Rationality

About: Rationality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 20459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 617787 citations.

Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism

Abstract: A Note on Translations and Names Acknowledgments PART ONE: BEGINNINGS 1. Making Sense of Cultural Agency 2. The Venezuelan Context: Confronting La Crisis PART TWO: IMAGINATIVE RATIONALITY 3. Imagining Social Life I: Confronting Akrasia, Crime, and Violence 4. Imagining Social Life II: Addressing Personal and Social Issues 5. Imagining Evangelical Practice PART THREE: RELATIONAL IMAGINATION 6. The Social Structure of Conversion 7. Two Lives, Five Years Later 8. Toward a Relational Pragmatic Theory of Cultural Agency Epilogue Appendix A: Status of Evangelical Respondents after Five Years Appendix B: Methods and Methodology Appendix C: Quantitative Analysis of Networks and Conversion Glossary of Spanish Terms References Index

A theory of argumentation

Abstract: ions such as "culture" and "society" (Chapter 1). People are multivalent; society is balkanized into discourse domains. The relationship between individuals and social worlds cannot therefore be a simple, universal one. Atomism is a worse metaphor now than in Hobbes's day. Our world of "quantum weirdness" (Pagels, 1982), increasing entropy in closed systems, and invisible but real probability waves does not translate easily to the realm of action. To take but one example, one might say that the state of public opinion (a consensus) is a statistical drift, but we do not assess a disciplinary consensus by sampling techniques. Human groups and organizations are not closed systems. People are not analogous to atoms: their motives in particular situations may not be relevant to whatever random samples of their communities might reveal. If the ebb and flow of opinion in a system is not random, then individual choices are more than expressions of probability waves. Action, Burke insists, is different from motion. And preferable. Taken seriously by organizational actors, atomism is a debilitating idea. It implies that organizations are indivisible wholes closed to critique and reconstruction; it overlooks situational adaptation and (thus) organizational evolution. As we shall see, freedom is a feature of one's thinking that cannot coexist with atomism. So dichotomizing the individual and society is a mistake, not only because it yields needless disputes but because it is empirically wrong. Maybe argument is not such a hard case after all. Rid of their shady companions and free of their old neighborhood, rationality and freedom clean up nicely. Perhaps we can discuss both constructs as if they are (1) ideas, not facts of nature; (2) cogent enough not to need mythical states to instantiate them; and (3) sufficiently flexible (and broad) to serve a more complex theoretical agenda.

Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality

Abstract: A key debate within International Relations (IR) centers on the character of globalization and what globalization means for the principle of state sovereignty and for the power and functioning of states. Among theorists, realists who argue in favour of the continued importance of states confront constructivists who contend that a number of political entities challenge states while the logic of globalization itself undermines their sovereignty. Drawing on the literatures on state formation and social theory, particularly the works of Weber and Foucault, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending question the terms of the realist-constructivist debate. Through a series of detailed case studies, they demonstrate that the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) tends to increase the power of states, because states are able to draw on them indirectly in the effort to uphold social order. Neumann and Sending conclude that the power of states not only depends on the predominance of the states-based system in global politics, but ultimately rests on the individual states' social power. Furthermore, the key to globalization is the neo-liberal rationality of government--a rationality that is creating a global polity where new hierarchies among states as well as between states and other actors have emerged.

The new institutional economics and the theory of behaviour under uncertainty

Abstract: The new institutional economics (NIE) is diverse in terms of the theory of behaviour under uncertainty. Some views are close to neoclassical economics, but others are similar to those held by heterodox economists. Distinctions between procedural and substantive uncertainty, weak and strong uncertainty and ambiguity and fundamental uncertainty help to identify different approaches to uncertainty in NIE. Regarding the influence of institutions on economics behaviour, not all NIE focuses on institutions as constraints and takes individuals as given. The dominant views of rationality in NIE are standard neoclassical maximization and bounded rationality, but alternative notions have also been defended.