Rationality

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

The Rationality of Narrative Inquiry in Research and Professional Development

Abstract: SUMMARY As researchers follow the hermeneutic turn to narrative, are they also obliged to join what Richard Bernstein calls the 'rage against reason'? Taking criteria from Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action and his concept of communicative rationality, I propose that narrative inquiry can indeed be a rational enterprise. Habermas recreates a standpoint from which critiques are possible, for he detects and analyses the implicit rationality built into everyday communicative practices in which conversation partners orient themselves toward understanding rather than the success of their own points of view. In these practices, as in narrative inquiry, participants claim that each could challenge the other's implicit claims to truth, sincerity and social appropriateness. I give examples to illustrate how such challenges can be met in one specific line of narrative research .

On transplanting human resource practices to China

Abstract: Argues that, whether referring to economic or bounded rationality, the notion of rationality is meaningful only in a specific cultural context. Proposes, by analogy, a culture‐driven approach for rationally managing the human resource function in a global environment. Shows how culture provides additional explanatory power for human resource management (HRM) practices – beyond what is a accounted for by political or economic structures – by comparing the USA with one of its major trading partners, Taiwan and with the People′s Republic of China (PRC), a country with which the USA has had a rather checkered relationship, on their commonly‐used practices of selection, reward systems, performance appraisal and participative management. Makes suggestions on how to reconcile cultural differences in transplanting HRM practices to China.

Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for Rainbow Coalition Politics

Abstract: The effects of the logic of multiple subjects for determining who can make liberatory knowledge and history the association between experience and knowledge between subjectivity and experience and between subjectivity and objectivity are explored All new social movements including feminism must acknowledge and examine the existence of multiple subjects of knowledge within their movements It is only then that considering the viewpoint of dominant group lives they understand the reasonableness of the relations between subjectivity experience and knowledge fixed in conventional epistemology and political philosophy Socially situated subjectivity is inclined to overwhelm or stain supposed pure knowledge Rational man (dominant social groups) has defined women indigenous peoples the poor and groups other than itself as models of irrationality social passions immersion in the bodily and the subjective It considers these marginalized groups as unable to escape their social situation It applies there beliefs to dispassionate reason social justice historical progress and the objective pursuit of knowledge Yet rational man allows itself to be subjective in the search for truth justice and social progress If dominant social groups take on the perspective of marginal groups and look at imagined relations between experience subjectivity and knowledge these relations seem logical Thus we must reformulate ourselves as others to acquire doubly multiple subjectivities that can understand objectivity our own social location not just assuming that we understand the social locations of others For this to happen however we need sciences with stronger and more competent criteria of objectivity rationality and reflexivity than the half sciences centered in the West