Rationality

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

What is sociological about economic sociology? Uncertainty and the embeddedness of economic action

Abstract: This article argues that the problem of uncertainty represents the central limitation of efficiency-based approaches to the explanation and prediction of economic outcomes. The problem of uncertainty reintroduces the Hobbesian problem of order into economics and makes it possible to connect questions of economic decision-making with social theory. The emphasis lies not, as in the behavioral theories of the Carnegie School, in the influence of uncertainty on the actual decision process, but in those social “devices” that actors rely on in decision-making, i.e., that structure the situation for the agents. If agents cannot anticipate the benefits of an investment, optimizing decisions become impossible, and the question opens up how intentionally rational actors reach decisions under this condition of uncertainty. This provides a systematic starting point for economic sociology. Studies in economic sociology that argue from different theoretical perspectives point to the significance of uncertainty and goal ambiguity. This contribution reflects theoretically why economic sociology can develop a promising approach by building upon these insights. It becomes understandable why culture, power, institutions, social structures, and cognitive processes are important in modern market economies. But it should be equally emphasized that the maximizing paradigm in economics will not be dethroned without a causal theory of the relationship of intentional rationality and social rigidities.

Truth and Progress: Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality

Abstract: In a report from Bosnia, David Rieff said, “To the Serbs, the Muslims are no longer human. … Muslim prisoners, lying on the ground in rows, awaiting interrogation, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van.” This theme of dehumanization recurred when Rieff said: A Muslim man in Bosansi Petrovac … [was] forced to bite off the penis of a fellow-Muslim. … If you say that a man is not human, but the man looks like you and the only way to identify this devil is to make him drop his trousers – Muslim men are circumcised and Serb men are not – it is probably only a short step, psychologically, to cutting off his prick. … There has never been a campaign of ethnic cleansing from which sexual sadism has gone missing. The moral to be drawn from Rieff s stories is that Serbian murderers and rapists do not think of themselves as violating human rights. For they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but to Muslims. They are not being inhuman, but rather are discriminating between true humans and pseudo-humans. They are making the same sort of distinction the Crusaders made between humans and infidel dogs, and Black Muslims make between humans and blue-eyed devils. The founder of my university was able both to own slaves and to think it self-evident that all men were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. This was because he had convinced himself that the consciousness of blacks, like that of animals, “participates more of sensation than of reflection.”

Rationality and Intelligence

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction 2. Rational choices and plans 3. A theory of thinking 4. The scheme fleshed out: a decision-theoretic analysis of thinking 5. Conditions of effective thinking 6. Effects of rational thinking on the individual and society 7. The teaching of rational thinking References Index.

Procedural rationality in the strategic decision‐making process*

Abstract: Despite the central place of rationality in the organization theory, strategic management, and decision-making literatures, we know relatively little about why some strategic decision-making procedures are more rational than others. This question was addressed in a study of 57 strategic decisions in 24 companies, using a multiple-informant, structured interview protocol. Results indicate that environmental competitive threat, perceived external control of the organization, and the uncertainty of the strategic issues being addressed are related to procedural rationality. Surprisingly, some of these relationships were in the opposite direction from our predictions. These results are interpreted within a framework that emphasizes the link between procedural rationality and managerial discretion.

Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

Abstract: In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In "Doing What Comes Naturally," Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through.