Rationality

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

The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science

Abstract: Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality.

Organization Science as Social Construction Postmodern Potentials

Abstract: We critically examine three major assumptions of modernist organization science: rational agency, empirical knowledge, and language as representation. With these assumptions problematized, we are positioned for a postmodern turn in the discipline. From a postmodern standpoint, we are moved to replace rational agency with communal rationality, empirical knowledge with social construction, and language as representation with language as action. Outcomes for an organization science place special emphasis on reconstructing and enriching the aims and methods of research and on critical reflection, generative theorizing, and scholarly action within organizations.

Personal Influence, Collective Rationality, and Mass Political Action

Abstract: We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.

Biases in the interpretation and use of research results.

Abstract: The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study science: specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theory and research on a range of cognitive and motivational mechanisms for bias. Interestingly, not all biases are normatively proscribed; biased interpretations are defensible under some conditions, so long as those conditions are made explicit. I consider a variety of potentially corrective mechanisms, evaluate prospects for collective rationality, and compare inquisitorial and adversarial models of science.

Risk, calculable and incalculable

Abstract: This paper starts with two approaches to risk : the sociological approach of Ulrich Beck and the 'governmentality' account based on Michel Foucault's theses Beck's approach is characterized as totalizing, realist, and relying on a uniform conception of risk Moreover, his narrative of the emergence of risk society founders on the untenable binary, calculable/incalculable Using Francois Ewald on social insurance, the paper argues that risk is better approached as a form of calculative rationality, a way of rendering the incalculable calculable The governmental account allows us to analyse specific forms of risk rationality and technology, the types of agency and identity involved in practices of risk, and the political and social imaginaries to which these practices are linked The governmental account, however, encounters difficulties in grasping the more general transformations of contemporary regimes of government In this respect, Beck's notion of reflexivity is extremely useful The paper then delineates various types of risk rationality (insurance, epidemiological, clinical, and case-management risk, and comprehensive risk management) and places them in an analytic of contemporary government It concludes that one of the conditions of these new forms of government is the 'governmentalisation of government' Rather than 'the death of the social', it is better to understand this analytic as charting a transformation of the liberal problematic of security and the emergence of 'reflexive government'