Rationality

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

Intelligent Policy Making for a Complex World: Pragmatism, Evidence and Learning:

Abstract: The credentials of the evidence-based policy movement appear to be increasingly subject to challenge based on research that has highlighted the limits on the use of evidence in policy making However, moves towards a more ‘realistic’ position of evidence-informed policy making risk conflating prescription with description and undermining a normative vision of better policy making This article argues that we need to review the ideas that underpin our thinking about evidence-based policy making, and move beyond the territory of instrumental rationality to a position founded upon two intellectual pillars: our developing knowledge about complex adaptive systems; and ideas from a pragmatist philosophical position – especially those of John Dewey – about social scientific knowledge and its role in guiding action to address social problems This leads us to a conception of ‘intelligent policy making’ in which the notion of policy learning is central

In search of rationality: the purposes behind the use of formal analysis in organizations.

Abstract: This paper describes the results of a study that examines how formal analysis is actually used in practice in three different organizations. Four main groups of purposes for formal analysis--information, communication, direction and control, and symbolic purposes--are identified and related to the nature of the social and hierarchical relationships between those who initiate analysis, those who do it, and those who receive it. It is concluded that, far from being antithetical as often assumed, formal analysis and social interaction are inextricably linked in organizational decision making and that different structural configurations may generate different patterns of use of analysis.

Prospections, Retrospections, and Rationality: The "Bankers" Model of Presidential Approval Reconsidered

Abstract: MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1992) recently have challenged a long-standing conventional wisdom by claiming that sociotropic prospections dominate presidential approval models. Net of long-term expectations about the economy, judgments about its past performance are not significant. However, when nonstationarity in the time series of interest is taken into account, analyses of models similar to MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson's and analyses of an alternative error correction model both indicate that retrospections as well as prospections are influential. They also contend that the electorate forms its economic expectations according to a rational expectations model. This claim is unfounded because their analyses and data are inadequate for assessing it.

Consciousness and Society

Abstract: Hughes' ideas, and the way they are expressed in Consciousness and Society, have become paradigms of twentieth-century scholarship. In dealing with the changing social thought after 1890 in Europe, Hughes covers a wide array of thinkers and issues in a scholarly, yet graceful manner. His is a study of the "cluster of genius" of Europe at that time: Croce, Durkheim, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche, as well as other great European minds. The book explores questions that are still relevant in today's society: Is the separation of facts and values tenable, or even desirable? Can rationality accommodate the ideas of a Bergson or a Freud? Is there, or should there be, a relationship between science and religion? And does history have any ultimate meaning for later generations?

The roles of embodiment, emotion and lifeworld for rationality and agency in nursing practice

Abstract: Nursing practice invites nurses to embody caring practices that meet, comfort and empower vulnerable others. Such a practice requires a commitment to meeting and helping the other in ways that liberate and strengthen and avoid imposing the will of the caregiver on the patient. Being good and acting well (phronesis) occur in particular situations. A socially constituted and embodied view of agency, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, provides an alternative to Cartesian and Kantian views of agency. A socially constituted, embodied view of agency is less mechanistic and less deterministic than Descartes' and Kant's radical separation of mind and body, and more responsive and generative than Kant's vision of moral agency as constituted by autonomous choice makers who are uninfluenced by emotion. The role of emotion in perception and judgement is explored in this paper. Distinctions between techne and phronesis are drawn. The role of emotion in market relationships and procedural ethics drawn for the abstract, general other are strategies for exchange of goods and services, but these same market relationships are dependent on well-functioning nonmarket relations of noncalculated giving and receiving.