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Economic rationality is a part of the taken-for-granted assumptions of how organizations are understood and studied. Organizations have economic purpose and intent; organizational structures, systems, and policies are designed to achieve goals or ends. Ergo, organizations are rational. All this notwithstanding, there is an abundance of literature illustrating that organizations often follow purposes and objectives which do not make strict economic sense and that structures, systems, and purposes are rarely designed and often fail to achieve stated intent or purpose. Although economic rationality is often presented as a discrete, coherent, and readily identifiable mode of rationality, it elides a series of confusions and contestations: disputed definitions of rationality; disagreements as to what behaviours typify it and how it may be identified; and strong objections to the characterization of its dominant actor, homo economicus. Its genesis, both from debates about the nature of individual autonomy and from the disciplinary development of economic thought, where rationality arrives as a relative latecomer, reveals a series of discrete strands of literatures and debates that coalesce in a generic, rather fragmented, understanding. These various strands and how they have impacted on organizations form the basis of this chapter.

This introductory chapter argues that medieval landlords and their officials, on whom our understanding of medieval agriculture primarily rests, are usually perceived as being economically artless. Yet manorial account rolls, which detail the agricultural exploitation of lords' demesne farms and which survive in abundance between the late 13th and early 15th centuries, have the potential to reveal much about economic mentalities. Investigating the actions of reeves — the unfree tenants who often made most of the day-to-day decisions about the running of these farms — provides an insight into the mindset of peasants as well as lords. More importantly, it has important implications for the way medieval agriculture is interpreted: by presuming an absence of economic rationality, historians have almost invariably highlighted exogenous factors in their explanations of change over time in agricultural productivity and economic fortunes.

This chapter examines whether boilerplate rights deletion schemes can be justified by the “contract-as-product” theory. The contract-as-product theory attempts to sidestep the issue of consent by denying that a particular set of contracted terms is an individual transaction requiring consent in the traditional sense. According to this view, whatever adhesion terms accompany the purchase of a product should actually be conceived of as part of the product. The chapter considers how choice or consent by the recipient enters into the contract-as-product view, and how information asymmetry and heuristic biases render erroneous the assumption of economic rationality. It argues that contract-as-product theory cannot suffice to validate boilerplate in general, or even presumptively.

There are two main themes in Ch. 3. Firstly, the demonstration that the choice behaviour of the rational economic person of standard economic theory can be shown, formally, to be equivalent to the computational activity of a Turing Machine. Secondly, the formal demonstration that preference generation is computably infeasible.

Lists some of the issues explored through micro models in subsequent chapters of the book. Also discusses the general economic methodology followed throughout the book. In particular, the assumption of maximization in household behaviour and its place in the micro analysis of farm households is examined. While there is substantial evidence of peasant rationality, there is no denying the fact that individual decision‐making is influenced by social norms and the evidence that it is prone to errors and biases. The assumption of rationality is best seen as a not untenable working hypothesis or benchmark.

This chapter discusses the relation between virtues and economic contexts and explores potential approaches to this subject matter by virtue ethics and economics. Referring to Aristotle’s philosophy, the crucial role of rationality for linking virtue ethics and economic theory is demonstrated. Against this backdrop, the chapter critically discusses conceptions of economic rationality in modern economics and argues that bounded rationality concepts are a more suitable methodological basis for analyzing the interrelation of virtues and economic actions than standard economic rationality. From a virtue ethics perspective, the chapter explores the meaning of multiple modern economic spheres for the development of personal virtues and explores the ethically relevant societal contexts of today’s economic spheres. Finally, the chapter discusses potential new normative frameworks of excellence relevant to the modern economy with the example of sustainability.

In 1956, troops of the Warsaw pact states invaded Hungary and cracked down on the Hungarian revolution. This event had heavily dislocating effects on Western political thought. As a reaction, Paul Ricoeur published one of his best-known essays, ‘The Political Paradox’, in which he seeks to come to terms philosophically with the exigency of the Hungarian events. Counter to state-Marxism, his aim is to think what he perceives as the double originality of politics: a specifically political rationality and a specifically political evil. In order to work his way towards this double specificity he has to disentangle the rationality of politics from the sphere of economic rationality, to which it was reduced by Marxism. It seems that the way ‘the political’ is understood differs between the followers of Hannah Arendt and the followers of Carl Schmitt. While the ‘Arendtians’ see in the political a space of freedom and public deliberation, the Schmittians see in it a space of power, conflict and antagonism. Both the Arendtian and the Schmittian trajectory share what can be called the neutralisation or sublimation thesis.

This chapter reveals that even secular-minded thinkers like Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas were or are now sensitive to such claims discussed in the previous chapter. Weber understood secularization as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but he was aware that modernization came at a price and a steep one. The diminishment and privatization of religion entailed a loss that Weber acknowledged with ambivalence and melancholy. Once religion was consigned to its corner, he anguished, what remained to guide human beings through life but “the steel hard cage” of economic rationality? Habermas, once a firm secularizer, has come to a similar realization: that the “communicative rationality” so central to his vision might, in its rejection of final truths, create an enervating “normative deficit.”

This chapter traces the history of cost–benefit analysis in the United States bureaucracy from the 1920s until about 1960. It is not a story of academic research, but of political pressure and administrative conflict. Cost–benefit methods were introduced to promote procedural regularity and to give public evidence of fairness in the selection of water projects. Early in the century, numbers produced by the Army Corps of Engineers were usually accepted on its authority alone, and there was correspondingly little need for standardization of methods. About 1940, however, economic numbers became objects of bitter controversy, as the Corps was challenged by such powerful interests as utility companies and railroads. The really crucial development in this story was the outbreak of intense bureaucratic conflict between the Corps and other government agencies, especially the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Reclamation. The agencies tried to settle their feuds by harmonizing their economic analyses. When negotiation failed as a strategy for achieving uniformity, they were compelled to try to ground their makeshift techniques in economic rationality. On this account, cost–benefit analysis had to be transformed from a collection of local bureaucratic practices into a set of rationalized economic principles.

The model of human action as resting on rational choices between alternative opportunities for maximizing our utility has been borrowed from liberal economics by social scientists keen to refute the conventional explanation of secularization. This chapter considers whether we can treat religion as a commodity that people buy more or less of according to individual rational choice. It argues that religion differs from soap powder both extrinsically (because we cannot readily compare its costs or benefits) and in terms of its social roots: in most societies switching religion threatens social bonds far more than does changing car brands. Finally, it advances an important general principle: that we should be very reluctant to impute to other people motives that we would not impute to ourselves.

This chapter discusses the dependence of air travel on software and focuses on the growing use of software in organizing, managing, and producing air travel. A persuasive set of discourses that includes security, safety, economic rationality, and increased productivity emphasizes the need for the widespread use of software in managing and monitoring the whole process of air travel. Air travel currently consists of chains of more densely interconnected codes/spaces that are governed by automated management and which are required for a convenient or cost-effective journey. The chapter also discusses several issues, including the transduction of air travel codes/spaces, the incompleteness of codes/spaces, the automated management of the assemblage of air travel, and the interlocking discourses of anti-fraud, citizenship, and security in the air travel industry.

This chapter examines ageism and its three strands: stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. It first considers legislation against age discrimination and whether it works as intended before turning to a discussion of economic rationality and/or stereotypical beliefs that are used as grounds to ‘justify’ or defend age discrimination. It then looks at positive ageing as a means to counter the stereotypes with a message of ‘positive’ moral and economic obligation, followed by an analysis of the concept of lookism whereby ageism interweaves with gender and physical appearance — especially for women — is commodified.

Foreign fieldwork always presents interesting and unique challenges; however, fieldwork that involves illegal activities on the part of the study group is “ethnography” like no other. The typical fieldwork tools such as tape recorders, cameras, statistical models, and formal questionnaires are often not an option. Instead, great caution and sensitivity must be maintained to protect the identity of informants, as well the researcher’s personal safety. Informants may be willing to talk about illegal activities, but in this study no one was willing to go on record or have their photographs taken with their illegal marijuana (Cannabis sativa) crop. As a result of these cautious methods, much of the information contained in this chapter is based on interviews with unnamed informants in unstructured interviews whom I came to know and trust mainly during the late 1990s while conducting fieldwork with the Mopan and Kekchí Maya in southern Belize on various cultural ecological topics. There was no intention to assist informants in illegal activities by hiding their identities, but similar to investigative journalism (which in many ways these chapters resemble), informants must have sufficient trust in the investigator in order to provide reliable information. This chapter discusses a situation that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the U.S. media, and most citizens would consider a success story in the so-called war on drugs—small-scale marijuana producers who, through the actions of interdiction authorities, were largely driven out of business. However, this chapter presents a slightly different angle on the war on drugs in that it examines the recent history of marijuana production among Maya farmers in southern Belize: why seemingly traditional and conservative peasant farmers turn to drug production in the first place, how these activities affect village life and culture, and some implications and lessons this case study provides on the larger battle over what crops, legal or illegal, smallholder farmers produce. This chapter provides some useful lessons for the larger war on drugs because the Mopan and Kekchí Maya are quite similar to other smallholder farmers who grow most of the commodities that are then consumed in raw form or manufactured into narcotics. These are economically poor farmers who perceive psychoactive plants as cash crops, much like coffee or cacao, that are consumed in distant lands by unknown peoples.