Search results for "Rationality"
showing 10 items of 144 documents
Instrumental calculation, cognitive role-playing, or both?: self-perceptions of Seconded National Experts in the European Commission
2011
This is the authors’ final, accepted and refereed manuscript to the article Most work studying micro-processes of integration – i.e. how agents develop identities and decision-making behaviours within a particular institution – offers explanations based on either instrumental rationality or socialisation. This article proposes a two-dimensional framework that allows analysing under which conditions both logics of social action co-exist. Our empirical analysis employs a unique dataset from a 2011 survey of all 1098 currently active Seconded National Experts (SNEs) in the European Commission. We find that a) instrumental cost-benefit calculation and cognitive role-playing (as semi-reflexive s…
Effects of Behavioural Factors on Human Financial Decisions
2014
Abstract In this article, we investigate the factors that may explain the trading volume evolution on two emerging capital markets, Romania and Brazil. We analyze the impact of both investors who ground their trading behaviour on rational expectations and investors who show psychological and emotional facets of the human decision, which we call behavioural errors, as independent variables on the trading volume as dependent variable. The results indicate that trading is influenced by the investors’ irrational behaviour. Thus, the rationality hypothesis can be rejected for both capital markets.
Integrative strategy formation process and the management of complex work - a microorganizational analisys
2010
The goal of this study is to analyse how the strategy formation process takes place; studying the relevance of the integrative perspective and the use of the variables rationality, involvement and vision; Verifying the relationship between an integrative strategy formation process and the management of work and the consequences of this relationship in terms of performance, identifying the causes for a better fit; Also, verify the propositions that have been formulated and looking for new variables that could affect the relationship between strategic process and work management. It has been adopted a qualitative methodology through a study case. After the case analysis it has been identified…
The intentional stance as structure learning: a computational perspective on mindreading
2015
Recent theories of mindreading explain the recognition of action, intention, and belief of other agents in terms of generative architectures that model the causal relations between observables (e.g., observed movements) and their hidden causes (e.g., action goals and beliefs). Two kinds of probabilistic generative schemes have been proposed in cognitive science and robotics that link to a "theory theory" and "simulation theory" of mindreading, respectively. The former compares perceived actions to optimal plans derived from rationality principles and conceptual theories of others' minds. The latter reuses one's own internal (inverse and forward) models for action execution to perform a look…
Territorial fragmentation in post-communist Romania: the not so curious case of a de-amalgamation reform
2021
Abstract The efficiency-driven trend towards amalgamation characterising local government reforms in Europe seems to have escaped Romania, which displays a significant increase in the number of local governments post-1989. This is the result of rural first-tier local governments splitting into smaller units. The paper examines objective factors and subjective motivations that have shaped the behaviour of both national and local actors in dealing with territorial reform. First, it explores the rationale and rationality of a central government initiative to facilitate municipal splits against a set of criteria derived from the literature. Second, it examines the municipal splits occurring bet…
Breaking the Traditional Style of Finnish Civic Activity
2010
In this article, “the basic idea is to introduce the idea of style as an approach to (political) activity and, especially, as an alternative practice to ideological activity.” Using the example of animal-rights activism, the author posits something “decidedly new” in Finnish civic activity, which traditionally has been channelled through institutions: Finnish movements have been state-oriented, with demands being addressed to the government, and have emphasized knowledge-based rationality as the measure for competent activity. The author categorically rejects “the notion that, in politics, style is anything more than a superficial curtain, behind which the true contents of politicking can …
Genesis and destiny : for a dynamogenic’s conception of the myths
2012
If the myth has become today an unavoidable fact to understand the human soul and its different forms of expression, it remains, however, ambiguous and hardly conceptualizing. Indeed, the myth is at once understood as a fictitious narrative which isn’t based on any in-depth reality, but also as a real and highly significant discourse. In order to underline the philosophical meaning of our work, we have begun by assert the myth problem such as it evolves in the European thought. The myth is badly affected by a too long history; it has been divided between rationalism and romanticism. Then, we have questioned other civilizations – Fon from Dahomey, Benin – for whose myth represents all the hu…
Rationalitäten der Wissenproduktion: Über Transformationen von Gegenständen, Technologien und Information in Biomedizin und Lebenswissenschaften
2009
Rationalities of Knowledge Production: On Transformations of Objects, Technologies and Information in Biomedicine and the Life Sciences. Since decades, scientific change has been interpreted in the light of of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. The Kuhnian interpretation of scientific change however is now more and more confronted with non-disciplinary thinking in both, science and studies on science. This paper explores how research in biomedicine and the life sciences can be characterized by different rationalities, sometimes converging, sometimes contradictory, all present at the same time with varying ways of influence, impact, and visibility. In general, the rationality of obj…
The Rise and Fall of the Aizjomi Landscape†
2012
Jurmalciems, an ancient fishing-farming village on the Baltic Sea coast in southwestern Latvia, provides the setting for this article. In this setting I focus on the notion of dwelling in a landscape that comes to reflect the residents' lifeworld. The holistic notion of "dwelling" incorporates the complex and multiple dimensions of human life spent in the physical landscape, where time and space, nature and culture, are bound together and where local and macrolevel historical and social circumstances determine them both. This study is my attempt to understand a visible reality: the aizjonii landscape that is etched into the topography in the form of fields carved and embosomed into sandbank…
Branch Points of Algebraic Functions and the Beginnings of Modern Knot Theory
1995
Many of the key ideas which formed modern topology grew out of “normal research” in one of the mainstream fields of 19th-century mathematical thinking, the theory of complex algebraic functions. These ideas were eventually divorced from their original context. The present study discusses an example illustrating this process. During the years 1895-1905, the Austrian mathematician, Wilhelm Wirtinger, tried to generalize Felix Klein's view of algebraic functions to the case of several variables. An investigation of the monodromy behavior of such functions in the neighborhood of singular points led to the first computation of a knot group. Modern knot theory was then formed after a shift in mat…