front cover of Rational Choice
Rational Choice
Edited by Robin M. Hogarth and Melvin W. Reder
University of Chicago Press, 1987

front cover of Rationality and Freedom
Rationality and Freedom
Amartya Sen
Harvard University Press, 2002

Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In two volumes on rationality, freedom, and justice, the distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues. This volume--the first of the two--is principally concerned with rationality and freedom.

Sen scrutinizes and departs from the standard criteria of rationality, and shows how it can be seen in terms of subjecting one's values as well as choices to the demands of reason and critical scrutiny. This capacious approach is utilized to illuminate the demands of rationality in individual choice (including decisions under uncertainty) as well as social choice (including cost benefit analysis and environmental assessment).

Identifying a reciprocity in the relationship between rationality and freedom, Sen argues that freedom cannot be assessed independently of a person's reasoned preferences and valuations, just as rationality, in turn, requires freedom of thought. Sen uses the discipline of social choice theory (a subject he has helped to develop) to illuminate the demands of reason and the assessment of freedom. The latter is the subject matter of Sen's previously unpublished Arrow Lectures included here.

The essays in these volumes contribute to Sen's ongoing transformation of economic theory and social philosophy, and to our understanding of the connections among rationality, freedom, and social justice.

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The Rebel's Dilemma
Mark Irving Lichbach
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Since the mid 1960s, theorists have elaborated over two dozen different solutions to the collection action problem. During much of this same period, students of conflict have explored many questions about protest and rebellion. The Rebel's Dilemma examines what happens when one brings the full richness of collective action theories to bear on the many complex problems of collective dissent.
". . . a significant contribution to the understanding of collective behavior, protest, and rebellion." --Choice
"The book is interesting and thought-provoking, and its insights extend beyond the narrow subject of rebellion to help illuminate many issues related to organizing groups to undertake collective action." --Public Choice
"[Lichbach's] book is monumental and pivotal. . . . [It] consolidates over three decades of research on collective action problems and sets the agenda for future studies of collective dissent and rebellion. . . . [This] book is a major step forward. It will have an enormous impact in the field of conflict studies and belongs on the shelf of anyone even casually interested in dissent, rebellion, and revolution. . . . [This] book is a major step forward. It will have an enormous impact in the field of conflict studies and belongs on the shelf of anyone even casually interested in dissent, rebellion, and revolution." --American Political Science Review
"For scholars interested in game-theoretic analyses of politics . . . essential reading." --Manus I. Midlarsky, Journal of Politics
"Lichbach has to be praised for providing valuable insight on the logic of collective dissent. . . ." --Political Studies
Mark Irving Lichbach is Professor of Political Science, University of Colorado.
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front cover of Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics
Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics
Attention, Choice, and Public Policy
Bryan D. Jones
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Most models of political decision-making maintain that individual preferences remain relatively constant. Why, then, are there often sudden abrupt changes in public opinion on political issues? Or total reversals by politicians on specific issues? Bryan D. Jones answers these questions by innovatively connecting insights from cognitive science and rational choice theory to political life.

Individuals and political systems alike, Jones argues, tend to be attentive to only one issue at a time. Using numerous examples from elections, public opinion polls, congressional deliberations, and of bureaucratic decision-making, he shows how shifting attentiveness can and does alter choices and political outcomes—even when underlying preferences remain relatively fixed. An individual, for example, may initially decide to vote for a candidate because of her stand on spending but change his vote when he learns of her position on abortion, never really balancing the two options.
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Reconstructing Architecture
Critical Discourses and Social Practices
Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Reconstructing Architecture was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

To create architecture is an inherently political act, yet its nature as a social practice is often obscured beneath layers of wealth and privilege. The contributors to this volume question architecture's complicity with the status quo, moving beyond critique to outline the part architects are playing in building radical social movements and challenging dominant forms of power.

The making of architecture is instrumental in the construction of our identities, our differences, the world around us-much of what we know of institutions, the distribution of power, social relations, and cultural values is mediated by the built environment. Historically, architecture has constructed the environments that house the dominant culture. Yet, as the essays in Reconstructing Architecture demonstrate, there exists a strong tradition of critical practice in the field, one that attempts to alter existing social power relations. Engaging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, each chapter addresses an oppositional discourse that has developed within the field and then reconstructs it in terms of a new social project: feminism, social theory, environmentalism, cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and critical theory.

The activists and scholars writing here provide a clarion call to architects and other producers of culture, challenging them to renegotiate their political allegiances and to help reconstruct a viable democratic life in the face of inexorable forces driving economic growth, destroying global ecology, homogenizing culture, and privatizing the public realm. Reconstructing Architecture reformulates the role of architecture in society as well as its capacity to further a progressive social transformation.

Contributors: Sherry Ahrentzen, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Bradford C. Grant, California Polytechnic State U, San Luis Obispo; Richard Ingersoll, Rice U; Margaret Soltan, George Washington U; Anthony Ward, U of Auckland, New Zealand.

Thomas A. Dutton is an architect and professor of architecture at Miami University, Ohio. He is editor of Voices in Architectural Education (1991) and is associate editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.

Lian Hurst Mann is an architect and editor of Architecture California. A founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, she is editor of its bilingual quarterly Ahora Now and a coauthor of Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up (1993).

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Red-winged Blackbirds
Decision-making and Reproductive Success
Les D. Beletsky and Gordon H. Orians
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Drawing on detailed data from their sixteen-year study of red-winged blackbirds in the marshes of Washington's Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, Beletsky and Orians analyze the information redwings use to make breeding-season decisions and the consequences these decisions have for lifetime reproductive success. Because male and female redwings make different, and often independent, decisions—males focus on territory acquisition and maintenance, while females must choose when and where to nest and how much energy to invest in reproduction—the authors have taken the novel approach of studying the sexes separately.

Using analyses of observational data combined with field experiments and game-theoretical models, the authors provide new insights into the complex patterns of reproductive decision-making and breeding behavior in redwings. This book will be of interest to all who study social animals, including behavioral ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and ornithologists.
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Reluctant Partners
Implementing Federal Policy
Robert P. Stoker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991

Constitutional principles at the core of the United States government divide authority between market and state and within the structure of the state itself. This diffusion of authority is valuable because it defends against the excesses of national government, causing federal policy initiatives to be more attuned to the concerns of local jurisdictions, and creating a context in which free enterprise may flourish.

However, this diffusion of authority weakens the control that federal officials enjoy over resources vital to the implementation of national policy. To implement their plans, federal policy formulators must often call upon autonomous participants such as state or local governments, advocacy groups, or commercial interests. When federal policy challenges the perspectives, interest, or priorities of these participants, they become reluctant partners. These implementation participants enjoy substantial autonomy, making their cooperation in pursuit of federal policy goals uncertain and difficult to achieve. How, then, can the federal government secure the cooperation it needs to implement policy when the act of implementation empowers potential adversaries?

Reluctant Partners explores these problems and proposes strategies to reduce the impediments to cooperation and promote policy coordination. Drawing upon theories of regime development and cooperation, Stoker suggests the “implementation regime framework” to analyze the difficulties of realizing cooperation in the implementation process. The framework is illustrated with numerous vignettes and two extensive case studies: the National School Lunch Program and federal nuclear waste disposal policy.

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Respecting Patient Autonomy
Benjamin H. Levi
University of Illinois Press, 1999
Against a backdrop of real clinical situations, Benjamin H. Levi examines the dynamics that shape relations between patient and health care provider, addressing fundamental questions about how medical decisions should be reached and compelling the reader to think about health care issues and decisions in terms of the values and goals they promote.
 
Presenting bioethics as a practical, educational activity rather than an abstract intellectual exercise, this important volume shows how dialogue between patients and health care providers can clarify both medical and ethical issues, promoting patient autonomy and advancing health care.
 
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front cover of Risk Quantification and Allocation Methods for Practitioners
Risk Quantification and Allocation Methods for Practitioners
Jaume Belles-Sampers, Montserrat Guillén, and Miguel Santolino
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Risk Quantification and Allocation Methods for Practitioners offers a practical approach to risk management in the financial industry. This in-depth study provides quantitative tools to better describe qualitative issues, as well as clear explanations of how to transform recent theoretical developments into computational practice, and key tools for dealing with the issues of risk measurement and capital allocation.
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Risk Taking
A Managerial Perspective
Zur Shapira
Russell Sage Foundation, 1995
Classical economic theory assumes that people in risk situations follow a course of action based on a rational, consistent assessment of likely outcomes. But as Zur Shapira demonstrates in Risk Taking, corporate managers consistently stray from the prescribed path into far more subjective territory. Risk Taking offers a critical assessment of the relationship between theory and action in managerial decision making. Shapira offers a definitive account of the classical conception of risky decision making, which derives behavioral prescriptions from a calculation of both the value and the likelihood of possible outcomes. He then demonstrates how theories in this vein have been historically at odds with empirical observations. Risk Taking reports the results of an extensive survey of seven hundred managers that probed their attitudes and beliefs about risk and examined how they had actually made decisions in the face of uncertainty. The picture that emerges is of a dynamic, flexible process in which each manager's personal expertise and perceptions play profound roles. Managerial strategies are continually modified to suit changing circumstances. Rather than formulating probability estimates, executives create potential scenarios based not only on the possible outcomes but also on the many arbitrary factors inherent in their own situations. As Shapira notes, risk taking propensities vary among managers, and the need to maintain control and avoid particularly dangerous results exercises a powerful influence. Shapira also examines the impact of organizational structure, long-term management objectives, and incentives on decision making. With perceptive observations of the cognitive, emotional, and organizational dimensions of corporate decision making, Risk Taking propels the study of managerial risk behavior into new directions. This volume signals the way toward improving managerial decision making by revealing the need for more inclusive choice models that augment classical theory with vital behavioral observations.
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Risk vs. Risk
Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment
John D. Graham
Harvard University Press, 1995
We see the stories in the newspaper nearly every day: a drug hailed as a breakthrough treatment turns out to cause harmful side effects; controls implemented to reduce air pollution are shown to generate hazardous solid waste; bans on dangerous chemicals result in the introduction of even more risky substitutes. Could our efforts to protect our health and the environment actually be making things worse? In Risk versus Risk, John D. Graham, Jonathan Baert Wiener, and their colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis marshal an impressive set of case studies which demonstrate that all too often our nation's campaign to reduce risks to our health and the environment is at war with itself.
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Risk-Taking in International Politics
Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy
Rose McDermott
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Risk plays a dramatic role in international relations as leaders make decisions about such issues as war and peace, disarmament, and about lowering economic barriers to trade and investment. How a country's leaders think about risk in making foreign policy decisions is important in understanding why and how they make decisions.
Rose McDermott applies prospect theory, a theory developed by psychologists to understand decisionmaking under conditions of risk, to four cases in American foreign policy. Prospect theory suggests that decisionmakers who are confronting losses are more likely to take risks than are those decisionmakers who are satisfied with the status quo. The cases used to demonstrate this dynamic include: the Suez Crisis, the U-2 affair, the decisions surrounding the admission of the Shah of Iran to the United States in 1979, and the attempted rescue of the American hostages in Iran in 1980. McDermott shows how prospect theory enables us to understand cases that are otherwise inexplicable.
Risk Taking in International Relations offers a unique application of a sophisticated psychological model to international relations theory. The book will be of interest to political scientists and psychologists interested in decision making, in international relations and in American foreign policy.
Rose McDermott is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Cornell University.
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front cover of The Rule of Five
The Rule of Five
Making Climate History at the Supreme Court
Richard J. Lazarus
Harvard University Press, 2020

Winner of the Julia Ward Howe Prize

“The gripping story of the most important environmental law case ever decided by the Supreme Court.”
—Scott Turow

“In the tradition of A Civil Action, this book makes a compelling story of the court fight that paved the way for regulating the emissions now overheating the planet. It offers a poignant reminder of how far we’ve come—and how far we still must go.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

On an unseasonably warm October morning, an idealistic young lawyer working on a shoestring budget for an environmental organization no one had heard of hand-delivered a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency, asking it to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new cars. The Clean Air Act authorized the EPA to regulate “any air pollutant” thought to endanger public health. But could carbon dioxide really be considered a harmful pollutant? And even if the EPA had the authority to regulate emissions, could it be forced to do so?

The Rule of Five tells the dramatic story of how Joe Mendelson and the band of lawyers who joined him carried his case all the way to the Supreme Court. It reveals how accident, infighting, luck, superb lawyering, politics, and the arcane practices of the Supreme Court collided to produce a legal miracle. The final ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, by a razor-thin 5–4 margin brilliantly crafted by Justice John Paul Stevens, paved the way to important environmental safeguards which the Trump administration fought hard to unravel and many now seek to expand.

“There’s no better book if you want to understand the past, present, and future of environmental litigation.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“A riveting story, beautifully told.”
Foreign Affairs

“Wonderful…A master class in how the Supreme Court works and, more broadly, how major cases navigate through the legal system.”
Science

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