There are several advantages to viewing ethics as rational choice in this broader sense. It provides a conceptual framework that allows you to analyze complex business decisions that involve multiple stakeholders (as nearly all do). It offers a style of argument that can appeal to all parties, since rational choice, by definition, considers all points of view. It provides a vocabulary with whic...

I WANT TO FOCUS ON A SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE. It is not directly concerned with war among states, though its author, Choderlos de Laclos, was in fact a soldier, an artillery officer, and an expert in fortifications. It deals with other kinds of war. My goal today is to consider the place of reason—of rational choice in the commonsense version of this term—and, specifically, of rational choice...

Although rational choice theory has made considerable advances in other social sciences, its progress in sociology has been limited. Some sociologists’ reservations about rational choice arise from a misunderstanding of the theory. The first part of this essay therefore introduces rational choice as a general theoretical perspective, or family of theories, which explains social outcomes by cons...

INTRODUCTION THE INTERPRETATION OF TEXTS AND OF BEHAVIOR is closely related to the rational choice explanation of action. In this article I try to bring out two aspects of that connection. I first ask whether we can enhance our understanding of a literary text by assuming the rationality of its creator. In novels, for instance, things often happen “for a reason”—be it a reason for the author, f...

Employee violations of IS security policies are reported as a key concern for organizations. Although behavioral research on IS security has received increasing attention from IS scholars, little empirical research has examined this problem. To address this research gap, the authors test a model based on Rational Choice Theory (RCT)—a prominent criminological theory not yet applied in IS—which ...

Rational choice and hermeneutics seem at odds, but the tension can be fruitfully resolved. The conflict between them closely mirrors the earlier conflict between historicism and positivism. In interwar Vienna, an influential group of social scientists tried to combine the best elements of both approaches. Rational choice was united with Verstehen and the method of ideal types, as evidenced by t...

The SAGE Library of Political Science collects together the articles that have been most influential in shaping the discipline. Each multi-volume set presents a collection of field-defining published works, both classical and contemporary, sourced from the foremost publications in the discipline by an internationally renowned editor or editorial team. They also include a full introduction, pres...