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Reason and Rationality in Organization Studies: Employee Motivation

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Venture Work

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Abstract

The chapter examines the literature that contrasts reason and rationality, wherein the former is defined as the human cognitive faculty being responsive to social, cultural, and behavioral conditions wherein the individual acts and makes decisions. When enacting reason, concepts such as norms, beliefs, and values are included in, for example, decision-making. In contrast, rationality is a term reserved for calculative and instrumental thinking wherein factors that cannot be accommodated by current calculative practices are either excluded or simplified to the point wherein they are lending themselves to numerical operations and metrics. Reason and rationality are thereafter discussed in terms of their value and role in social and economic activities, including, for example, the domain of venture work, dependent on both these human cognitive faculties. For instance, to tolerate ambiguities and uncertainty at work, one of the core features of any innovative or entrepreneurial pursuit, the capacity to construct meaningful images of work is helpful to impose a structure and a direction on everyday work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In probability theory, ergodicity means that a behavior is averaged over time (i.e., a system displays a certain degree of predictability over repeated empirical observations). In economic theory, individual cases are seen as being evidence of a behavior that will be repeated over time, say, as in the case of preferences and choices, where an individual, for example, once demonstrating a preference for strawberry and chocolate ice-cream makes the same choices repeatedly over time. Critics of this assumption claim for instance that preferences are neither endogenous (i.e., unaffected by the choices of other human actors or other external factors), nor of necessity are consistent over time. That is, the preference for strawberry and chocolate ice-cream at one decision point may therefore be complemented by a choice of, for example, vanilla and pecan nut ice-cream at a second observation, indicating that preferences are unstable, thus making preferences and choices “non-ergodic.”

  2. 2.

    Collins (1981) stresses that abstract concepts (“grand theories” in Mills’ 1959, vocabulary) need to be substantiated by empirical material to make sense: “Sociological concepts can be made fully empirical only by grounding them in a sample of the typical micro-events that make them up. The implication is that the ultimate empirical validation of sociological statements depends upon their microtranslation” (Collins 1981: 988. Emphasis in the original).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Alexander Styhre

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Styhre, A. (2019). Reason and Rationality in Organization Studies: Employee Motivation. In: Venture Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03180-0_2

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