The Assumptive World of Welfare State Reform
The Assumptive World of Welfare State Reform
This chapter develops the arguments about individual rational action and social and public policy discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 and relates them to social science theories of agency. It argues that a central problem of social science is the reconciliation of the everyday life experience of individual choice and agency with the evidence that people behave in ways that are co-ordinated and largely cohesive in societies. It distinguishes individual rational actor traditions from those that stress the role of normative principles and of symbolic communication and expressiveness in action. It shows how the individual rational actor approach is increasingly attractive to policy makers, because it offers a framework in which policies can be developed and justified on the grounds that they reinforce an appropriate structure of incentives.
Keywords: rational actor, expressiveness, communication, symbol, norm, agency, policy, incentives, choice, cohesion
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