Individual irrationality and social welfare

Individual preferences inconsistent with personal welfare caused neither by ignorance nor by a positive consideration for the welfare of others are defined as (welfare) irrational. Sources of irrationality (rigid adherence to moral principles, excessive fear of danger, excessive tempetation of pleasure, revenge, inertia, faulty telescopic faculty, the fallacy of diminishing marginal utility of utility, etc.) are discussed. An evolutionary explanation of irrationality is suggested and some implications for individual decision and social policy indicated.I am grateful to two anonymous referees for comments.     

The utilitarian criterion,finite sensibility,and the weak majority preference principle

This study is a further analysis of the approach taken by Yew-Kwang Ng to derive the utilitarian criterion. Specific for the model is that individual preferences are finitely sensible. In this framweork an analysis of the consequences on social preferences when different kinds of value premises are imposed is made. It is found that the utilitarian criterion is the unique consequence only for very special choices of the value premise. In addition, uniqueness requires the underlying preferences be cardinal. It is also found that finite sensibility induces approximate cardinalization of preferences.I am grateful to Y.-K. Ng, two anonymous referees and an editor of this journal for helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. The research was financially supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences     

Theorizing Managerial Work: a Pragmatic Pluralist Approach to Interdisciplinary Research

Management research is especially open to the benefits of using insights from a variety of social science disciplines but it should not use these indiscriminately. A strategy of pragmatic pluralism is proposed as a way of ensuring that concepts taken from different social science paradigms or disciplines are drawn together into a single coherent perspective to shape the particular study to which they relate. This is illustrated with reference to an ethnographic study of managerial work carried out by the author.     

Normes,théorie des jeux et pratiques participatives: le poids réel des travailleurs dans les économies libérales

Les auteurs analysent l'effet de la directive européenne relative à l'information et à la consultation des travailleurs sur les pratiques participatives en entreprise au Royaume‐Uni et en Irlande. Dans une analyse conceptuelle et empirique, qui fait appel à la théorie des jeux, ils formulent trois hypothèses explicatives, qu'ils cherchent à vérifier avec des données qualitatives recueillies auprès de seize entreprises. La démonstration permet de comprendre pourquoi la coopération, gage de gains mutuels, n'est pas la solution qui l'emporte dans les pays examinés, et elle nous en dit un peu plus sur l'effet des normes sur la gestion participative dans les économies de marché libérales.     

Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions – ‘Gold Standard’ or ‘Fool's Gold’ in Public Policy and Management?

In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making and management. The UK has been in the forefront of this movement but similar movements have been identified internationally. This interest in outcome‐based decision‐making has been given particular impetus through the ‘results’‐based movement in evaluation and performance management since the 1980s, which has increased in scope over time, slowly changing its emphasis from cost reduction and measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. This change has been widely welcomed by policymakers, practitioners and academics. However, there is evidence that the reality is often rather less than the rhetoric. Moreover, the ‘attribution problem’ of attributing changes in outcomes to specific social policies has remained a major issue. The conceptual solution of constructing ‘cause‐and‐effect’ models, imported from the policy evaluation field, has only recently become common for operationalising these models. This article outlines the evolution of interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making up to recent times and the growing realization of the importance of the attribution problem. It then outlines both how the ‘cause‐and‐effect’ policy modelling approach can partially tackle the attribution problem, but also its inherent limitations. Lastly, the article uses several case studies in current UK social policy‐making to demonstrate the potential importance of the reasoning embedded within cause‐and‐effect models but also the dangers in policy‐making which adopts this approach without understanding its conceptual basis or in fields where it is inappropriate, given the current state of our knowledge of social policy systems.     

Constructing poverty in anti-welfare Singapore

In recent years, attention on the issue of poverty in Singapore has been increasingly placed in the spotlight. This study examines the various types of attitudes among Singaporeans and how they are formed, relating them to the broader institutional context of Singapore. A mixed method design is employed where clusters or groups of attitudes are derived through the use of cluster analysis. Subsequently, discourses of poverty and welfare attitudes are construed through qualitative interviews with the aid of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Quantitative findings point to three clusters of attitudes: ‘Conservatives’, ‘Liberals’, and ‘Sui Generis’. Qualitative findings, however, show that ‘Sui Generis’ ultimately align themselves closer to either ‘Conservatives’ or ‘Liberals’ in their discourses of welfare. In fact, respondents in all three clusters reproduce state discourses, albeit in varying ways. In essence, this study explicates poverty and welfare attitudes as a product of social identities premised on subjective notions that are shaped by state discourses of meritocracy, self-reliance and anti-welfarism. It is thus argued that current socio-political constructions of poverty ensue a paucity of major welfare reform in the near future of Singapore.