Posted by Kev on January 31, 2000, at 14:04:15
In reply to Kev---are you a consultant, or a lawyer????, posted by claudeah on January 31, 2000, at 12:56:09
> Kev---
>
> That sounds like lawyer or consultant talk......so which do you fess up to being???
>***I am a sociologist. The reason I come up with stuff like this is because the theoretical object of sociology is non-rational action, that is to say defined negatively against rational action (as defined in terms of utilitarian theories of action such as classical economics). So constructing rational models of action is part of my theoretical activity; they represent the limiting cases which define the boundaries of my field of analytical objects. To make this somewhat more clear, an act may be defined as non-rational when it is pursued as an end in itself, as opposed to being regulated by means-end rationality. Non-rational acts, of course, are further distinguished by the level of organization whence their etiology is situated: individual or sociocultural. The former is the province of biology, psychiatry, neurology, etc. But the structure of non-rational acts is often pretty much the same: obsessive cleaning can find its underlying cause in either, say, psychopathology (OCD) or a religious ideology ("cleanliness is next to Godliness"). The two levels can also interact: disorders such as anorexia clearly have a psychopathological component, but the specific manifestation of the underlying pathology is clearly subject to the influence of an analytically independent class of social factors (e.g., cultural standards which equate beauty with thinness).
What was the question again?
-Kev
poster:Kev
thread:19971
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000128/msgs/20206.html