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Rational Choice Theory: Actions
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The methodological individualism of rational choice theorists leads them to start out from the actions of individuals and to see all other social phenomena as reducible to these individual actions. For Homans... it was also necessary to see individual actions as reducible to these conditioned psychological responses (see also Emerson 1972a and 1972b). This position was justified on the grounds that the principles of rational choice and social exchange were simply expressions of the basic principles of behavioural psychology. While many other rational choice theorists have rejected this claim - and Homans himself came to see it as inessential - it is worth looking, briefly, at the argument.
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Rational choice may ... explain why collective action may not occur. One reason why this is so, according to rational choice models, is that people may not agree on how to distribute the costs and gains from cooperation. This problem is especially large when there are many participants needed (such as to create an army and pay for it), when the costs to cooperation is high and when the benefits of free riding are high. So, according to rational choice models voluntary cooperation would be difficult to find in the above mentioned circumstances and this corresponds to the real world. To solve such problems one then creates coercive solutions such as creating a state with the power to tax everyone.
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In this book Joseph Heath brings Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas's use of speech act theory to explain social order and outlines a multidimensional theory of rational action that includes norm-governed action as a specific type.
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Rational choice theorists have incorporated collective action into their theories by requiring that the actions of groups and organisations be reducible to statements about the actions of individuals. Trades unions, political parties, business enterprises, and other organisations may, then, all figure as actors in rational choice theories. Whenever it is possible to demonstrate the existence of a decision-making apparatus through which individual intentions are aggregated and an agreed policy formulated, it is legitimate to speak of collective actors (Hindess 1988, Cook et al 1990).
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[S]ome studies (Snyder, 1975) of other forms of collective action as strikes suggest that a multivariate sociological perspective is more plausible in this regard than the rational choice model, including the bargaining hypothesis of unions. As reported, in their decisions to strike workers do not just resort to accurate computations of economic costs and benefits, since these actions are (...) more affected by extra-economic factors. The operation of such social, especially political and status, variables transform strikes from instruments of economic (labor-capital) exchange to potent weapons in political (working class-state) conflict. Notably, the conversion of strikes from a form of economic bargaining to a political means to achieve power is evidenced in the incidence of externalities in this collective action (Perrone, 1984). Thus, the effects of strikes shift from the economic to political realm when the benefit is not attributed to market power, so they evolve from a local menace to profit to a general threat to the social order. In this view, the transformation of strikes from economic to political phenomena is evidenced by their increasingly disruptive potential vis-à-vis the polity and social system as a whole, with the positional power of actors (labor vs. capital) being determined by such potentials.
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[I]n terms of Alexander’s action/order matrix, both exchange and rational choice theories are resolutely in the individualist/rational cell. Certainly collective institutions are acknowledged, but they must be explained as arising from and persisting because they allow individuals to rationally maximize benefits through their involvement. And that again is the constant research question: why is such-and-such behavior a rational, maximizing, course of action?
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