Instrumental Variations I: Rational Choice Theory

Schutz's work can also be seen as offering a foundation for rational choice theory, an approach developed out of the marginalist revolution in economics in the second half of the nineteenth century, a development with which Weber was intimately acquainted.

The basic assumption is that people will act in a way which brings them benefits and will avoid acting in a way that does not bring them benefits. Exchange theory, for example, is based on the idea that people will exchange activities when seeking to maximize profits. If, for example, I decide that time to relax is more important to me than the satisfactions I gain from housework and from the income I would have to give up to pay somebody to do the housework, I will employ a cleaner. The cleaner I employ will have decided that the satisfactions of his or her free time is less important than the satisfactions to be gained from the wages I pay.

The whole of society can be seen in terms of a series of such decisions and exchanges. The assumptions of the economics of supply and demand are the same: I am an agent on a free market, and I have a disposable income and a set of needs and preferences which I order into a hierarchy - some are more important than others. I then decide how to dispose of my income to fulfil my most important needs or realize my most important preferences, whether they be for heroin or for books. The market, the ‘perfect market' (perhaps the ideal-type market) consists of other equally free individuals pursuing their own interests and preferences in similar ways, and the end balance is the price of goods on the market; the price will settle at a point where the demand for the good equates with the willingness of suppliers to supply and the largest possible number of people are satisfied.

Weber tended to think that all social orders were rather precarious and unstable, and he saw such market relationships as binding a society together; however, his conception of rational action is much wider than that of the rational choice theorists, according to whom the most distinctive feature of human beings seems to be that we are constantly calculating the benefits that come from our actions. Weber recognized other types of action and most importantly that rational action could be undertaken in pursuit of values that did not bring any measurable benefit to the actor. Many of the arguments and developments of rational choice theory are attempts to integrate wider definitions of self-interest and other aspects of subjectivity into rational choice models, or to limit the scope of rational choice explanations (Abell 1991; Carling 1986; Sen 1977). Generally, however, rational choice theorists seem to want something much closer to the natural sciences in the ability not only to explain but also to predict. Whether this can be achieved is another matter.

There are important questions to be raised about rational choice theory in terms of its ability to understand the complexity of human motivations, limiting the role of values, and internal contradictions and conflicts in human psychological life. Weber was to some degree critical of the dominance of rationality in Western life, but rational choice theory can be seen as assuming an extension of that rationality to people's internal lives. It is much closer to positivism than Weber, adopting implicitly or explicitly, a positivist psychology - behaviourism - which attempts to explain human action through a process of conditioning involving rewards and punishments (Sen 1977). Whereas phenomenology is a philosophy of consciousness, rational choice theory is closer to a natural-science, cause-effect model.