Thursday, December 18, 2008

Rational people achieve rationally collective outcome ?

Individuals are seen as motivated by wants of goals that express their preferences. They act with specific, given constraints and on the basis of information that they have about their conditions. The idea of rational action has generally been taken to imply a conscious social actor engaging in deliberate calculative strategies.
Trade union, political parties etc.show that actions taken by individuals are aggregated and an agreed policy formulated then it is legitimate to speak of collective actor.Rational people have no individual incentive but even OLSON agrees to the presence of selective incentive which alters the cost in such a way as to make support of collective action profitable.
An example of this type of collective action was seen by me during my posting as veterinary doctor in Gopalganj district of Bihar where people took to street and blocked the road due to irregular supply of electricity. Though they were well aware of the fact that it will cause hardship to travellers but the incentive for them was higher and hence they resorted to this mean.Thus collective action generally incorporates some type of incentive to make people act.

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