What Is Rational About Identity?

Fernando Aguiar () and Andrés de Francisco

IESA Working Papers Series from Institute for Social Syudies of Andalusia - Higher Council for Scientific Research

Abstract: In this article we explore the positive use of “social identity” in order to explain certain instances of social action. We attempt to isolate its explanatory power alongside the two great motivational mechanisms of the sociological tradition: interests and instrumental rationality, on the one hand; and values, norms and practical reason, on the other. We discover an ample sphere for a reductionist strategy where identity is and must be translated to the language of either interests and preferences or norms and values with which the individual identifies himself. Nevertheless, in the final part of this paper we also explore the possibility and circumstances of the appearance of reasons of identity proper as independent and irreducible agency factors.

Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://iesaa.csic.es/RePEc/pdf/Identity.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server iesaa.csic.es: No such host is known.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esa:iesawp:0505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IESA Working Papers Series from Institute for Social Syudies of Andalusia - Higher Council for Scientific Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Luis Miguel Miller ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).