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As discussed in Chapter III, rationality is a social structure that enables and constrains actions. The following sections first look at how rationality enables action, followed by a discussion of how they constrain.
Rationality Enables Action
Chapter V described rationality as the process through which we assess our environment, make decisions and evaluate choices. By applying various forms of rationality, we build our understanding of the world and decide how to operate within it. Rationality, thus, enables actions through two mechanisms.
- First, it justifies actions.
- Second, through bureaucratic rationality, it organizes our activities[1]
Rationality Justifies Action
Rationality enables actions as it is how we justify our behaviours and convince members in our social group to do certain things. We want others to perceive that we are rational, and thus we choose actions that create that perception.
Considering the Seniors Program from Appendix 1, for example, the fellowship used technocratic rationality to demonstrate their intervention measurably improved the frailty in a seniors population. Through the study they performed, they learned how to delay frailty’s onset. They then used those results to convince healthcare managers and physicians to adopt the program.
Moreover, interviews with the fellowship surfaced other ways rationality enabled action.[2] The fellowship noted that many managers approached the age of the population targeted by the program. That is, the Seniors Program targeted pre-frail seniors, and the managers of the BC Health Authority were getting to the age where they started to think they might be pre-frail seniors. This realization led some managers to support the program’s spread in the healthcare region.
This is an example of emotional rationality. The managers’ sense of affiliation with the target population gave them feelings of, perhaps, fear, empathy, compassion, and so on. These feelings, in turn, led them to support the fellowship’s continuing efforts. The figure below diagrams the above description using a critical realist framework.
Bureaucratic rationality, however, plays an essential role in enabling action.
Recall from Chapter V how bureaucratic rationality defines how organizations do things. It does this by creating documents, boundaries, rules, processes, and procedures and roles.
- Organizations, thus, enable actions that comply with these bureaucratic structures.
- Importantly, it is through the creation of new bureaucratic structures that the organization undertakes new actions.
The development of the Seniors Program in Appendix 1 showed an example of this. The Project Charter documented the details of the collaboration between the Foundation and the BC and Nova Scotian Health Authorities. All participating organizations signed this document, committing themselves to form a team that attended the Training Fellowship. It was through this fellowship the Seniors Program came into existence