The Masks of Rationality

Abstract

In Chapter 1 I outlined the issue of this study as concerning the twists of order and disorder in the organization of economic life. In Chapter 2 I presented a retrospective on the academic reception during the last quarter of the past century of the organization of “modern” capitalism. We have also learned how business leaders, themselves assembled in the European Roundtable of Industrialists, related the deficiencies in “European” productivity and competitiveness to a lack of “concerted responses” to political and socio-economic “uncertainties”. Inspired by the surge of corporate cross-border movements, documented in Chapter 2, I will suggest an alternative interpretation of the links between micro-choices, meso-arrangements and macro-order.