Choosing an Identity
Subtitle: A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: August 30, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780472107018
Subjects: Political science & theory; Social, group or collective psychology; Social Psychology; Social Interaction; Social Science; Sociology; Sociology - Social Theory; Politics/International Relations; Sociology - General; General; Political Science / General; Identity (Psychology); Group identity; Rational choice theory
Description: "Social science research is fragmented by the widely differing and seemingly contradictory approaches used by the different disciplines of the social sciences to explain human action. Attempts at integrating different social science approaches to explain action have often been frustrated by the difficulty of incorporating cultural assumptions into rational choice theories without robbing them of their generality or making them too vague for predictions.

Another problem has been the major disagreements among cultural theorists regarding the ways in which culture affects preferences and beliefs.".

"Sun-Ki Chai provides a general model of preference and belief formation, addressing the largest unresolved issue in rational choice theories of action. With Choosing an Identity, Chai plays a bridging role between these approaches by augmenting and modifying the main ideas of the rational choice model to make it more compatible with empirical findings in other fields.

The resulting model is used to analyze three major unresolved issues in the developing world: the sources of a government's economic ideology, the origins of ethnic group boundaries, and the relationship between modernization and violence."--BOOK JACKET.