PUBLIC ALLOCATIONS AND RATIONAL SOLIDARITY

Such dichotomies as state and market are too narrow to include important allocation processes in our society. As an alternative, sociologists have developed theories of economic processes that are neither state nor market, such as theories of the negotiated economy and the normative foundations of the welfare state. These theories are based on assumptions of rational actors maximizing utility or actions guided by internalized norms, respectively. Both suffer from important shortcomings since neither takes into account the motivating factor of collective consequences or collective goods in interaction processes. To overcome this theoretical weakness, some new concepts are suggested: collective rationality, collective consequences, and rational solidarity. These can be used to make empirical analyses of public allocations. Examples are given from both the welfare state and the deregulated Norwegian credit market. The argument is based on critical and constructive use of certain insights from the rational choice theory. The rational actors in the ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' realize a distinction between individual and collective rationality. As rational maximizers of utility, they will defect and realize a suboptimal outcome. This critical insight is overlooked both in Gudmund Hernes's theory of negotiations and in Jurgen Habermas's understanding of strategic interaction. On the other hand, Jon Elster suggests that the optimal outcome can be accounted for by assuming cooperative social norms. This solution is rather self-defeating, since actors governed by norms do not take consequences into account. The structure of the game and the distinction between collective and individual vanish together with rationality, at least from the actors' point of view, if not for the researcher. Instead we treat the ''Prisoner's Dilemma'', or the ''logic of collective action'', as a communication process that creates a structure of mutually defeating, normative expectations. This, then, opens up for new theoretical and empirical observations.