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Classical thinking on rationality regards it as an all-or-nothing affair. It thus fails to account for the fact that institutions are powerful social factors that frame the contexts within which rational agents supposedly exercise their ability to choose. This poses the classic dilemma: should social explanation refer to individual decisions or to institutions? Wettersten skillfully criticizes some of the most advanced solutions to it, and attempts to formulate a better explanatory unit for the social sciences: the partially rational individual. Since the partially rational individual is also only partially an individual,Wettersten's methodological reconciliation between individualism and holism seems to have some ontological implications too, ones that he seems reluctant to embrace. His book is nevertheless an interesting contribution to the controversy regarding the limits to the explanatory power of social theories.

Individual budgets allow the service user to take control and make decisions about the care that they receive. Manchester was one of 13 local authority development sites chosen by the Department of Health to trial individual budgets. The pilot has ended but the scheme remains strong. Here, Caroline Marsh describes how one individual's life has been transformed through the power of choice.

Summary
The article presents a brief description of a series of integrated studies on the communication style and way of life of individual personalities, bearers of the basic personality systems, provisionally called synthetic-reflective and analytic-active. A set of psychological, psycho-linguistic and sociological methods has helped investigate the ways of communication behaviour of a number of individuals in various kinds of communication (small social groups, binary interpersonal communication between spouses and close friends, communication with objects of culture and spending leisure time). Correlations were drawn between the communication activity and the components of the basic personality system.

A description of two cases from my time as a school psychologist in the middle of the 1950s forms the background to the following question: Has anything important happened since then in psychological research to help us to a better understanding of how and why individuals think, feel, act, and react as they do in real life and how they develop over time? The studies serve as a background for some general propositions about the nature of the phenomena that concerns us in developmental research, for a summary description of the developments in psychological research over the last 40 years as I see them, and for some suggestions about future directions.

In spite of rebuffs, China's reformers are still in charge, as the recent 13th Congress confirmed. We look at the present state of political and economic reform, the rule of law, and individual rights

AbstractIn this paper I address several phenomena that arise from the limited information possessed by individual investors. This limitation focuses attention on the channels by which investors receive information about securities. I find this perspective to have implications for the marketing of financial products, the dissemination of information by brokers, the commissions of brokerages, the role of investment analysis in the pricing of securities, the pricing of the services provided by financial intermediaries, and the equilibrium of pricing of capital assets.

The unemployment compensation system in the US is out of date & in trouble. The system has four fundamental problems: (1) During recessions, it often cannot meet its financial obligations without federal aid or deficit spending. (2) It is out of step with the structural & cultural realities of the modern workforce. (3) It encourages layoffs & unemployment. (4) It operates in isolation from other programs related to employment & financial security. We propose an alternative unemployment policy based on the individual unemployment account (IUA). The IUA would be a mandatory & portable individual trust to which the employer & employee contributed. It shifts control & responsibility from the employer & the state government to the employer & the employee, & it is compatible with the realities of a 21st-century economy. We begin by providing an overview of how the current unemployment insurance system works & discussing its problems. We then describe an alternative unemployment policy based on IUAs & discuss the benefits of such a policy. 1 Table, 45 References. Adapted from the source document.