pt. 1. Role theory : the puzzle of Britain's appeasement decisions in the 1930s -- pt. 2. Role demands : substantive rationality and structural adaptation -- pt. 3. Role conceptions : bounded rationality and experiential learning -- pt. 4. Role enactments : communicative rationality and altercasting.
"Appeasement is a controversial strategy of conflict management and resolution in world politics. Its reputation is sullied by foreign policy failures ending in war or defeat in which the appeasing state suffers diplomatic and military losses by making costly concessions to other states. Britain's appeasement policies toward Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s are perhaps the most notorious examples of the patterns of failure associated with this strategy. Is appeasement's reputation deserved or is this strategy simply misunderstood and perhaps improperly applied? Role theory offers a general theoretical solution to the appeasement puzzle that addresses these questions, and the answers should be interesting to political scientists, historians, students, and practitioners of cooperation and conflict strategies in world politics. As a social-psychological theory of human behavior, role theory has the capacity to unite the insights of various existing theories of agency and structure in the domain of world politics. Demonstrating this claim is the methodological aim in this book and its main contribution to breaking new ground in international relations theory"--
Mistakes as a feature of everyday political life -- Foreign policy mistakes and the exercise of power -- Fearing losses too little : deterrence failures -- Fearing losses too much : false alarm failures -- Seeking gains too late : reassurance failures -- Seeking gains too soon : false hope failures -- Foreign policy analysis : maximizing rationality -- Foreign policy analysis : minimizing mistakes -- Avoiding foreign policy mistakes : extension and expansion -- Foreign policy dynamics : the Middle East and South Asia systems -- Some final thoughts : exploring the rationality frontier
The symposium papers show that differences in sources and context clearly matter in the 'at‐a‐distance' assessment of a leader's psychological characteristics. The stability of both cognitive and personality attributes decreases as observations focus on shorter time frames, more spec fic policy domains, and private rather than public arenas. Despite these qualifications on the use of texts to profile individual leaders, the indices of social cognition and personality do discriminate individual differences between leaders. Because the results reveal significant differences in assessing individual leaders over time with multiple sources and at different levels of analysis, it becomes more worthwhile to investigate research questions that would be moot in the absence of important source, context, or aggregation effects. With the use of automated content analysis and greater access to data from electronic sources, it is now easier to carry out quantitative content analyses of psychological characteristics and to confirm or qualify the insights generated in this symposium.