Praxeology And Understanding

Starting from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Schäfer composes a methodical approach to habitus of social actors and the logic of their praxis: Building upon the generative terms of praxeology, he focuses on identity and strategy in processes of internalization, their transformation by means of dispositional schemes, and their externalization in action. The emphasis lies on a theory of dispositions that allows a flexible understanding of identity and strategy formation in the context of social experience and the interplay with social structures. This theory is developed over the course of a three-step analysis on habitus as a network of dispositions, on the dynamics that unfold between the logic of socio-structural processes and practical logic, and on the praxeological assessment of social structures via models of fields and the social space.This book is the second of three volumes of HabitusAnalysis. While the first volume deals with the epistemological underpinnings of praxeology, this book advances Bourdieu's theory with a special focus on creativity of action in the context of social structures, thereby preparing the methodological design of empirical models in the third volume.

This work proposes that Carl Menger’s Subjective Theory of Value (STV), and its subsequent elaboration by Ludwig von Mises as Praxeology, provides a useful alternative to more common methods in the study of action and social phenomena, and more specifically, to leadership in complex social systems. Rather than being based on rationality assumptions and algorithmic predictability, the STV emphasizes transient subjectivity shaped by a complex world of lacking information, mistakes, disequilibrium, uncertainty and attempted error correction that defy mathematization and exact prediction. As such, it is a framework to make sense of human action systems in terms of subjective understanding, learning, and uncertainty, rather than quantitative predictability. Accordingly, the aim of this work is to explain the STV as a general theory of action and to demonstrate its capability in developing adequate qualitative theory and to elaborate on some of the major topics that its implications raise with regard to leadership. The power of the method can be seen in that its procedure naturally branches out to facilitate an understanding of a broad selection of processes and may provide the basis for a universal theory of leadership.

2021 Hardcover Reprint of the 1949 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" is the first comprehensive treatise on economics written by a leading member of the modern Austrian school of economics. Von Mises' contribution was very simple, yet at the same time extremely profound: he pointed out that the whole economy is the result of what individuals do. Individuals act, choose, cooperate, compete, and trade with one another. In this way Mises explained how complex market phenomena develop. Mises did not simply describe economic phenomena - prices, wages, interest rates, money, monopoly and even the trade cycle - he explained them as the outcomes of countless conscious, purposeful actions, choices, and preferences of individuals, each of whom was trying as best as he or she could under the circumstances to attain various wants and ends and to avoid undesired consequences. Hence the title Mises chose for his economic treatise, "Human Action."

Collection of essays on economic theory. Most of the essays originally appeared in the late 1920s in German journals devoted to the social sciences, with the original German language collection being issued in 1933.