Decision-making as a difficult challenge

Münster University's newspaper about the Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Decision-Making“

Juliane Albrecht talked with the speaker of the SFB 1150, the social and economic historian Ulrich Pfister, about the aims and methods of the collaborative research centre. The interview appeared in the magazine of the WWU Münster wissen|leben.

What will the researchers investigate in their work on the cultures of decision-making?

Current research on decision-making has so far focused mainly on the results of decision-making, i.e., the decisions, and aims to discover how better decisions can be made. What is different about our approach is that we focus centrally not on the decision as such, but on the process of decision-making.

What exactly is new about the approach?

First of all, we see decision-making as a form of social action, as an interactive process, and not as a mental process. There are two important ideas behind this approach. First, for the persons involved, the process of decision-making is a difficult challenge. This is because the process of decision-making initially generates possible alternatives. At the end point of the process, though, one alternative is selected and all others are expunged. This means that decision-making faces a great challenge to legitimize itself. We are interested in how past and present societies deal and dealt with this difficult challenge, and what cultural conditions – that is, cultures of decision-making – they are founded upon. One option that we can frequently observe may be to postpone decisions initially, or even to make no decision at all.

The second important idea is that decision-making is removed from everyday routine and is institutionalized, such as when the contents of a university magazine have to be specified in a separate editorial meeting. These are some of the main concerns of our research programme and the direction that we wish to take. We see this as a form of fundamental research, one that can open up new and genuinely cultural-theoretical perspectives on decision-making.

Do you believe that, as a result of your findings, some passages in history books will have to be rewritten?

The history books will probably not have to be changed. But, in the assessment of long-term processes, we may possibly be able to say more precisely how in certain situations decision-making took place and why certain decisions were made – or, actually, were not made. We can then perhaps better answer the question of why something was decided in such a way at one particular moment in time, and then quite differently at a later or an earlier moment. But we are also concerned with describing and understanding history differently from how it is described and understood in classical political history, which sets out with the notion of decisions as historical events, and investigates how they came into being and what were their consequences, as well as why this or that politician made this or that decision. We, on the other hand, are interested also precisely in such cases of decision-making where no decision was made. In my opinion, such cases could well constitute the great majority.