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The study aims to understand the underlying factor why McDonald's customers return despite previous failure customer experiences. Why do customers come back to the company that contributes to the former dissatisfaction? McDonald's attempt to maintain unceasing purposeful emergence fail at the local level, where the customer contact occurs. McDonald's offerings and customers' bounded rationality results in that customers are satisfied with an "ok" experience, which adds to their low expectations of McDonalds. This makes clear that McDonald's does not have to make an effort through constant adaptation at the local level to achieve a "great" level of satisfaction. Because the customer is satisfied with an "ok" experience, and not require more to return to McDonalds. If you can lower your customers' expectations so much that they do not care about the previous failure customer experiences, the company's competitive invincible, even without continuous adjustment.

This work is dedicated to the development of a unified account of both theoretical and practical rationality. I adopt a particular view of evaluative properties, according to which entities are evaluated as good or bad according to how well they fulfill the constitutive functions of their kinds. I argue that the function of belief is to accurately represent reality, while the function of action is to satisfy the agent’s desires. These functions fix the goodness- or success-conditions of belief and action. With these functions in place, I adopt a reliabilist conception of reasoning which evaluates reasoning processes by how well they allow us to achieve the constitutive aims of belief and action. Moreover, I argue that the process of determining which action will best satisfy our desires is a cognitive matter – non-cognitive states like desire do not actually provide the agent with reasons.

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Current explanations for anchoring phenomena seem to be unable to account for the diversity of effects found by 40 years of research. Additionally, the theories do not have much to say about the processes that make anchors so resilient to modification. I argue that by focusing on the mechanisms involved in spatial representation, we can account for most anchoring effects which have spatial components.

The notion that corporations would voluntarily devote resources to serve non-shareholder interests seems to contradict the purpose of commerce. Yet, corporate social responsibility ranks among the most prominent aspects of contemporary capitalism, reaching – in the words of one author – a point of nearly universal adoption among businesses. Over four decades of empirical testing has provided no incontrovertible evidence to support the belief that businesses benefit, even in the long run, from responsible behaviour. Peculiarly, then, it appears that corporations are defying the logic of competitive markets by investing in CSR en masse without an established business case for doing so. Inspiring the work is a research question rooted in the observation of a counter-intuitive: if not profit, in every circumstance, what is turning the attention of nearly every major corporation away from their bottom line and towards social interests? The thesis explores what other factors may lay behind the business community’s curious adoption of CSR, including a new hypothesis that corporate leaders may be diverging from the normative ideal of rational choice and following boundedly-rational patterns of behaviour. It argues that CSR is a form of risk-averse corporate behaviour from a private sector that has seen tremendous growth and gain since the end of the Second World War.

Who has never reflected about an artist or a creative person thinking why this person is not recognized and famous? Why so much talent for nobody?Who has never reflected, why this singer sings or this actor plays or this fashion designer draws? And secretly thinks that he or she should not.Finding a talented and a creative leader is a real challenge for the company. Finding the good one, we mean. Indeed, the creative leader is the key of improvement and success for creative organizations such as the theater, cinema, cuisine, music and fashion… Once the company found him or her, it has to keep him or her, to give to him or her all the freedom and power he or she needs because he is the one that is able to create great products, to draw out the creativity of the team and to build a clear vision for the company.However, the company also has to deal with constraints. There are financial, material, humans…This thesis try to understand how creative companies work and what are the characteristics of a creative leader. But we do not let the financial part be a taboo. Creative companies build a bridge between their talented leader and their financial restrictions. This paradox involves the question of whether to control or to let the creativity be completely free. The duality between leading creativity and leading rationality is the matter of this thesis.We illustrate the dichotomy with the business of fashion, in particular with Haute Couture Houses. The study case is a way to go inside a real creative organization and to understand how the leadership is implemented.

This dissertation reports on the findings of a single, embedded, interpretive case study centered on nine teachers, supportt staff and administrators in a small, fledgling, faith-baised, independent school in a major city in Canada. Communication practices in schools are significantly impacted by the highly rational society in which they are situated as well as by the expectations often associated with traditional hierarchal roles. Independent schools, as a feature of their 'independence,' have certain freedoms to create new norms of leadeship and emancipation but also meet with greater pressures because of their increased dependency for sustainability on donations and tuition fees. They tend to be easily drawn into the competitive ideologies that exemplify a highly rationalized, free market capitalist society. A large body of literature describes the impact of excessive rationality on communicative practices. The work of Jurgen Habermas serves as foundational to the phenomena of communicative practices in this dissertation. The researcher used qualitative methods to explore participants' perspectives on the communicative practices of their school organization. The findings show participants to be vulnerable to the cultural hegemony of rationality, but anaware of that hegemonic power. However, the findings also show a desire to foster ethical and inclusive communicative practices. They also reveal a significant interplay between participants' individual theologies and their beliefs about communicative practices. The suggestions for educational change are to more readily educate both teachers and administrators regarding ethical discourse and the essential components of Ideal Speech, and for each school organization to conduct an audit of communicative practices to ensure an ongoing creation and critique of communicative norms. / Graduate

In my dissertation I explain and defend the claim that conscious beliefs are essentially prescriptive. I argue that norms of conscious belief are explained by the fact that consciously believing p involves a commitment to the truth of p, a commitment analogous to the one involved in the act of accepting an assertion in public linguistic practice. Having a conscious belief implies being vulnerable to certain questions and criticisms from other agents. For instance, when asked for reasons for her belief, a person should provide a justification which demonstrates her entitlement to accepting the given proposition as true. Moreover, if a certain belief logically follows from the agent’s beliefs then she should either accept it as a conclusion or revise her initial beliefs. I argue that both deliberative and non-inferential conscious beliefs can be construed as acceptances of assertions and that they carry the same normative import as public acts of accepting claims put forward by others. The intrinsic relation between conscious belief and language-use shows that conscious belief is irreducible to unconscious or lower-level belief, the type of belief which we attribute to non-human animals or small children. Rather than trying to reduce conscious belief to lower-level belief, I suggest that we should offer an account of the emergence of the linguistic practice of assertion in terms of animal belief and then explain the normative features of conscious belief by reference to the norms implicit in assertional practice. In addition, my work proposes a way of formulating the norms of conscious belief which is consistent with the fact that actual human beings do not have perfect logical abilities; that they can only dedicate a limited amount of time and cognitive resources to the task of reasoning.

This thesis analyses theories of practical reason. In particular I compare desire theories of reasons with value theories of reasons. Desire theories of reasons, as I define them, claim that it is a necessary condition of A having a reason to ф that A’s reason depend on A’s antecedent desires. In contrast, I define value theories of reasons as those theories that claim that it is a necessary condition of A having a reason to ф that A’s ф-ing be valuable. In this thesis my main concern lies with those value theorists who accept the motivational requirement: the claim that if an agent is to have a reason to ф, then it must be possible for the agent to ф on the basis of this reason. In particular, I concentrate on those value theorists who claim that A has a reason to ф iff a) A’s ф-ing is valuable; b) it is possible for A to ф on the basis of this reason. I reject desire theories of reasons on the basis of several criticisms. I claim that our desires are normatively arbitrary, and that according to desire theories of reasons, some of our desires ought to be eradicated. I argue instead for a value theory of reasons that adopts a particular interpretation of the motivational requirement. I distinguish three different interpretations of the motivational requirement, each offering a connection between reasons and motivations that differs in strength. The first, strongest requirement claims that in order for A to have a normative reason to ф, it must be possible for A to ф on the basis of this reason given certain qualities that A possesses (where I take the sense of ‘possible’ relevant to these interpretations to be one that reflects an agent’s capacities). The second and weakest requirement claims that in order for A to have a normative reason to ф, it must be possible for A to ф on the basis of this reason if A possessed certain qualities. The last and moderate requirement claims that in order for A to have a normative reason to ф, it must be possible for A to ф on the basis of this reason if A possessed certain qualities and A either has these qualities, or it is possible for her to get herself into a state where she has them. I argue for a value theory of reasons that employs this last, moderate motivational requirement. I argue that a value theory that adopts the moderate motivational requirement is best, as it allows the theory to be practically useful; reasons on this account have a role in deterrence, encouragement and praise- and blame-worthiness. The theory also aligns with a plausible account of eligible candidates for reasons. While the employment of the moderate motivational requirement in a value theory of reasons likens the theory, in some respects, to a desire theory, it avoids the objections raised against desire theories of reasons. In this way, a value theory of reasons that employs the moderate motivational requirement combines the attractive features of a desire theory and a value theory. Specifically, it generates reasons that are both dependent on an individual’s qualities, and also aligned with an account of value. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008