SFB 1150: Cultures of Decision-Making

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The Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Decision-Making” examines the social practice of decision-making in a historical-comparative and interdisciplinary perspective from the Middle Ages to the present. Its aim is to address decision-making as a form of social action which is neither self-evident nor invariant, but which is based on changing social and cultural conditions. We presuppose that decision-making is a fundamental problem that results from the need to cope with social complexity. Furthermore, it is also a phenomenon which expresses itself in culturally-specific ways and which (at any given time) plays a different role in structuring the social order. Therefore, our central aim is to reconstruct different historical “cultures of decision-making” and to make visible their significance for particular social orders. Our long-term research goal is twofold: First, on the basis of an analytical research program, we will examine selected fields, asking: how decision-making was framed, modeled, performed and reflected on in different historical contexts; what the culture-specific conditions underlying decision-making were in each case; and in what ways it in turn shaped the institutional and power structure of society. We also examine how and why cultures of decision-making changed over the long term. Second, we want to provide an impetus for rendering decision-making a central problem of the historical cultural sciences as well as a contrast to current ahistorical discourses of decision-making. Furthermore, given the widespread trivial-rationalist understanding of decision-making in politics and everyday life, the Collaborative Research Centre can make an important contribution to current social self-reflection on decision-making.