Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 256 pages
• Published by: Routledge
• Edition: 1st Edition December 24, 1996
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0415911923
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0415911924
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 3.2 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 5.6 ounces

Product Review
History without large-scale explanatory models is just one damn thing after another. This collection of essay provides a very useful intoduction to one such model that deserves our attention..
–The Journal of Religion Vol 78, No 2 , April 1998

This book both serves as an great introduction to rational choice theory and helps to fram future research agendas fro scholars already working in the field..
–Anthony Gill Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion

This book is awesomely important for the sociology of religion and as a harbinger of rational-choice theory's wider sociological prospects.
–American Journal of Sociology

This book is awesomely important for the sociology of religion and as a harbinger of rational-choice theorys wider sociological prospects.
–American Journal of Sociology

This collection of essays offers to those new to the social scientific study of religion a solid and fair depiction of rational choice theory. Valuable not only as an introduction to rational choice theory, this book also offers applications and assessments of the limitations of the theory through discussions of religious choice, preference, and behavior. Graduate students new to this theoretical framework would find this book highly beneficial, as would any reader interested in the study of methods and theory..
–Religious Studies Review, 01/99

This slim volume brings together several sogent articles arguing for and against the approach. It is both a one-stop overview of the subdiscipline's purported new paradigm and a source of its cogent critique. As such, I recommend it highly. All of these articles are well chosen, concise, and stimulating. for a brief summary and assessment of the rational-choice approach to the sociology of religion by some of its best practitioners and critics, this book has no peer.
–Contemporary Sociology

This slim volume brings together several sogent articles arguing for and against the approach. It is both a one-stop overview of the subdisciplines purported new paradigm and a source of its cogent critique. As such, I recommend it highly. All of these articles are well chosen, concise, and stimulating. for a brief summary and assessment of the rational-choice approach to the sociology of religion by some of its best practitioners and critics, this book has no peer.
–Contemporary Sociology

Product Description
Rational Choice Theory and Religion considers one of the major developments in the social scientific paradigms that promises to foster a greater theoretical unity among the disciplines of sociology, political science, economics and psychology. Applying the theory of rational choice--the theory that each individual will make her choice to maximize gain and minimize cost--to the study of religion, Lawrence Young has brought together a group of internationally renowned scholars to examine this important development within the field of religion for the first time.

The collection of essays addresses why it is that individuals are drawn to a religion. Using economic models from which rational choice theory was orignally derived, the contributors find that an individual's religious choice has as much to do with an individual's demand for religous meaning as it does with the plurality of religions one can choose from. The more religions, they contend, the more likely it is the people will believe in one or more of the religions available.

With rational choice's capacity to consider the broadest range of issues surrouding religious choice and belief, Rational Choice Theory and Religion makes a salient contribution to the sociological study of religion, as it promises to replace other dominant paradigms in the field, such as as secularization.

Contributors: Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, Darren Sherkat, R. Stephen Warner, Mary Jo Neitz, Nancy T. Ammerman, Lawrence A. Young, Michael Hechter, Randall Collins.