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This study examines green investment reforms carried out in Bangladesh. The reform process curated significant changes by promoting green investment and fostering the adoption of risk management (RM) rationalities. This study’s focus is on revealing changes in behaviour and explaining how RM can act as an effective generator of climate change mitigation practices.

Building on Foucault's concept of governmentality, the authors apply a “green governmentality” interpretive lens to analyse interviews and documentary evidence, adopting a qualitative case study approach. The authors explore how green governmentality generates RM rationalities and techniques to induce policies and practices within banks and financial institutions (FIs) for climate change mitigation purposes.

The findings provide valuable insights into the reform process and influence of RM rationalities in the context of environmental concerns. The authors find that the reforms and creation of RM rationalities affect the management of climate mitigation practices within banks and FIs and identify the processes through which the RM techniques are transformed as climate concerns are emphasised. The authors illustrate green governmentality as persuasive strategies, which have generated specific ways of seeing climate change reality and new ways of inserting RM into organisational activities, through the green governmentality effects they created. These reforms made climate change actionable and governable through the production of RM rationalities, supported by accounting conceptualisations and processes.

The insights from this study can assist with how we act upon questions of climate change from an RM perspective. Governments, policymakers and regulators who develop climate change-related laws, regulations and policies can draw on these insights to help foster green governmentality for climate change mitigation actions informed by RM practices.

This study offers insights into how climate change is not simply a biophysical reality but a site of power-knowledge dynamics where RM rationalities are constructed, and accounting processes are transformed. The authors show the application of RM and accounting efforts to change investment practices and how changes were encouraged and promoted by using regulation as a persuasive force on knowledgeable subjects rather than a repressive or oppressive power. The analytic power of green governmentality can be applied to increase understanding of how RM rationality contribute to the creation of useful conceptualisations of climate change and provide insights into how organisations respond to green governmentality.

This paper aims to offer an incremental contribution, augmenting the notion of situated rationality as proposed by terBogt and Scapens (2019). Through insights from empirical data, the authors explore the role of situated rationalities of key individual actors in processes of management control change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted with qualitative data collected in a single public service organisation through face-to-face interviews, organisation documentation and observations.

The findings present the important role of key individual actors in bringing about a new situated rationality in a housing department. External austerity forces combined with actors’ experience rationalities acted as a stimulus to change existing management control practices in the management of public services.

The paper conceptualises “experience” rationality, capturing the experiences of a key actor, including elements of leadership style. Drawing on a story of a complex process of management control change, this paper thus reveals interactions between generalised practices and situated rationalities which were not highlighted by the extended framework of terBogt and Scapens.

In order to further optimize the methods of modern urban planning, the philosophical basis, planning theory, planning measures and practice are analyzed, and some discussions are made in connection with China's planning practice. The research results show that the core of modern urban planning is constructed by traditional rationalism with classical physics as its core. Urban planning is both a technology and a social science. Whether it is traditional or modern urban planning, it has been closely linked with the legal system since its birth. It is an important direction to promote the development of urban planning discipline. The most influential rational ideas of city planning are instrumental rationality, bounded rationality and communicative rationality. Instrumental rationality derives from rational comprehensive planning, systematic planning and procedural planning; the separation-gradualism and hybrid inspection model are developed under the influence of bounded rationality and are amendments to instrumental rationality; communication planning, collaborative planning and consultative planning are developed on the basis of communicative rationality, which is one of the important development directions at present.

Drawing on recent research, which recognises the situated nature of accounting practices, the purpose of this paper is to extend the Burns and Scapens (B&S) framework and to illustrate its potential for studying the situated nature of management accounting practices. The extended framework distinguishes field-level institutions (which the authors term broader institutions) and institutions within the organisation (which the authors term local institutions). To extend the B&S framework the authors draw on recent debates in institutional theory, both new institutional sociology, where the focus is now on the institutional logics perspective, and old institutional economics, where there has been debate about the relationship between institutions and actions.

While the B&S framework focussed on institutions within the organisation, the extended framework explicitly recognises institutions which extend beyond the boundaries of the organisation. It also recognises the way in which rationality and deliberation are related to human agency, as well as the power of specific individuals and/or groups to impose new rules. To illustrate the usefulness of the extended framework the research note draws on a recent study of performance measurement in the Accounting and Finance Groups of the Universities of Groningen and Manchester.

It is argued that local institutions within the organisation combine with the broader institutions to shape the forms of situated rationality which are applied by individuals and groups within the organisation. Different groups within an organisation (e.g. engineers and accountants) can have different forms of situated rationality, and contradictions in these forms of rationality can be a source of institutional change or resistance to change within the organisation, and can explain why accounting changes can by implemented in different ways in different organisations and also in different parts of the same organisation.

The extended framework will be useful for studying: (1) how situated rationalities evolve within an organisation, more specifically how they are shaped by both local and broader institutions; and (2) how prevailing situated rationalities shape the responses to accounting change.

As well as explaining the basis for, and linking the thematic structure of the contributions to, the Journal of Management History ‐ Special Issue on the topic of rationality, the article appraises the philosophical trichotomisation (or three‐part division) of epistemology. Recognising that rationality is primarily a philosophical concept, but also an esteemed and iconic indicator for good reasoning, the discussion of the trichotomised epistemology is undertaken to illustrate that rationality is conceptually understood in three different forms. From the observation that rationality has to be conceived as trimorphic, the commentary then illustrates the substantive limitations for each form.

There is a strong tradition among land‐use planners to conceive of their task as one of inserting rationality into public decision making. The idea of the rational selection of ends as well as means makes land‐use planners reluctant to take goals as given even if they insist on a difference between planning and politics. A retrospective outline shows how three prominent planning theorists handle the controversial question of rational ends. By applying Habermas’ communicative rationality and the bounded/unbounded distinction, the range of rationality concepts becomes sufficiently wide to serve as a basis for classifying most popular planning modes. With multiple forms of rationality, some new problems arise. How are we, for instance, to rationally choose among forms of rationality in a given situation, and how can the various forms be applied simultaneously?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of perceived risk on the procedural rationality of the decision process rather than decision choices or outcomes. The moderating roles of attainment discrepancy and organizational slack are also explored.

These relationships, motivated by behavioral theory, are tested using survey data of capital investment decisions in a sample of 128 public firms in the USA.

The findings suggest an inverted‐U shaped relationship between perceived risk and procedural rationality. In addition, absorbed slack and attainment discrepancy played moderating roles on the perceived risk‐procedural rationality relationship.

This study has several implications for research. First, the influence of risk is extended beyond decision outcomes to include decision processes. Second, the core arguments of behavioral theory, including uncertainty avoidance and decision context, appear to hold for the decision process. However, the effects of risk appear to be in the form of an inverted U‐shaped relationship, differing from prior behavioral theory research related to decision outcomes.

Perceived risk and the organizational context can lead to differing approaches to making decisions. As perceived risk increases, managers appear to alter the extent of information gathering and analysis. Organizations may consider designing different decision processes for different situations that take these managerial tendencies into account.

The contribution of this study is the extension of behavioral theory explanations of risk from decision choices or outcomes to the procedural rationality of the decision process. The findings show that risk has a non‐linear influence on the procedural rationality of the decision process.

This paper is concerned with enlarging the traditional view of rationality that has dominated management and planning in modern times. The inquiry begins by re‐examining Weber’s discussion of rationality as interpreted by contemporary analysts. Weber saw rationality as multi‐faceted and included notions of a social rationality involving more than simple instrumental or “practical” rationality. Habermas’ ideas concerning communicative action are then introduced as the basis for parsing out Weber’s differing conceptions of rationality based on the dual underlying motivations of pursuing social agreement along with technical or instrumental goals. In dialectical fashion, the paper introduces the concept of adaptive rationality involving a synthetic form of reason that mediates between substantive, or social, rationality and instrumental, or technical, rationality. This adaptive form of reason is seen as the heart of management and planning and requires a combined technical, political and moral imagination in the service of creating new forms of social practice and marshaling both the collective will and resources for their fulfillment. Thus, the paper argues for a wider conception of rationality that explicitly acknowledges social norms and the distribution of power and concludes with the hope of a renewed focus of research for a richer understanding of rational action.

The purpose of this paper is to re‐think the definition of three commonly used terms; discuss links between ethics, common sense and rationality; offer a model integrating these; and present findings regarding the understanding of common sense and rationality.

The paper reports on data collected from a convenient sample on their definitions of common sense and rationality. A constant comparison method of analysis is used to identify common themes in the definitions from this sample of 38 responses. Percentages and Yule's Q statistical data as well as descriptive statistics of demographics are obtained and examined.

Our findings indicate that a much higher percentage of respondents understand common sense to have a very similar meaning to the literary definition than those understanding the literary meaning of rationality. Statistical analysis of the findings agree.

Further research should include a random sample and definitions of the term “ethics” and further consider the integration of ethics, common sense and rationality.

One implication of this research is to focus on a common understanding of these terms to those who use them. The model presented is intended to provide practical perception of the integration of ethics, common sense and rationality for application in management and life.

This paper adds to current literature on ethics, common sense, and rationality by extensive literature review of all three and combining that research as not presented previously. We offer a view that integrates common sense, rationality and ethics from distant philosophers and considers the current lack of literature connecting the three as shown in the form of a Figure.

The idea of what constitutes rationality has always been central to moral philosophy as well as to modern social science and economics; regardless of the fact that its meaning has also greatly changed during the last five hundred years. While for Aristotle and his followers, full rationality implied not only effective deliberation of means towards any given end, but also that such end had to be rationally selected with the guidance of reason or “practical wisdom”, since the age of Thomas Hobbes and David Humes, the concept of rationality has been reduced to one of seeking the best means to any particular end, wise or unwise. In the process, reason was relegated to mere “reckoning”, of adding and subtracting according to arithmetic rules. The good was simply what was desired, motivated by a physiological appetite for survival or otherwise. As could have been expected, such mechanical mode of reasoning readily provided the rudiments of contemporary computational theories of action, in particular game theory (see Cudd, 1993).