IS THERE A PLACE FOR THE RATIONAL ACTOR - A GEOGRAPHICAL CRITIQUE OF THE RATIONAL CHOICE PARADIGM

Behavioral models in economic geography, and even in Marxist social science, are increasingly dominated by the postulate of the rational actor. Three parables are intimately associated with the rational choice model: that individual action dictates a social organization of maximum benefit to all individual members of society; that rational choices have rational consequences; and that self-interested individual behavior dominates collective action (the free rider problem). The first parable has been logically negated by Marxian applications of the rational choice model, but the second and third parables are not questioned by Marxist work. If the presumption that the rational actor can be abstracted from his/her geographical context is rejected, however, the second and third parables are also fundamentally challenged. Rational economic choices made in a spatially differentiated but integrated economy can lead to actions that have the unintended consequence of undermining the verv intentions those actions were supposed to realize. Rational actions need not have rational consequences in a space economy. The places in which everyday life is constituted provide all the conditions necessary for denying the general validity of the assumptions that legitimize the free rider argument.