Thanks for the invitation.

Thanks for the flattering introduction.

Just to say something about formalities, I've opened the chat and I also see the list of

participants.

So, if you have a question that is related to a detail that I'm telling you about, just

jump in and write your question in the chat or raise your hand.

I tried to give a quick answer.

Of course, I'll be there later on for the Q&A part of this meeting.

So what is my talk about?

Probably about half of the time I use for developing a conceptual framework to analyze

decision-making as a social practice.

As Professor Miller has said, one of the ideas to develop a decided culturalist approach

to studying decision-making.

And in the second half, there are two briefer parts of my talk.

First, I invite you to take a look at a strange world.

I try to briefly characterize cultures of decision-making in pre-modern societies and

very briefly towards the end, I will provide an overview of two important forces that drive

long-term change in cultures of decision-making from patterns that we observe in pre-modern

societies to how decision-making takes place in modern societies.

Let me start with the first part, devoted to the development of a conceptual framework

to a culturalist approach to studying the study of decision-making.

This part is quite a lot of slides, probably about 15, 17 slides.

The structure of the next couple of minutes, I start with the definition, what is decision-making?

I think that's not a trivial question.

And I will discuss how it differs from how decision-making differs from other forms of

social action.

And then I go on by discussing important cultural foundations of decision-making.

In particular, I briefly discuss topics like framing, institutions, and performance, particularly

the performing of choice.

And based on this, I will continue with a discussion of the means that actors use for

doing decision-making.

And here three terms are important, or concepts, or topics are important, narratives, practices,

and resources mobilized for doing decision-making.

I conclude this with a slide with general conclusions on cultures of decision-making.

So we start with a definition of decision-making on one slide of three elements.

Two of them are core.

First, I would stress that decision-making consists of an explicit development of alternative

options in a particular situation of action.

So there's an explicit presence that either we can choose option A or option B, and there

is a procedure for or in form to evaluate these alternative options.

So deliberation of explicit alternatives is key to the concept.

A second important element is that I would follow a constructivist tradition that stresses

that the idea of decision-making should be focused on the diplomatic situation.

The idea here is or the argument goes follows that a problem that can be solved by applying

pre-existing rules or algorithms does not form the object of decision-making because

in these cases, no deliberation is required to arrive at a choice.

And so in this view, decision-making usually refers to a non-resolved dilemma so that choices

that result from decision-making, they always remain an element of arbitrariness or a term

that I will use several times now is they retain an element of contingency.

So here in a bracket, I provide a short definition of what contingency or contingent character