Modern portrayals of human action are overwhelmingly in a calculative and consequentialist tradition. Consequentialist reasoning is the basis for most of modern social and behavioral science and preeminently for economics. Action is seen as choice, and choice is seen as driven by anticipations, incentives, and desires. These ideas trace their roots at least to the Greeks, owe substantial parts of their modern manifestation to the formulations of Jeremy Bentham, and derive much of their contemporary power from the geniuses of L. J. Savage and John von Neumann.

The Dark Energy Survey is undertaking an observational programme imaging 1/4 of the southern hemisphere sky with unprecedented photometric accuracy. In the process of observing millions of faint stars and galaxies to constrain the parameters of the dark energy equation of state, the Dark Energy Survey will obtain pre-discovery images of the regions surrounding an estimated 100 gamma-ray bursts over 5 yr. Once gamma-ray bursts are detected by, e.g., the Swift satellite, the DES data will be extremely useful for follow-up observations by the transient astronomy community. We describe a recently-commissioned suite of software that listens continuously for automated notices of gamma-ray burst activity, collates information from archival DES data, and disseminates relevant data products back to the community in near-real-time. Of particular importance are the opportunities that non-public DES data provide for relative photometry of the optical counterparts of gamma-ray bursts, as well as for identifying key characteristics (e.g., photometric redshifts) of potential gamma-ray burst host galaxies. We provide the functional details of the DESAlert software, and its data products, and we show sample results from the application of DESAlert to numerous previously detected gamma-ray bursts, including the possible identification of several heretofore unknown gamma-ray burst hosts.

The organizations research community is a multidisciplinary, multinational and multilingual association of scholars with all the paraphernalia of international exchange. Nevertheless, it is a community that is organized in a geographically fragmented way, with linguistic, national, cultural and regional boundaries separating relatively autonomous scholarly communities. Although this fragmentation limits the integration of organization studies, it serves an adaptive role in making the resistance of deviant ideas to the homogenizing tendencies of dominant scholarly groups easier. The effective use of such differentiation, however, requires linkages among the fragmented parts of the field. We consider some ways of thinking about how research boundaries can be both sustained and violated, with particular attention to the emergence of Chinese scholarship in the study of organizations.

This paper is about criteria for assessing alternative political institutions in a society committed to popular sovereignty. The issues are classic, and we do not attempt a comprehensive review of the ways in which they run through political and economic thought since Aristotle. An aggregative perspective on political institutions, which describes politics in terms of aggregating exogenous, prior preferences of citizens, is contrasted with an integrative perspective, which describes politics more in terms of the development of preferences within a framework of rights and norms. The evaluation of aggregative processes and institutions highlights questions of efficiency, preferences, and endowments. The evaluation of integrative institutions focuses on questions of competence and integrity. Many of the most influential contemporary discussions of political institutions are based on an aggregative framework that is relatively inattentive to issues of political integration. This contemporary emphasis on metaphors of aggregation, however, represents a phase in a history of oscillation between aggregation and integration in politics and political theory, and there are signs that the emphasis may shift in the next few decades to a greater consciousness of integration. Although the cyclic process is not escaped through awareness of it, such awareness may provide a basis for a more thoughtful approach to the search for appropriate institutions within a political system dedicated to popular sovereignty.

The request to interpret the meaning of the historical record of citations for our article on the “New Institutionalism” is in the tradition of asking successful entrepreneurs to explain their successes, and is probably equally misguided. We interpret the charge as an invitation not to describe the real mysteries of fashion in citations but rather to explore why this article might have been cited if citation counts reflected valid judgments of scholarly significance. The context for the article is a long history of intellectual struggle between partisans of two logics for taking, describing, or assessing human action. The first logic is one of consequences. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by anticipation of its consequences and evaluation of those consequences by some kind of utility function that reflects the desires of the actor. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of the pursuit of interests and rational choice. They emphasize incentives and the complications of understanding rationality in an ecology of rational actors.

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.