“To Disdain the Truth and Look at Others with Contempt:” Byzantines and Muslims on Latin Pride and Arrogance,ca. 1100–1300

This essay examines the fundamentals of the Byzantine and Muslim political discourses during the period of the Crusades by analyzing a common political trope, the concept of Western pride and arrogance. The principal argument is that the seemingly stable categories of Eastern political propaganda obscure a massive discursive shift. At the beginning of their encounter with the Latin Christians both Byzantines’ and Levantine Muslims’ discourses on power and their place on the international stage were hegemonical, exclusive and self-referential. Towards the end of the Crusading period and under the steady pressures of Western practices, both societies’ political discourses came to accept as legitimate principles of international politics—such as power as a claim rather than a right, relations based on contract, territoriality and legitimacy of secular rule—that have long been the staple of Western conceptualization of politics, but were initially seen as utterly alien by Byzantines and Levantine Muslims.     

Optimization and Its Alternative in Media Choice: A Model of Reliance on Social-Influence Processes

In the reconciliation of rational-choice and social-influence approaches to media choice offered here, the choice process is decomposed into two subprocesses. In the first subprocess—that of rational choice—decisional ambiguity frustrates complete optimization. Optimization is partial, yielding a set of effectively interchangeable media alternatives over which the user is indecisive. In the second subprocess—that of social influence—imitation, deference, and other cues act on the set of interchangeables, yielding a single ultimate choice. If in the social-influence subprocess there are benefits to coordinating with others, group choice crystallizes around a single media alternative. If these benefits are absent, individual choice remains idiosyncratic, with each decision maker making random choices within the set of interchangeables. In organizational life, media choice transpires sequentially, with each choice conditioning a succeeding one. In its dynamic form, the present model explicitly incorporates such sequential environments: The twofold choice process transpires iteratively within individual decision sites (in the multiple purchasing decisions of a committee, for example) and sequentially across decision sites (from committee to individual, for example). The model generates considerable empirical implications. As decisional ambiguity grows, the rational-choice component of the choice process shrinks, implying upper-bound conditions for the explanatory power of rational-choice statistical models.