SFB 1150:  Cultures of Decision-Making

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252080619

The Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Decision-Making” examines the social practice of decision-making in a historical-comparative and interdisciplinary perspective from the Middle Ages to the present. Its aim is to address decision-making as a form of social action which is neither self-evident nor invariant, but which is based on changing social and cultural conditions. We presuppose that decision-making is a fundamental problem that results from the need to cope with social complexity. Furthermore, it is also a phenomenon which expresses itself in culturally-specific ways and which (at any given time) plays a different role in structuring the social order. Therefore, our central aim is to reconstruct different historical “cultures of decision-making” and to make visible their significance for particular social orders. Our long-term research goal is twofold: First, on the basis of an analytical research program, we will examine selected fields, asking: how decision-making was framed, modeled, performed and reflected on in different historical contexts; what the culture-specific conditions underlying decision-making were in each case; and in what ways it in turn shaped the institutional and power structure of society. We also examine how and why cultures of decision-making changed over the long term. Second, we want to provide an impetus for rendering decision-making a central problem of the historical cultural sciences as well as a contrast to current ahistorical discourses of decision-making. Furthermore, given the widespread trivial-rationalist understanding of decision-making in politics and everyday life, the Collaborative Research Centre can make an important contribution to current social self-reflection on decision-making.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• International Connection: United Kingdom

Completed projects

• A04 - Hercules at the Crossroads? Scenarios of Decision-Making in the Autobiographical Construction of Life Courses (Project Head Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina )
• A06 - Social Practices and Media Narratives of Matrimonial Decision-Making in India (Project Head Basu, Helene )
• A11 - Grammars of Decision-Making: The Philosophic-Action-Theoretical Perspective (Project Head Quante, Michael )
• A12 - Poetics of Decision-Making in German Narrative Literature of the Middle Ages (Project Head Quast, Bruno )
• A17 - Political Decision-Making in the Federal Republic of Germany (Project Head Großbölting, Thomas )
• B01 - Dilatory Action as a Technique of Rule in the High and Late Middle Ages (Project Head Keupp, Jan )
• B02 - Problematic Procedures: Criticism and Reflection of the Decision-Making Practices in the Medieval Inquisition of Heretics (ca. 1230-1330) (Project Head Steckel, Sita )
• B04 - Decisions about Truth and the Pressure to Take a Position: The Communicative Production of Needs for Decision-Making in the Early Reformation (Project Head Pohlig, Matthias )
• B05 - Political Decision-Making on Security in British Parliamentarism, 16th to 19th centuries (Project Heads Ahmann, Rolf ;  Krischer, André Johannes )
• B06 - The Differentiation of Policy Fields: Economic-Political Decision-Making in German Territories and States in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Project Head Pfister, Ulrich )
• B12 - Contingentia and Disputatio: Decision-Making in Scholastic Theory of the Western European Middle Ages (Project Head Kintzinger, Martin )
• B14 - The Framing of Political Decision-Making in the Post-Colonial State-Building Process: Argentina and Mexico in the First Half of the 19th Century (Project Head Hensel, Silke )
• B15 - Between Privacy and the Public Debate: Decisions on Reproduction in Germany and the US in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Project Head Heinemann, Isabel )
• C03 - Decision-Making by Drawing Lots in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (Project Heads Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara ;  Wagner, Wolfgang Eric )
• C04 - Decision-making in Early Modern Court Proceedings: A German-English Comparison, 16th to 19th centuries (Project Heads Krischer, André Johannes ;  Oestmann, Peter )
• C07 - Political Decision-Making in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Project Head Mühle, Eduard )
• C11 - The function of the Supernatural in the Process of Imperial Decision-Making in Byzantium (6th to 12th centuries) (Project Head Grünbart, Michael )
• C12 - Decisions without Alternatives? The Establishment of the Spanish Inquisition during the Reign of the Catholic Monarchs (Project Head Drews, Wolfram )
• C15 - Prussian Civil Servant Bureaucracy and Local Self-Government: Village Decision-Making in the Prussian Province of Westphalia in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Project Head Freitag, Werner )
• C16 - Medieval Rabbinic Responsa as a Practice of Religious Decision-Making (Project Head Grundmann, Regina )
• MGK - Integrated Graduate School "Cultures of Decision-Making" (Project Head Keupp, Jan )
• Z - Central Tasks (Project Heads Pfister, Ulrich ;  Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara )

• Applicant Institution: Universität Münster
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Ulrich Pfister, since 6/2015; Professorin Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, until 5/2015