Made-up Reasons For Rationalization Of Myth
From the Thorneloe University (2013) lecture notes on Theories of myth, A myth by definition is seen as a story and in most cases, it should be oral, this means that a myth can be easily changed as no one orally presenting a story is going to tell the same exact story each time. Many writers would have rationalized their work when recording a myth. Rationalization is when something is made to be more logical or reasonable, but by doing so a made-up reason must be added. This means that many of the authors of myth, that recorded these stories down for others to read, would have to rationalize the myth in some way. Most of these authors would have to so called “clean-up” the stories so it made more logical sense to the readers. This means that a myth would be altered in an ever so slightly way that it made some kind of connection between all of the different stories.
There are many different versions of myth, making it helpful for an individual to analyze all of the versions in order to get a better understanding. This goes to show that as myth or stories are passed on from generation to generation they will have many different readers or story tellers. This cause the myth to grow and develop and thus have different meanings.
While being passed down the myth or story can develop into three different versions: The Literary version, the Rationalized version and the Working version. The Literary version of myth is when the story is reworked by an individual to express the opinion and values of the literary writer. The Rationalized version of a myth is when scholars study myth and draw inferences about the beliefs of the people and society the myth originated from. They rationalized what they believe the story is trying to explain. Lastly, the working version of myth involves the story becoming associated with a ritual or ceremony in society. This means that the myth is still being told and retold by society today in a ritual or ceremony. Institutional Theory according to Greenwood et al (2008) is based on an alternative set of assumptions that center on the concept of social construction – that is, the external and internal world of organizations which is subjectively understood or perceived by people in those organizations.
Managers beyond being influenced by social norms and expectations perceive the world in a particular way and then behave accordingly. In consequence, they help create a world in line with their perceptions.
Because similar organizations experience similar social expectations and pressures of conformity, they tend to adopt similar strategies and managerial arrangements. This is the process of “isomorphism”. By conforming to social prescriptions, organizations secure approval, support and public endorsement, thus increasing their “legitimacy”.
Brock (2009) cited Justin Fox, in a masterfully documented and engaging history of the rise and the fall of the efficient market hypothesis (Henceforth EMH). The history spans from the early 20th Century insights of mathematician Louis Bachelier and economist Irving Fisher to the recent sparring among economists – notably Eugene Fama and Dick Thaler. He further explains the evolution of EMH from the early attempts to clarify the apparently random movements in the stock market, to Fama’s EMH formulation in the 1960s which states that “the price of a financial asset reflects all publicly‐available information that is relevant to its value” to Michael Jensen’s bold 1978 declaration that ‘there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis’. From its earliest characterization, the powerful and mathematically eloquent theory of EMH has developed into a broader set of conclusions. Fox went on to describes how EMH progressed from the observation that ‘stock price movements were random’, to the claim that it was impossible to predict stock prices and, finally, to the conviction that ‘stock prices were in some fundamental sense right’. The author also keeps an eye on the skeptics, from Herbert Simon in the 1950s and psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1960s, to present‐day behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler.
As Robert Merton, LCTM (Long Term Capital Management) partner and 1997 Nobel Prize winning economist, so aptly acknowledged: ‘The mathematics of financial models can be applied precisely, but the models are not at all precise in their application to the complicated real world’. While EMH may have spawned overconfidence in markets and paved the way for deregulation and laissez‐ faire policy, the recession of 2007–09 will probably inspire a pendulum swing in the other direction.
