"Critics of state interventionism maintain that the slimming-down process in the shipbuilding industry could have been improved if the locus of management had been moved from politics to the market".

          Theory building has become more complicated because of the increasing governmental involvement in economic life. At the same time, we notice a growing professional recognition of methodological issues. Mainstream economics focus on utility maximization and the "rational expectation hypotesis". But how "rational" are people actually?

          This study has grown out of an interest to use case-studies to clarify relationships between politics and the economy and to illuminate the "maximization metaphor" in view of work in the field of "bounded rationality" and cognitive science. Different disciplinary lines are crossed in the course of the examinations which focus on the retrenchment of a Swedish shipyard.