max weber (1864 - 1920)

who was max weber

• giant in the formation of sociological thinking in his own right

major works

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations

What was weber’s germany like?

• highly developed industrial economy

• industry was late but it caught up with England and France

• becoming a heavily industrialized country within record time

• population increased and urbanization took place

• political structure was dominated by the semi-feudal values of prussian conservatism

• no basic changes in politics

The political system was characterized by

a combination of a patriarchal type of authoritarianism with a highly developed formal legalism

How did weber perceived modern western society?

• unique

• interested in describing this uniqueness and explaining its emergence

• argues that bureaucratic coordination of activities is the distinctive mark of modern era

• civil servants were committed to the Kantian notion of duty and imbued with a strong sense of prerogative and authority

Metholdology

• human actors attach subjective meaning to their actions withing specific social historical context

• Weber accepted meanings and values as the basic subject matter of sociology

• did not place science and history in opposite camps, leaving sociology as a purely formal or logical science

• accepted the traditional situation of sociology as a scientific discipline, working with materials from history

• does employ the comparative method along with ideal types to arrive at the causal imputation

• by causality he meant probability

ideal type

• analytical construct that serves the investigator as a measuring rod ( yard stuck) to ascertain similarities as well as deviations in concrete cases

• used to facilitate the comparison to comparable cases and to generalization

• does not refer to moral ideas or statistical averages

• hypothetical, cultural, social, or psychological units or entities (personalities, social situations, changes, revolutions, institutions, etc.) constructed out of their relevant components by the researcher for the purpose of instituting precise comparison

• exaggerated and others are neglected or omitted this distortion is created purposefully to achieve a logically pure form.

• does not represent or embody the actual or existent content of empirical social and cultural reality

• one step away from concrete reality

The ideal type is a device to simplify, homogenize and systematize the causally relevant

items out of experience

The empirical is understood only by relating it to some

relevant ideal type

Verstehen

• refers to essentially empathic understanding

• Understanding of the conduct of others is done of the basis of one’s own motivations

• becomes important in establishing the linkage between an emotional (or non rational )subjectively intended meaning and overt conduct

• especially useful in establishing motive, a complex of subjective meanings

Conduct is adequately explained on the level of

meaning

Weber share emphasis on ___ (intentionality of purposiveness) which relates to motives of acts with Tarde, William James, WI Thomas, Cooley, and Mead

meaningfulness

Social action

• webers stress on the ultimacy of personal meaningfulness in conduct leads him to a social nominalism.

• only individuals and their actions exists.

• acting person = unit of analysis

• focuses on the subjective meanings that human actors attach to their actions in their method orientations within specific social historical context

• we can understand (verstehen) humans actions by penetrating to the subjective meaning giving to actors behavior as well as to the behavior of others

Typology of social action

• webers point for departure for a typological of social action clearly reveals his background in classical economics

• starts with the concept of rationality

social action typology

• purposeful rationality

• value orientated rationality

• traditional action

• affective action

purposeful authorty

a choice of means calculated to achieve an end with greatest efficiency (e.g an engineer building a bridge by the most efficient technique)

value oriented authority

delimits the choice of possible means in accordance with a single absolute end or value which is pursued irrespective of consequences

tration action

requires the selection of means in keeping with the sanctity of the past (tends to elevate means to ends)

affective action

links means and ends in keeping with an expression of the actions emotional or feeling states

science and values

• considers that the natural and social sciences are different in nature

• differences lie in the cognitive intentions of the investigator, differing interests, and aims of the scientist

• natural scientist is primarily interested in those aspects of natural events that can be formulated in terms of abstract laws

• socials scientists are interested in particular qualities of human actors and the meanings they ascribe to their actions

• what particular problem attracts a scholar and what level of explanation is siught, depends on the values and interests of the investigators

• choice of the problem is always “value relevant”

however, sociologists should be __. he/she cannot impose his/her values on the date and he/she is compelled to pursue his/her line of inquiry whether or not the results turn our to be inimical to what he/she holds dear

value free

authority

• struggle for power and the retention of power in a society are not simply a reflection of the economic base

• in order to control people, it is necessary not to only secure authority, but to establish the right to wield such power

• This is to make the power legitimate

Authority refers to legitmate ___. Weber distinguished three main mdoels of claiming legitimacy

power

legal-rational authority

based on rational grounds and anchored in impersonal rules that have been legally enacted or contractually established (authority < office, incumbency) (president)

traditional authority

based on belied in the sanctity of tradition. (inheritance/birthright)

charismatic authority

rests on the appeals of leaders who claim allegiance because of their extraordinary virtuosity

charisma

gift of grace, superhuman characteristics, magnetic personalities

bureaucracy

• weber’s interest in the nature of power, authority, and modern trends of rationalization led him to concern himself with bureaucracy

• emergence of modern western society is basically a process of rationalization

• Bureaucratic types of organizations are superior to all other forms of administration since it is the most effective and efficient way of social organization

division of labor

regular activities of the organization are broken down into a clear cut division of labor. (specialization and professionalization

hierarchy of authority

bureaucracy takes the shapes of a pyramid in which officials are held accountable to their superior for their subordinates decisions and actions as well for their own

rules

rules govern behavior of positional incumbents, a consistent system of abstract rules and regulations which define the responsibilities and relations between positions

impersonality of personal contact

impersonal orientation in dealings with clients and subordinates

careers

employment in bureaucracy constitutes a career choice (?). There is no dismissal for any arbitrary reasons.

social stratification

• considered that every society is divided into groupings and strata with distinctive lifestyles and views of the world

• unlike marx who focused on the people’s relation to the means of production and their consciousness, Weber used their consumption patterns to classify people

• Introduced a structural category “status group”

status groups

• usually communities in which people share the same proper lifestyles and honor and social esteem quality

• refers to and expansive feeling of being special and valuable

• can exist only to the extent that others accord its member prestige or degrading, which removes them from the rest of social actors and establishes the necessary social distance between “them” and “us”

Religion

• weber firmly believed in both historical and sociological causality in terms of probability, which is; in all likelihood men involved in a certian context will orient their behavior in terms of normative expectations

• considered that human action was trult unpredictable only in the case of the insane, that is, sane people orient themselves toward rational behavior/action

The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism

• many people conceive of religion as a conservative force which retards social change

• weber argues that without Protestantism, modern capitalism would not have develops

• considered religion as a vital agent for social change

• believed that the protestant ethic served to liberate individuals from the domination of tradition and created a perception of the world that was a stimulus for innovation, and rationalized economic activity.

• used ideal types as his methodology

Capitalism developed in protestant countries (US, England)

while catholic countries(spains, italy, portugal) lagged behind

in germany (socio, historic, economic conditions are the same for both groups) the protestant regions saw more

industrial development than the catholic regions

the number of entrepreneurs. there are more ___ entrepreuneurs

protestant

among the Protestantism, Calvinists are most conspicuous. It’s three tenets

1. the doctrine of predestination

2. work is virtue

3. calling

What weber meant by the spirit of capitalism is essential features of the way capitalists think about the world — the calculating, _ way of viewing the world (asceticism). Weber showed how religious ideas (the superstructure for marx) can affect economic behavior, Marx’s infrastructure

rational