SOC 100 Exam #2: Weber

Protestant Ethic: Culture/Ideas can drive economics

• Calvinist Protestants worked as a duty to God (hoping to prove that they were God’s chosen)

  • Called “worldly asceticism” - doing things on earth but with a focus on heaven 

• They made a lot of money, but didn’t believe they should spend it on pleasurable things, so their wealth went back into business. They became the owners (bourgeoisie) 

Weber believed…

• Religion created capitalism 

• That is, something from the world of ideas & culture created the economic system 

Types of Conflict

Class, Status, Party

Class

Those with the same possession of goods or opportunity to make money

• where you are in the economic structure - would divide bourgeoisie into captains of industry, those who make money from renting property, and those who talk about patents 

Weber believes class can be complicated by status - class & status might go together or not 

• Four classes

  • Capitalists 

  • Property owners

  • Those who hold patents/copyrights, etc.

  • Laborers 

• A class will only take action under certain cultural conditions and if the class members recognize their economic situation and its consequences 

  • In contrast to Marx - there is no guarantee that the proletariat will gain “class consciousness” and rise up in revolt

• All other exchange issues being equal, economics will drive social realities 

Status

a “status group” is a group whose members share a characteristic or lifestyle that is honored or honored in society

• Honor in society 

• Status may or may not be linked to class

• If economic circumstances are stable, status will drive social realities

Party

a self-selected group that seeks to influence a particular social issue or action

• The party will have a specific program aimed at causing a particular action

• The party’s issue may or may not be related to a specific class or status group 

• Example: political groups — left & right party

Science (a sociological approach)

Weber: We can't examine society as if people were chemicals. We need the “subjectivity” of understanding how the people we are studying experience their situation. “Verstehen”

• Verstehen: we need to have an understanding of how things are experienced by the people.

Domination

Some forms of power/domination are legitimate authority 

There are three:

1. Traditional

2. Legal

3. Charismatic

Historical Progress

Weber: capitalism causes us to focus on trying to attain the highest level of efficiency in everything → “Rationality” or “Rationalization”

• Ideas, economy, & culture move us forward

Rationality & Disenchantment

Rationality: Robs our world of the beautiful, the imaginative, the supernatural… anything that doesn’t contribute to absolute efficiency 

• Call this “disenchantment”

• In economics - gives us the spirit of capitalism - the drive to be efficient in making money

• In organizations - produces bureaucracy - everything well defined, orderly, efficient and lifeless!

Steel-hard shell

• Protestants wanted us to treat our material goods like a light jacket: something we could easily take off at any time.

• Instead, our material possessions have become like steel shell we wear or an iron cage around us, weighing us down; trapping us