SOC 168 Test Three (Weber)

• Weber’s Response to the Methodenstreit

  • Induction v Deduction

    • Weber attempts to bridge the gap with a historically based social science

    • If we try to embrace positivism, we’ll miss the ideographic (unique) contexts that are very significant in the development of any society.

    • At the same, we need the more generalist theories to guide the research.

    • We will see Weber’s use of ideal types as a way to concretize this bridge between the two positions.

  • Universality v. Relativity

    • A historically based social science cannot be universally applicable, findings are always relative to a particular culture.

    • E.g., the way that contemporary capitalism develops in Western Europe will be different from the way that capitalism emerges in pre- capitalist societies.

    • Economic development is not following any linear evolutionary stages, there will always be unpredictable events such as wars, ecological changes, charismatic leaders...etc.

  • Rationality v. Non-Rationality

    • Weber agreed that rational economic behavior needs to be conceptually distinguished from other modes of action, since most of the economic action Weber saw was based on rationalistic purposes.

    • But Weber also agreed that people have multiple forms of action available to them in (Western) modernity.

  • Ethics v. Science

    • Weber was empathetic of the historical economists and the political liberals, but he felt that social science should be value- free.

    • It was precisely this ”objectivity” that would allow social science to be a valued source of knowledge that would allow policy makers to make intelligent and ethical decisions

• Intellectual Tradition: Wilhelm Dilthey

  • 1833-1911

  • German historian and psychologist

  • We need to figure out how historical actors make sense of their world in order to understand it, not develop abstract and generalizable laws to predict behavior.

• Intellectual Tradition: Heinrich Rickert

  • 1863-1936

  • German philosopher

  • Concepts are the most useful ways of studying both the natural and social world. The differences between the sciences are HOW CONCEPTS ARE USED.

  • Concepts in the social sciences are best directed toward detailing the particular features that account for the uniqueness of an event or a society’s development.

• Intellectual Tradition: Friedrich Nietzsche

  • 1844-1900

  • German philosopher

  • Rationalization defined: the ongoing process of how interaction and institutions are governed by calculable rules and methodical procedures.

  • In steering the course of societal development, values, emotions, and traditions have been displaced in favor of formal and impersonal bureaucratic practices. 

• Fredrich Nietzsche continued…

  • This process leads to efficiency in goal orientation but also disenchantment of the world.

  • We no longer wonder about the magic and the mystical in the world. “God is dead”

  • The eclipse of religious and philosophical absolutes brought on by the rise of science and instrumental reasoning, created an era of nihilism (meaningless). • What is the purpose of life? Ethics no longer helps us determine what can be done and what ought to be done

• See Slide: Intellectual Tradition: Marx

• Overall: Weber develops a sociology…

  • In which sociologists cannot be positivists

  • In which we need to pay attention to how individuals make meaning of their world in order understand it… that understands that while we can’t create causal laws, we can generalize social patterns into categories of understanding….that endeavors to explain how the world is becoming cold, calculating and impersonal

• Ideal Types

  • Ideal Type or (abstract type); analytical constructs against which real life can be measured. 

    • Both general and specific

    • Will ask on exam; ideal types, what was he calling an ideal type

      • FALSE: Nothing to do with rules; abstract or pure; does not reflect reality, it is only a measuring stick 

    • Nothing to do with morals

    • With ideal types, deviations from ideal types are available

    • Never directly reflects reality

• Verstehen

  • Weber is ultimately looking for an interpretive understanding as his key objective.

  • Contrast this to attempting to search for “causal universal laws” of social life (or starting a revolution).

  • Also contrast to the sui generis theorists (Comte, Spencer, Durkheim) that argued that society is super-organic and should be studied as such.

  • For Weber, the states of mind of the actors are important. If we want to understand social action, we need to understand how the actors are making sense of their worlds.

  • Therefore, the primary unit of analysis is the individual. He or she is engaging in social action if he or she is taking others into account while acting.

  • In practice though, Weber spends most of his theoretical time focusing on the collective

•  Types of Social Action

  • Motivations for action

    • Instrumental rational*

    • Value rational*

    • Traditional

      • Based on tradition

    • Affective

      • Emotional states 

• Instrumental Rational

  • The efficient pursuit of goals through calculating the advantages and the disadvantages associated with the possible means for realizing them.

    • Focusing on the means to an end…

      • Not based on the end result; simply the best way to get to that end result 

      • What kind of instrument are we using to get to our destination

        • The one with the most benefits and least downsides 

      • Business maximizing profit— choosing the most efficient way to maximize profit 

      • Side Effects: 

        • For things to be efficient; a great amount of control is needed 

        • Replace personal values with impersonal values 

    • Preparing for a job interview.

    • Preparing for a test.

    • Politicians weighing options before a vote.

    • Deciding what class to take.

    • Which line of action is the shortest.

• Value-Rational Action

  • Actions based on the values that people have about things. 

  • Strategic means to an end are chosen, BUT the means are the end in themselves. People do things because they are the “right” thing to do or the “moral” thing to do. 

    • Risking arrest for some cause. 

    • Donating our time for some charitable cause.

• Traditional Action

  • Behaviors are chosen on the basis of habit or long-standing custom.

  • Here, the individual is not focused on efficiency or commitment to some ethical principle. Rather, “an unreflective adherence to established routines”

    • Singing along to the national anthem

      • Normative, habitual 

    • Eating turkey at Thanksgiving

    • Saying please or thank you

• Affective Action

  • Behaviors are the result of emotions.

  • This is not a calculated response.

  • Baseball players arguing a call during a game.

  • Crying at a funeral.

  • Clamming up on a first date.

• Bases of Legitimate Domination

  • Legitimacy: The belief systems on which valid commands issuing from authority figures are based.

  • Domination: will your commandments be obeyed by a group of persons?

  • These belief systems supply the justifications and motives for demanding obedience and allow those in authority to rightfully exercise domination over others.

  • Three bases: Legal-Rational; Traditional; Charismatic

• Types of Social Action

  • Motivations for action

    • Instrumental rational

      • Society now is this

      • Efficiency is everything 

      • Across education at large for generations…

      • Less patience, less attention 

    • Value rational

    • Traditional

    • Affective

• Bases of Legitimate Domination

  • Legitimacy: The belief systems on which valid commands issuing from authority figures are based.

    • Validity that we are going to give and allow others to consent to be dominated 

  • Domination: will your commandments be obeyed by a group of persons?

  • These belief systems supply the justifications and motives for demanding obedience and allow those in authority to rightfully exercise domination over others.

  • Three bases: Legal-Rational; Traditional; Charismatic

  • Distinguish between authority/legitimacy and domination!*

• Legal-Rational Authority

  • In modernity, we find legitimacy in laws and those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands.

  • We don’t owe authority to the person, but the office. Once retired a judge or police officer is just a citizen.

    • Professor is given authority in the classroom simply by showing up for class

      • After class is over; no authority is given outside of this context

      • Given on the basis of rules and regulations 

• Traditional Authority

  • Traditional authority is based on the traditions of yesterday. “What was, is”

  • Kings, tribal chieftains, based on lines of heredity or rites of passage.

  • Based on a person, not rules. But also founded on what has always been.

    • Tradition is embodied by a person; we approve of them, give authority to them based on tradition

• Charismatic Authority

  • Charismatic is based on personal qualities. “The miracles of heroes and prophets”

    • EX: Donald Trump

      • Presidential candidates are often given this position as a result of charismatic authority 

  • There are no limits on a charismatic leaders’ power and demand for obedience. They can be immensely powerful and therefore capable of significant positive change and also disruption and conflict.

• Class, Party & Status

  • In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber picks apart Marx’s historical materialism and argues that ideal forces (religion) were not simple superstructure but rather a potent independent variable in the shift to a new material system. 

  • In Class, Status and Power, Weber picks another bone with Marx.

  • What are the bases of societal stratification?

Lecture Fifteen (2/25/25) 

• Power: “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others.”

• For Marx, there is one dimension 

  • Division of labor, classes, who owns the mode of production

• For Weber, there are three: 

  • Class

    • People who share in “life chances” or possibilities that are determined by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income.

    • Might own things, might not,

    • Might have money in the stock market, might not.

    • Several possible “classes”

    • What are the configurations of your economic life like, and what do they do for you?

    • Weber says at times, making more money is very important for life chances 

    • See Classes Slide*

  • Status 

    • A specific positive or negative social estimation of honor.

      • Examples: Race, ethnicity, religion, taste in aesthetics, consumption, and occupation.

    • These have a huge impact on our social interaction.

      • Are you looked upon by others as being of a higher or lesser social status? Does this assist or limit you in interaction?

  • Party 

    • Power aimed at influencing a communal action on matter what the content may be.

    • Political power.

    • Has strategic goals, usually with staff to help, achieve objectives

      • Examples: political parties; political action committees; lobbyists; labor unions, the media, journalists 

      • People who run universities, heads of corporations they own, class power, political power…

      • Do you have group-level access to power?

        • Not really…

          • Especially as students 

    • Power within institutions to shape those institutions 

      • Power in groups

      • Labor unions 

  • Life chances are what matter! How can we achieve the goals we set for ourselves and live the life we want to live… 

    • Limited or advantaged by what you own… but also impacted by other things!

      • Type of job

      • Income

      • Benefits 

      • Education 

      • Skilled at labor/unskilled at labor 

      • Specialized trade 

      • Esteem/prestige 

        • Given based on titles 

• Bureaucracy

  • The dominant organizational form worldwide. The epitome of rationalization.

  • How else could we efficiently deal with massive numbers of people?

    • Takes away human element, we become robots 

    • Paternalistic 

  • Without bureaucratic structures, how would we…

    • Build our cities

    • Enforce our laws

    • Educate millions of children

    • Care for the millions of the sick and elderly

  • Why Bureaucracies? 

    • Weber tells us they are a technically superior form of organization.

    • Hierarchically structured making for clear chain of command 

      • Ideal type!

      • Comparative theorist; which place is doing which type of bureaucracy 

    • Competitive selection process based on merit

    • Specialized DOL leads to more efficient completion of tasks

    • Governed by formal, impersonal rules that regulate all facets of the organization

    • There is predictability in action and therefore strategic planning is possible.

  •  Good or Bad

    • Effective, but…

    • For those working in bureaucracies, the individual is “chained to his activity in his entire economic and ideological existence” (225)

    • The bureaucracy demands dispassion and dehumanization

      • Repress our individuality, creativity, and uniqueness

    • And as an outsider, we interact with these organizations all the time.

    • We are embedded in a world of faceless impersonal inhuman social structures. 

      • School, the HUB, etc.

      • Experience other humans in a faceless way; can result in alienation - Marx would say

        • We are interacting with pegs trying to fit into a hole

        • They see us as numbers, we seem them as mindless workers 

  • Weber – The Rationalization Thesis

    • Weber believed the bureaucracy would extend into all areas of human life, and that this process was inevitable. 

    • Once established, bureaucracies are among the hardest social structures to destroy.

    • The bureaucrat cannot “squirm out” of his responsibilities. In most cases, he is a small cog in a big machine. The machine can only be put into a different motion or stopped by the very top.

    • The “ruled” (the rest of us) cannot replace the machine with anything other than chaos.

    •  “...the material fate of the masses depends upon the continuous and correct functioning of the ever more bureaucratic organizations of private capitalism, and the idea of eliminating them becomes more and more utopian.”

      • Referencing Marx, calling his theory “utopian” 

    •  Because of its impersonal character, even if you got rid of all of the people, new people could just come in and do the work. The system lives beyond the people. 

    • THE IRON CAGE

      • Bureaucracies are an iron cage

        • We are trapped in it 

        • In the end…

          • “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now”

          • This system will outlive us, regardless of what group you are in 

• Rationalization

  • Formal Rationality

    • Efficiency

    • Calculability

      • Quantifying production, assigning a number, a grade 

    • Control over process, product, and consumption

      • Classes across colleges look the same, are streamlined the same way 

      • Restaurants are the same

        • Wendy’s, McDonalds, Chipotle 

        • Processes are identical 

        • Consumer experience is the same 

    • Predictability

  • Ritzer - Mcdonaldization (Neo-Weberian)*

  • What is rationalized?

    • Economy

      • We have moved from the “irrational” and traditional forms of the family, the clan, and feudalism to the efficient and calculable capitalism

    • Religion

      • We moved from disorganized polytheism (animism) to, integrated polytheism (Greek and Roman pantheon of Gods) to monotheism with specialization of practice 

    • Law

      • Informal and emotional, to dispassionate and formal in procedure as well as content

      • Procedural law, substantive law 

    • Polity

      • Governmental system 

      • Irrational and violent monopolization of legitimate violence. Legislation, police, military and administration all centralized control with hierarchy clear rules of conduct

    • The City

      • The development of a city with rational marketplace economy, political system

    • Art

      • Music is now a calculable affair with “effective instruments and understandable rules.” 

      • It has become less flexible and ambiguous towards more mathematical and predictable

      • Architecture and visual arts follow the same pattern 

• What about charismatic authority?

  • Sure, for a while

  •  Because charismatic authority is based on a person, it is inherently unstable.

    • Rapid change is not sustainable

    • Based on humans, who die 

    • Charisma is not easily passable 

  • Authority dies with a charismatic leader, UNLESS new rules are designed to elect a successor.

  • But this is the “routinization of charisma” – the transformation of legitimacy into rational-legal or traditional legitimacy.

Lecture Sixteen (2/27/25) 

• Review: Weber

  • Not positivist, but empiricist

  • Ideal Types (action, general, structural)

  • Rationality (efficiency, predictability, calculability, control)

    • McDonaldization