Max Weber 18641920

1
Max Weber(1864-1920)
2
Max Weber- The Man

• Born April 21, 1864 in Erfurt, Germany- the
  oldest of 7 Children
• Caught between two very different parental
  influences.
• Father was involved in the political
  establishment and lived a self-satisfied,
  pleasure-loving and shallow life.
• His mother was a staunch Calvinist and came from
  a family of educators.
• As a child, Weber was sickly and withdrawn
• In school, he was known for his lack of
  discipline, however, he was an avid reader. His
  personal letters reveal that even before college,
  he was well versed in philosophy.
• His home life was difficult. His father was a
  strict disciplinarian.
• Attended University of Heidelberg in 1881. Here
  he joined the dueling fraternity, drank an awful
  lot, and proudly displayed his new dueling scars.
  He also studied philosophy, history and law.
• Fell in love with his cousin, Emmy, but had to
  break off his six year engagement to her, as she
  had been confined to a sanitarium for most of it.
• 1884 began study for a PHD at the University of
  Berlin. During this time, he began to resent his
  father, and his bullying treatment of his mother.
• He graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1891.
• 1892 began teaching at the University of Berlin.
  Here he was known for rigid and ascetic
  discipline.

3

• 1893 Married Marianne Schnitger. Yet the
  marriage was never consummated. He had a brief
  extra-marital affair in his mid-40s just before
  WWI.
• 1896 took a position as professor economics at
  Heidelberg. His home became a gathering spot for
  the young intellectuals in the area.
• Weber was also politically active, publishing
  commentary on issues of the day.
• 1887 Webers father dies. Only a month before
  his fathers death, they had a serious
  disagreement over the treatment of Webers
  mother. He ordered his father out of his house,
  and did not see him again.
• After this, Weber suffers a Nervous break down.
  It lasts for 5 years.
• 1903- he finally seems to recover and he is named
  editor of the leading German Social Science
  Journal.
• 1904 visits the United States, begins to return
  to normal academic life.
• 1905- Publishes the Protestant Ethic and the
  Spirit of Capitalism.
• Continued to work
• 1910- one of the founders of the German
  Sociological Society with Simmel and Toennies

4

• During WWI he enlisted and was commissioned as a
  reserve officer to establish and run nine
  military hospitals. He also campaigned against
  the war, and was a proponent of peace.
• 1917-1920 He was a productive and active figure
• Died 1920 while working on Economy and Society.
  His last words were The Truth is the Truth.
• Throughout his life he had a strong sense of
  justice and he actively campaigned for the merit
  of marginalized scholar to be recognized (Simmel,
  Sombart, Michels). He defended ethnic minority
  students (Jews, Poles, Russians) who were often
  shunned by professors. He defended pacifists
  during WWI. He never adopted a cause or
  abandoned one because it was politically
  expedient, he was his own man, and was guided
  by a personal sense of justice.

5
Webers Methodology

• Weber tends to de-emphasize methodological
  issues.
• Clearly Weber has no concern with methodology in
  the sense of rulebooks for correct practice...
  His methodological essays are more in the nature
  of philosophical reflections upon the nature and
  significance of claims to historical and social
  knowledge. Lassman and Velody, 1949.

6
Weber on Methodology

• Only by laying bare and solving substantive
  problems can sciences be established and their
  methods developed. On the other hand, purely
  epistemological and methodological reflections
  have never played the crucial role in such
  developments. (1903)

7
Weber on the Role of Sociology

• Sociology would provide a needed service to
  history- a preliminary and modest task.
  Sociology seeks to formulate type concepts and
  generalized uniformities of empirical processes.
  This distinguishes it from history, which is
  oriented to the causal analysis and explanation
  of individual actions, structures and
  personalities possessing cultural significance.
• What he said, and what he did.

8
Webers Project

• His project was oriented to the development of
  clear concepts so that he could perform a causal
  analysis of historical phenomena.
• He defined his ideal procedure as the sure
  imputation of individual concrete events
  occurring in historical reality to concrete,
  historically given causes through the study of
  precise empirical data which have been selected
  from specific points of view.
• Sociology would be a comprehensive science of
  social action.

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Intellectual Influences- Marx and Nietzsche

• Marx- was deeply influenced by his concept that
  ideas were expressions of public interests and
  served as weapons in the struggle of classes and
  parties. However, unlike Marx (economic
  determinist), Weber gave more power to the
  influence of ideas.
• Nietzschean- Applied his notion of Ressentiment
  (an expression of the repressed envy and hatred
  of socially disadvantaged groups).
• However, he did not reduce ideas to reflections
  of psychic or social interests.

10
Webers Influences

• Webers thinking was shaped by a series of
  intellectual debates (Methodenstreit) raging in
  Germany during his time.
• Positivist versus Subjectivists
• Posititivists thought history was composed of
  general nomothetic laws. Positivists thought
  that history/sociology should be exactly like
  other natural sciences
• Subjectivists reduced history to idiosyncratic,
  ideographic actions and events. whereas
  subjectivists saw the two as radically different.

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Webers View

• Weber rejected both poles.
• History is composed of unique empirical events.
• There can be no generalizations at the empirical
  level.
• Sociologists must, therefore, separate the
  empirical world from the conceptual universe that
  they construct.
• Concepts are heuristic devices.

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Does Weber Believe in Ahistoric Laws?

• For the knowledge of historical phenomena in
  their concreteness, the most general laws,
  because they are devoid of content, are also the
  least valuable. The reduction of empirical
  reality... to laws is meaningless. A
  systematic science of culture... would be
  senseless in itself.

13
For Weber- Is History Progressive Or Cyclical

• History is neither a closed cycle or a linear
  progress
• History was appropriately concerned with both
  individuality and generality. He utilized
  ideal types, or concepts in the study of
  particular individuals, events or societies.
  These general concepts are to be used to
  identify and define the individuality of each
  development, the characteristics which make the
  one conclude in a manner so different from that
  of the other. Thus done, one can then determine
  the causes which led to the difference (1896)

14
Webers View of Social Change

• Though material conditions must be present for
  changes to occur, without the requisite
  ideological changes, other changes will not occur.

15
Understanding Ideology

• Ideology is a complex belief system that
  explains social and political arrangements and
  relationships and underlies all social and
  political discourse and actions.
• Dominant ideologies legitimize and rationalize
  behavior and social relationships.

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An Empirical Example

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• There is an elective affinity between the
  Protestant work ethic and Industrial Capitalism.
• Though similar conditions existed in many
  predominantly Catholic areas, industrial
  capitalism did not arise at that time.

17
Webers View of the Ideological Underpinnings of
Change

• 1) Economic activity was not sanctioned by
  religious values, for the Calvinist it was.
  Catholicism encouraged an otherwordly
  asceticism in which the highest form of human
  activity was devotion to God.
• 2) There was no prohibition on consumption, as
  there was in Calvinism. (Note the shift in
  religious values under consumer capitalism today)
• 3) Calvinism suggested that each man is a free
  moral agent, accountable only to God.
  Catholicism, made men accountable to the Church,
  which sought to regulate the operation of the
  economy. Religious authorities set wages,
  prices, regulated competition, outlawed money
  lending, all of which retard Capitalist
  development.

18
Verstehen- Empathetic Understanding

• Methodological Concept
• Social scientists have an advantage over natural
  scientists. Natural scientists could not gain a
  similar understanding of the behavior of an atom
  or a chemical compound.
• His views on verstehen are derived from
  hermeneutics
• Hermeneutics is a special approach to
  understanding and interpretation of published
  writings. The goal was to understand the
  thinking of the author as well as the basic
  structure of the text.
• Weber applied these ideas to actors, interaction
  and human history.
• Verstehen requires rigorous research.

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Weber on Causality

• Weber saw the causes of social phenomena as being
  within the domain of history, not sociology.
  Yet, he still combined elements of it in his
  work.
• To Weber, causality means the probability that an
  event will be followed or accompanied by another
  event.
• What are the reasons for as well as the meanings
  of, historical change.
• - Weber has a multi-causal approach. He is
  attuned to the interrelationships among the
  economy, society, polity, organization, social
  stratification, religion, etc.

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Understanding Webers View of Causality

• Through verstehen, the causal knowledge of the
  social sciences is different from the causal
  knowledge of the natural sciences.
• Adequate causality- This is the view that the
  best we can do in sociology is to make
  probabilistic statements about the relationships
  between social phenomena.

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Ideal Types

• A concept constructed by a social scientist, on
  the basis of his or her interests and theoretical
  orientation, to capture the essential features of
  some social phenomenon.
• It is a heuristic device, helpful and useful in
  doing empirical research and in understanding
  specific aspects of the social world.
• An ideal type is formed by the one-sided
  accentuation of one or more points of view and by
  the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete,
  more or less present and occasionally absent
  concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged
  according to those onesidedly emphasized
  viewpoints into an unified analytical
  construct... In its conceptual purity, this
  mental construct... Cannot be found empirically
  anywhere in reality. 1903

22
Should Sociology be Value Free

• Webers thinking on values is complicated.
• Values and Teaching
• Values and Research

23
Weber and the Role of Social Science

• It can never be the task of an empirical
  science to provide binding norms and ideals from
  which directions for immediate practical activity
  can be derived.

24
Weber and What is Sociology

• His sociology is a reaction to the large-scale
  evolutionary sociology that predominated at the
  time.
• I became one (a sociologist) in order to put an
  end to collectivist notions. In other words,
  sociology, too, can only be practiced by
  proceeding from the action of one or more, few or
  many, individuals, that means by employing a
  strictly individualist method.

25
Sociology Defined

• Sociology... is a science concerning itself
  with the interpretive understanding of social
  action and thereby with a causal explanation of
  its course and consequences.
• Weber believes sociology is a science, just not
  one exactly like a natural scientist.

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Weber on Social Action

• There is a difference between action and reactive
  behavior. He is concerned with action that
  clearly involved the intervention of thought
  processes. Rather than behavior, that is more
  stimulus-response oriented.
• Four Basic Types of Action

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Four Basic Types of Action

• 1) Means-Ends Rationality
• 2) Value Rationality
• 3) Affectual Action
• 4) Traditional Action

28
Means-End Rational Action (zweck-rational)

• Both the goal and means are rationally chosen.
  Ie. An engineer who builds a bridge by the most
  efficient technique of relating means to ends.

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Value Oriented Rational Action (wertrational)

• Striving for a substantive goal, which may in
  itself not be rational (Ie. Attainment of
  salvation), but is pursued through rational means
  (ie. Ascetic self-denial in the pursuit of
  holiness).

30
Affectual Action

• Is anchored in the emotional state of the actor,
  rather than in the rational weighing of means
  and ends (fundamentalist sects and the
  participants experience of the religious service)

31
Traditional Action

• Is guided by customary habits of thought, by
  reliance on the eternal yesterday. (Orthodox
  behavior ie. Dress, comportment guided by
  tradition).

32
Action in the Modern World

• Behavior is increasingly guided by goal oriented
  rationality, whereas, in the past is as often
  motivated by tradition, affect, or goal oriented
  rationality.

33
Webers View of Stratification

• Class
• Status
• Party
• More nuanced viewed. One could be high on one
  axes, or low on another.

34
Class

• A class is a group of people whose shared
  situation is a possible, and sometimes frequent
  basis for action by the group. 1) A number of
  people have in common a specific causal component
  of their life changes, insofar as 2) this
  component is represented exclusively by economic
  interests in the possession of goods and
  opportunities for income, and 3) is represented
  under the conditions of the commodity or labor
  markets. This is class situation.

35
Status

• Every typical component of the life of men that
  is determined by a specific, positive or
  negative, social estimation of honor.
• Money and an entrepreneurial position are not in
  themselves status qualifications, although they
  may lead to them and the lack of property is not
  itself a status disqualification, although this
  may be a reason for it. 1921

36
Party

• Are always structures struggling for domination
  
• Parties often represent a class or status group.

37
The Bureaucratization of Modern Society

• Bureaucracy- rule by office.
• There is a general increase in the domination of
  complex organizations.
• There is a general increase in the domination of
  complex secondary organizations or
  Bureaucratization.
• Bureaucratic coordination of activities, he
  argued, is the distinctive mark of the modern
  era.
• Bureaucracies are organized around rationality,
  and action is of the purposeful type.

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Ideal Type of Bureaucracy

• 1. There is continuous organization of official
  functions bound by rules.
• 2. Each office has a specified sphere of
  competence.
• 3. There is a clear cut hierarchy of authority-
  like a pyramid
• 4. Offices may carry with them technical
  qualifications that require that the participants
  obtain suitable training.
• 5. Officials are full time and salaried.
• 6. There is a separation between the tasks of an
  official within the organization and his life
  outside.
• 7. No members of the organization own the
  material resources with which they operate.
• 8. Administrative acts, decisions, and rules are
  formulated and recorded in writing.

39
Three Features Set Bureaucracies Apart

• -1) Membership Status
• -2) Internal Structuring
• -3) Capacity to Have Persona

40
Forms of Cultural Authority

• Traditional
• Charismatic
• Legal-Rational

41
Traditional Authority

• Ancient original method of defining correct
  beliefs and practices. tied to kinship,
  patrimonial rule. Leadership is based on
  sanctity of age old rules and powers.
• Personal loyalty, not the officials impersonal
  duty, determines the relations of administrative
  staff to the master. Weber 1921
• -Types of Traditional Authority
• -1. Gerontocracy- Rule by elders
• -2. Primary patriarchalism involves leaders who
  inherit their positions.

42
Charismatic Authority

• Is based on extraordinary personal
  characteristics. It gives some individuals the
  authority to control, represent and define the
  interests of the group or organization because of
  their unique personalities. It may or may not be
  that the leader is charismatic, but rather the
  group of disciples need describe the person as
  such.
• -Charisma and Revolution
• -Routinization of charisma

43
Legal Rational Authority

• Subject to authority of formal laws. Bureaucracy
  as the purest type of exercise of legal
  authority.
• Webers Ideal Typical Bureaucracy- From a purely
  technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable
  of attaining the highest degree of efficiency,
  and is in this sense formally the most rational
  known means of exercising authority over human
  beings. It is superior to any other form in
  precision, in stability, in the stringency of its
  discipline, and in its reliability. It thus
  makes possible a particularly high degree of
  calculability of results for the heads of
  organization and for those acting in relation to
  it. It is finally superior both in intensive
  efficiency and in the scope of its operations and
  is formally capable of application to all kinds
  of administrative tasks. 1921

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The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy

• No machinery in the world functions so precisely
  as this apparatus of men, and moreover, so
  cheaply... Rational calculation... Reduces
  every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic
  machine and, seeing himself in this light, he
  will merely ask how to transform himself into a
  somewhat bigger cog... The passion for
  bureaucratization drives it to despair.
• He describes bureaucracies as escape proof.
  Practically unshatterable and the future
  belongs to bureaucratization.

45
Rationality- Four Types

• 1) Practical Rationality- Every way of life that
  views and judges worldly activity in relation to
  the individuals purely pragmatic and egoistic
  interests.
• 2) Theoretical Rationality- involves a cognitive
  effort to master reality through increasingly
  abstract concepts rather than through action.
• 3) Substantive rationality- directly orders
  action into patterns through clusters of values.
  One value system is no more rational than
  another.
• 4) Formal Rationality- involves means -ends
  calculations. In formal rationality it occurs in
  reference to universally applied rules, laws, and
  regulations.

46
Bureaucratic Rationalization

• Bureaucratic rationalization...
  Revolutionalizes with technical means, in
  principle, as does every economic reorganization,
  from without It first changes the material and
  social orders, and through them the people, by
  changing the conditions of adaptation, and
  perhaps the opportunities for adaptation, through
  a rational determination of means and ends.
  (1921)

47
Rationalization Processes

• This whole process of rationalization in the
  factory as elsewhere, and especially in the
  bureaucratic state machine, parallels the
  centralization of the material implements of
  organization in the hands of the master. Thus,
  discipline inexorably takes over ever larger
  areas as the satisfaction of political and
  economic needs is increasingly rationalized.
  This universal phenomenon more and more restricts
  the importance of charisma and of individually
  differentiated conduct.

48
Formal and Substantive Rationality

• 1) Calculability- things should be quantifiable.
• 2) Efficiency- on finding the best means to a
  given end.
• 3) Predictability- things operate the same way
  from time to time and place to place.
• 4) A formally rational system progressively
  reduces human technology and ultimately replaced
  human technology with nonhuman technology.
• 5) Control over an array of uncertainties are
  sought.
• 6) Irrational consequences for people involved
  with rational systems often arise.

49
McDonaldization

• What is McDonaldization- The process by which
  the principles of the fast food restaurant are
  coming to dominate more and more sectors of
  American Society as well as the rest of the
  world. Ritzer

50
The Dimensions of McDonaldization

• -Efficiency
• -Calculability (everything can be measured and
  calculated)
• -Predictability
• -Control through nonhuman technologies

51
Signs of McDonaldization

• 1) Growth of Franchises
• 2) Sales at fast food restaurants now exceed
  sales at traditional dining establishments.
• 3) McDonalds model being adopted by different
  types of food chains ie. Starbucks
• 4) The Starbucks revolution
• 5) Casual dining is being franchised ie. Outback
  steakhouse
• 6) Other types of business are adopting the
  principles of the fast food industry ie. Toys R
  Us, AAMCO etc.
• 7) International success of franchises
• 8) Global success of McDonaldized firms ie.
  Blockbusters
• 9) Other nations now franchising products
• 10) Import of other franchised firms to U.S.

52
The Advantages of McDonaldization

• 1) A wider range of goods and services is
  available to a much larger portion of the
  population than ever before.
• 2) Availability of goods and services depends far
  less than before on time or geographic location
  people can do things, such as obtain money at the
  grocery store or a bank balance in the middle of
  the night, that were impossible before.
• 3) People are able to get what they want or need
  almost instantaneously and get if far more
  conveniently.
• 4) Good and services are of a far more uniform
  quality at least some people get better goods
  and services than before McDonaldization.
• 5) Far more economical alternatives to
  high-priced, customized goods and services are
  widely available therefore, people can afford
  things they could not previously afford.
• 6) Fast, efficient goods and services are
  available to a population that is working longer
  hours and has fewer hours to spare.

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The Irrationality of Rationality

• 1) Inefficiency
• 2) High Cost
• 3) The Illusion of Fun
• 4) The Illusion of Reality
• 5) False Friendliness
• 6) Disenchantment
• 7) Health and Environmental Hazards
• 8) Homogenization
• 9) Dehumanization

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Advantages of McDonaldization

• 7) In a rapidly changing, unfamiliar, and
  seemingly hostile world, the comparatively
  stable, familiar, and safe environment of a
  McDonaldized system offers comfort.
• 8) Because of quantification, consumers can more
  easily compare competing products.
• 9) Certain products (for example, diet programs)
  are safer in a carefully regulated and controlled
  system.
• 10) People are more likely to be treated
  similarly, no matter what their race, gender or
  social class.
• 11) Organizational and technological innovations
  are more quickly and easily diffused through
  networks of identical operators.
• 12) The most popular products of one culture are
  more easily diffused to others.