4. Biographical Details
1864: born to upper middle class Protestant German family;
autocratic politician father and devout, shy, Calvinist mother
1882: goes to college and joins father’s fraternity: drinks, brawls,
gets hugely fat, acquires dueling scar
1893: marries cousin, Marianne
1894: becomes college professor
1897-1902: struck by paralyzing nervous breakdown after father’s
death; unable to work
1904-05: writes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
after visit to U.S.
1910: founds German Sociological Association
1914: supports German involvement in World War I as legitimate
defense against Russia and struggle for “honor”
1918: returns to teaching after 20 years, begins Economy and
Society, seems to finally recover from mental trauma and enjoy life
1919: politically active with coalition of center-left parties
1920: dies of pneumonia
5. Bureaucratic Management
Theory
Weber's theory of bureaucratic management also has two essential elements. First, it
entails structuring an organization into a hierarchy. Secondly, the organization and its
members are governed by clearly defined rational-legal decision-making rules. Each
element helps an organization to achieve its goals.
An organizational hierarchy is the arrangement of the organization by level of
authority in reference to the levels above and below it. For example, a vice-president
of marketing is below the company's president, at the same level as the company's vice
president of sales, and above the supervisor of the company's social media department.
Each level answers to the level above it, with the ultimate leader of the organization at
the top.
The easiest way to understand the term rational-legal decision-making rules is to
think of it as a set of explicit and objective policies and procedures that governs how
an organization functions. Examples of rational-legal decision-making rules include
human resources rules and policies or the regulations governing who is entitled to
unemployment insurance.
6. What Is a Bureaucratic
Organization?
A bureaucratic organization is a form of management that has a pyramidal
command structure. The bureaucratic organization is very organized with a
high degree of formality in the way it operates. Organizational charts
generally exist for every department, and decisions are made through an
organized process. A strict command and control structure is present at all
times. Bureaucracies are meant to be orderly, fair and highly efficient.
Bureaucratic organizational structures have many layers of management,
cascading down from senior executives to regional managers to departmental
managers - all the way down to shift supervisors who work alongside
frontline employees. So, authority is centered at the top, and information
generally flows from the top down. For example, a senior executive may
implement a new policy stating that employees must have all overtime
approved by management before actually working the overtime. The new
policy will go from the desk of the senior executive all the way down to the
frontline employees.
7. The Inevitability of History
Denies predictable “laws” of historical
development
Capitalism arose from series of accidents,
including free labor force,
industrialization, rationalized accounting,
codified law and ownership, and “spirit of
capitalism”
8. Marx and Weber
“silent dialogue” with Marx
“rounding out” Marx’s views on capitalism (transformative impact of
Puritanism and cultural values)
Agreements:
– 1. Structural factors giving rise to modern society
– 2. Mapping connections between factors influencing individual action –
“The social order is of course conditioned by the economic order to a
high degree, and in turn reacts upon it.”
– 3. Structural limitations on individual actions (importance of class,
alienation and “iron cage”)
Key disagreements:
– 1. The nature of science
– 2. The inevitability of history
– 3. Economic determinism
9. Economic Determinism
Refutes Marxist determinism:
– Protestant Ethic: importance of religious ideas
in shaping behavior
– Economy and Society: systems of domination
maintained because they are viewed as
legitimate, overwhelming class divisions
10. Ideal Types
A definition of an institution or type of
society that enumerates key or essential
features of the phenomenon
May not match perfectly with any real,
concrete example
11. Weber’s Ideal Type Analysis of
Domination
1. Charismatic Domination – based on force of personality of inspirational
leaders
– Emerges in times of crisis when old values fail
– unstable over long periods--problem of routinization (succession and
day to day operations)
– Examples: Hitler, Gandhi
2. Traditional Domination – legitimacy claimed and believed in by virtue of
the sanctity of ancient custom that cannot be challenged by reason
3. Rational-Legal Domination – by statute and legal norms – procedure
– Seen in modern bureaucracies and in system of political parties
– Separation of personal and legal affairs
– High degree of specialization
– Uniformly applied rules
12. Ideal Types of Social
Stratification
1. Class
2. Status Group
3. Party
13. Class
Persons who have a common life chances represented by
economic interests
Statistical aggregates – not communities – based on
market situation
Marx (2 classes) vs. Weber (more differentiated)
14. Communal Action and Class
Possibilities of group formation and unified political action
– Rare, since they usually fail to recognize common interest
– Happens under certain cultural conditions:
• 1. Large numbers perceive themselves in same class situation
• 2. Ecologically concentrated (i.e. in urban areas)
• 3. Clearly understood goals articulated by an intelligentsia
• 4. Clearly identified opponents
• 5. Naked, transparent exercise of class power
“Communalization” = “feeling of the actors that they belong together.”
“Societal Action” = “rationally motivated adjustment of interests”
Examples
– Russia, Nicaragua, Oaxaca
Misdirected Class Struggle (examples?)
15. Status Group
Persons who share “a specific, positive or negative, social estimation
of honor”
Subjective rather than Objective
Expressed and reinforced through lifestyle rather than market
situation or economic behavior
Lifestyle and taste reinforcing status (Bourdieu)
Emergence of Global Status Groups (Appadurai)
Rests on distance and exclusiveness
– Limiting of social interaction, marriage partners, social conventions and
activities, organizations and clubs, and “privileged modes of
acquisition” (such as property or occupations)
16. Status vs. Class
Consumption
More important in times of
stability
Importance of fashion/lifestyle (“all
‘stylization’ of life either originates in
status groups or is at least conserved
by them”)
Subjective Position
Reaction against “pretensions of purely
economic acquisition” (new money)
– James Bond
Ethnicity (horizontal) and Caste
(vertical)
Dignity in this world (high) vs.
next world (low)
Production
Becomes particularly
important in times of
instability/rapid
change
Objective economic
position
Not necessarily
communalized
17. Ethnicity, Caste, Race
Perception, not reality (they “believe in
blood relationship and exclude exogamous
marriage and social intercourse”)
Ethnicity: horizontal (each allowed to
believe in superior honor)
Caste (vertical) includes race (subjective,
not biological)
Pariah peoples
18. Party
Oriented around a specific goal (can be a
“cause” or personal power)
Related to, but separate from class and
status as three distinct stratification
systems
19. Rationalization
From use of money and credit in free markets to mediate transactions
and social relationships, and from unintentional changes in religion
Formal rationality: means-to-ends calculation (distinct from
substantive rationality)
Rise of bureaucratic rationalized state
Replaces tradition, patronage, and other ways of regulating markets
Reinforced and stimulated by random historical events and cultural
factors (religion)
Rationalized economic system and state continually reinforce each
other; creating a monolith that cannot be opposed
“disenchantment” of social world leads to “iron cage” of
bureaucracy, where social life is calculable, rational, efficient, and
dull – no liberating utopia should be expected from socialism or
capitalism
20. The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism
1. Goodness of Work: Work valued as an end in itself
2. Trade and profit taken as indicators of personal virtue
3. Methodically organized life governed by reason valued not only as
means to economic success, but as proper and righteous state of
being
4. Delayed Gratification: Immediate happiness should be forgone in
favor of future satisfaction (avoidance of spontaneous enjoyment and
hedonism)
Taken together, this “spirit” of capitalism one of 7 factors that led to
rise of rationalized capitalist economies in West
