Weber Flashcards
What were Weber’s two major works?
- The protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
- Economy and Society (started in 1909)
What were Weber’s main interests? (7)
Religion, capitalism, stratification, power, rationalization, bureaucracy, and organizations.
What is a market?
a group of buyers and sellers of utilities
What are utilities?
material goods (especially property), and human services (personal skills, labour power)
What was Weber’s distinction of classes?
There are 2 different classes of property and services
What was his education?
- Law school at the University of Heidelberg (1882)
- After 1 year, he transferred to the University of Berlin
- Continued his legal studies
- Worked as a junior barrister while he started working on his PhD in law (1889)
What are the two classes of services?
Intelligentsia and specialists and the proletariat
How did weber categorize the intelligentsia and specialists?
- Salaried, non-manual, white collar employees
- Selling personal skills on the market
- E.g. scientists, technicians, civil servants, managers
What was Weber’s later life and death?
- Lot of personal tragedy
Mother died
Sister committed suicide - Got pneumonia
Died in 1920, age of 56
Was still working on Economy and Society
Was published unfinished
What were the 3 potential causes of Weber’s nervous breakdown?
- Catalyst appears to have been guilt or remorse over the death of his father
- Stressed and overworked
- Mental illness ran in his family
How did Weber define social class?
An economic class that has acquired some subjective sense of unity and class-conscious organization
What are the comparisons between Weber’s social class and Marx?
Class in-itself and class for-itself.
- Marx: the development of class-consciousness is restricted to the proletariat
- Weber: class-consciousness may develop within other classes
What is the difference between how Marx looked at social inequality and how Weber did?
Marx looked only in terms of class, Weber explored other concepts like status and party
What was his family dispute?
- 1897
- Had his parents visiting
- Had an argument with his father over his treatment to his mother
- Ordered his father to leave
- Father died few weeks after the argument
What are some bases for a status group?
Religious affiliation, ethnic origin
How did Weber define class?
- An aggregate of people who occupy a common situation in a market and therefore have similar economic circumstances and life chances
What is an example of exclusion from a status group?
White people constituted a status group relative to Black people.
White people had power based on their prestige that was based entirely on their skin colour
How did Weber define party?
A voluntary association that has developed for the collevtive pursuit of interests
What are party organizations other than formal political parties?
- promoting special class-related interests (Canadian medial associations)
- Reflecting non-economic or status-related concerns (assemble of First Nations)
- A pressure group or special interest organization (Green Peace)
How did Weber define power? What are the issues with his definition?
The probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance.
- too broad to be useful, allows power relations to be temporary
How did Weber define domination?
A special case of power; power relations that involve persistent powers of social inequality
What is legitimate authority?
Subordinates comply because they accept the right of others in ruling over them
What are the 3 types of legitimate authority?
traditional, charismatic, rational-legal
What is traditional authority?
- Based on long-standing and rarely questioned principles
- Accept the right of certain groups or individuals to have authority even if this right is not established in law
- E.g. monarchies
what are the two classes with property?
The bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie
How did Weber categorize the proletariat?
- Wage-earning, manual, blue-collar workers
- E.g factory workers, construction workers
- Providing their physical capacity to labour
What did Weber predict about the middle classes?
- The petty bourgeoisie would gradually decline as a result of capitalism
- The intelligentsia and specialists would continue to expand in numbers and importance as bureaucratic organizations grew
What are the characteristics of status groups?
- Set of people who have a subjective sense of common membership and common awareness
- Tends to have a distincting style of life or mode of conduct that seperates it from the rest of the population
- Identified by power that stems from social honour or prestige within a society
What are the 4 key factors of rationalization and ideal-type bureaucracies?
Efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control
What is illegitmate authority?
Subordinates do not accept the right of others to rule over them, however, they comply anyways.
- typically due to threat of physical force orn of realistic alternatives.
Describe Weber’s concept of the ideal-type
- A descripton that tries to capture the characteristics of a social object in it’s “pure” form
How does the concept of the ideal-type help with our analysis of bureaucracies?
Gives us a framework that we can use in our empirical analysis of different organizations
What is the base of exclusion within status groups?
Subjective sense of membership becomes that base from group exclusion
One group takes an identifiable characteristic of a second group as a basis for exclusion of the members of that second group
What is charismatic authority?
- Based on the unique personal qualities of individuals
- subordinates comply because they find the leaders to be enormously appealing
- E.g. Pierre Trudeau, JFK
What is the iron cage of rationality?
Suggests that bureaucratic organizations are cages in which people become trapped due to the focus these organizations place on rationality
- comes at the expense of freedom and humanity
- rational structures are limiting and dehumanizing
Was Weber optimistic or pessimistic about the future of society?
Generally pessimistic because he thought there would be continuing domination due to the prevalence of rational-legal authority and bureaucracy.
What is rational-legal authority
Based on established positions or offices
- bassed on evidence that certain criteria have been met
- legal because it makes appointments by respecting verifiable rules
- Subs comply because they accept the right of individuals to hold certain positions of offices
- obey because of hierarchy of commamnd
What was the relationship Weber saw between RD and domination?
Saw RD as a form of government that does involve domination because it is based on rational-legal authority and involves bureaucracy.
- all was the basis of the danger of undermining democracy.
What are the differences between Marx’ view of buraucracy in socialism and Weber’s?
Marx: held the view that bureaucracy would be diminished with the emergence of communism
Weber: Bureaucracy will remain under economic system based on capitalism or socialism.
- within socialism, more bureaucracy is required
What did Weber mean by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “dictatorship of the official”
working class needed to hold more control within society because within bureaucracies the control is held by the officials.
What was Weber’s methodology?
historical sociologist
- Oriented to the development of clear concepts so that he could perform a causal analysis of historical phenomena.
- believed that history is composed of unique empirical events; there can be no generalizations at the empirical level
what were the intellectual debates over history and sciency?
At the poles were the positivists who thought that history was composed of general (nomothetic) laws and subjectivists who reduced history to idiosyncratic (idiographic) actions and events
What is Verstehen?
Involved doing systematic and rigorous research rather than simply getting a “feeling” for a test or social phenomenon. A rational procedure of study.
What is hermeneutics?
Goal of understanding the thinking of the actors as well as the basic structure of the text
What are bureaucracies?
formal organizations that are organized into a hierarchy of smaller departments
- ideal-type of rational-legal authority
what is a causailty? How did it shape Weber’s methodology/thoery?
the probability that one event will be followed or acompanied by another event
- Weber was inclined to the study of the causes of social phenomenon as being within the domain of history, not sociology.
- Weber thought the best we can do in sociology is make prababilistic statements about the relationship between social phenomena
- The goal is to “estimate the degree to which a certain effect is ‘favoured’ by certain ‘conditions’”
What does it mean that ideal-types are heuristic devices?
They are to be useful and helpful in doing empirical research and in understanding a specific aspect of the social world.
What are the typical causes for divergences from the exaggerated ideal type? (5)
- Actions of bureaucrats that are motivated by misinformation
- Strategic errors, primarily by the bureaucratic leaders
- Local fallacies undergirding the actions of leaders and followers
- Decisions made in teh bureaucracy on the basis of emotion
- Any irrationality in the action of bureaucratic leaders and followers
What are the 4 types of ideal types?
- Historical ideal types - relate to phenomena found in some particular historical epoch
- General sociological ideal types - relate to phenomena that cut across a number of historical periods and societies
- Action ideal types - pure types of action based on motivations of the actor
- Structural ideal types - forms taken by the causes and consequences of social action
What did weber believe about sociology and values?
Social scientists should not let their personal values influence their scientific research
Values and teaching
The need for teachers to keep their personal values out of the classroom
- the audience in a public speech have chosen to be there, as opposed to academic lectures where students must go to do well
What is rationalization?
Involves the movement away from mystical and religious interpretations of the world and toward interpretations of the world based on thought and belifs based on systematic accumulation of evidence
What are the characteristics of an ideal-type bureaucracy? (6)
- Clearly defined and specialized duties (DOL)
- Has a hierarchy
- Reliance on written documents (clearly define duties/policies)
- Separation of the person from the office
- Organizational rules
- Emphasis on expert training (merit and ability)
What are the negative assessments of bureaucracies?
Not good for the people at the bottom or people who have to deal with the bureaucracy.
What are the 4 types of social action Weber identified?
- Means-end rationality action
- Value rationality action
- Affectual action - Emotional state of the actor
- Traditional action - actor’s habitual and customary ways of behaving
“Class condition” exists if what 3 conditions are met?
- The people have a common specific casual component of their life chances
- The component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income
- Represented under the conditions of the commodity or labour markets
What is gerontocracy?
a form of social organization in which the elderly have the most wealth, power, and prestige
What were Weber’s theories of democracy?
2 types of democracy: Direct and representative
- Direct: the ideal, people in authority are obligated to conform to the will of constituents, increase influence of public opinion, decrease influence of officials.
- Representative: RD was necessary, officials act in accordance with the genral interests of the constituents, necessary because DD cannot operate in large and complex modern societies
How did Weber use hermeneutics?
Used the tools of hermenutics to understand actors, interaction, and all of human history
Values and research
Believed in the ability to separate fact from value, and this view could be extended ot the research world
- Values are to be restricted to the time before social research begins
How does charaismatic authority lack the components of ideal-type bureaucracies?
- staff are nor technically trained but are chosen for their possession of charismatic qualities or qualities similar to those possessed by the charismatic leader
- No clear hierarchy, no promotions, clear appointments or dismissals
- no formal riles, no established organs, and no precedents to guide new judgements
What is practical rationality?
Every way of life that views and judges worldly activity in relation to the individual’s purely pragmatic and egotistic interests
- People who practive PR accept given realities and merely calculate the most expedient ways of dealing with difficulties that they present
What is theoretical rationality?
A cognitive effort to master reality through increasingly abstract concepts rather than through action
- Leads the actor to transcend daily realities in a quest to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos
What is substantive rationality?
Mix of theoretical and practical
- directly orders actions into patterns through clusters of values
How does Weber define sociology?
- Sociology should be a science
- Sociology should be concerned with casualty
- Sociology should utilize interpretive understanding (verstehen)
How did Weber apply rationalization onto the economy?
- General economic history: concern was the development of the rational capitalistic economy
- Rational economy is dependent upon a variety of noneconomic forces throughout the rest of society in order to develop
How did Weber apply rationalization to religion?
Analyzed the degree to which early religions acted as impediments to the rise of rationality
- played a key role in rationalization as people use the basis of religion as the building blocks of rationalization
How did Weber apply rationalization to the law?
Only in the West did Weber see a rational, systematic theory of law
How did Weber apply rationalization to political groups?
Argued that the more rational the political structure becomes, the more likely it is to eliminate systematically the irrational elements within the law
How did Weber apply rationalization to the city?
Provided an alternative to the feudal order and a setting in which modern-capitalism and, more generally, rationality could develop
What is Weber’s theory of social action?
all human actions, or social actions, are informed by the unique experiences, desires, and contexts that every human interacts with
Weber saw that leaders of the economic system were all overwhelmingly __________
Protestant
- Suggests the the spirit of capitalism is a moral and ethical system that stresses economic success
What did Weber find about religious activity and rationalization in the non-West?
Religious ideas in the non-West have created overwhelming structural barriers to rationalization
What are some contemporary applications of Weber’s work?
- McDonalization in society
- Used to understand leaders of new movements/cults
What is primary patriarchalism?
People who inherit their position of authority
How does traditional authority lack the components of ideal-type bureaucracies?
- Lacks offices and clearly defined spheres of competence that are subject to impersonal rules
- Does not have a rational ordering of relations of superiority and inferiority
- Lacks a clear hierarchy
- No regular system of appointment and promotion on the basis of free contracts
- Technical training is not a requirement
- Appointments do not carry with them fixed salaries paid in money.
Charisma and revolution
Charisma was the most important revolutionary force in the social world.
What is formal rationality?
means-end calculation
- occurs in universally applies rules, laws, and regulations
How did Weber believe religious ideas effect economic activities?
Weber believed that religion could be a force for social change and that religious beliefs influenced the development of capitalism. His most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, put forward the controversial thesis that the Protestant ethic influenced the development of capitalism.
