SOCIAL THEORY weber II

1. Vaughn Tan SOCIOLOGY 97 SOCIAL THEORYweber II

3. Our agenda • Mechanisms • The Protestant Ethic • CEOs • Break • Big pictures: Weber and Marx • Response papers, past and future

4. mechanisms

5. “ Explaining the particular by the general” (2). “ Mechanisms in a theory are defined here as bits of theory about entities at a different level (e.g. individuals) than the main entities being theorised about (e.g. groups), which serve to make the higher-level theory more supple, more accurate, or more general” (Stinchcombe, cited on 7).

6. “ A mechanism can be seen as a systematic set of statements that provide a plausible account of how I[nput] and O[utput] are linked to one another” (7). Input  Mechanism  Output

7. Covering law vs mechanism (8) • Covering law: People who participate in the same extracurriculars are often friends with each other. • Mechanism: People who participate in the same extracurriculars have more in common with each other, and thus are more likely to be friends with each other.

8. Strong vs weak individualism (12) • Strong: Resolving only to the individual • Weak: Allowing some power to aggregate

9. “ The key characteristic of an analytical approach is that it proceeds by first constructing an analytical model of the situation to be analyzed (an ‘ideal type’). This theoretical model is in principle constructed in such a way that it includes only those elements believed to be essential for the problem at hand. The target of the theoretical analysis, then, is this model and not the reality that the model is intended to explain. However, to the extent that the theoretical model has been constructed in such a way that it incorporates the essential elements of the concrete situation, the results of the theoretical analysis will also shed light on the real-world situation that the model is intended to explain” (14).

10. the protestant ethic

11. “ Thanks to a believer’s conversion to ascetic Protestantism … he or she began to set a religious premium on a certain type of behavior, the unintended consequence of which was a novel norm for how to act in economic questions.” (Hedstrom & Swedberg 5)

12. Empirical problem • Strong correlation between religion (Protestantism) and ownership of capital and other capitalist behaviors (capitalist spirit) (1).

13. “ We are … attempting to clarify the part which religious forces have played in forming the developing web of our specifically worldly modern culture, in the complex interaction innumerable different historical factors … we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out” (91).

14. Phenomenon • Means-ends rationality (52). • “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs” (53) • Marx: M-C-M’

15. The term “spirit of capitalism” can only be applied to “an historical individual, i.e., a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance” (47). “ Truly what is preached here is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic.”

16. “ As a rule, it has been neither dare-devil and unscrupulous speculators, economic adventurers such as we meet in all periods of economic history, nor simply great financiers who have carried through this change, outwardly so inconspicuous, but nevertheless so decisive for the penetration of economic life with the new spirit. On the contrary, they were men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles” (69).

17. “ He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well” (71).

18. “ The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world (Beruf)” (80). “ Compared with the Catholic attitude, the moral emphasis on and the religious sanction of, organized worldly labour in a calling was mightily increased” (83).

19. “ The individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life” (85).

20. “ Baxter’s principal work is dominated by the continually repeated, often almost passionate preaching of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour. It is due to a combination of two different motives. Labour is, on the one hand, an approved ascetic technique … But the most important thing was that even beyond that labour came to be considered in itself the end of life, ordained as such by God” (159).

21. “ The emphasis on the ascetic importance of a fixed calling provided an ethical justification of the modern specialized division of labour” (163).

22. “ Asceticism turns with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer” (166). “ Man is only a trustee of the goods which have come to him through God’s grace … the greater the possessions the heavier, if the ascetic attitude toward life stands the test, the feeling of responsibility [to God] for them” (170).

23. “ When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save” (172).

24. “ One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born … from the spirit of Christian asceticism” (180).

25. “ The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force … In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage” (181).

26. “ It is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic and equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth” (183).

27. Historical analysis • Documents (47-52, Ch 5) • History (59-68) • Methodological individualism • Ideal type analytic approach • Emphasis on understanding subjective meaning • Ideas and material situations mutually generative • Mechanisms (authority and action) • Growth of Protestant ethic (charismatic authority) • Growth of means-ends approach to life (traditional and rational) • Approach to life aligns with capitalism (rationalisation) • Rationality outperforms traditional organization in the market

28. CEOs

29. “ Almost any characteristic can be used to this end [closure], provided that it can serve as a reliable mechanism for identifying and excluding outsiders. Exclusionary social closure is thus action by a dominant group designed to secure for itself certain resources and advantages at the expense of other groups” (49).

30. “ In contrast to classes, status groups are normally communities. They are, however, often of an amorphous kind. In contrast to the purely economically determined ‘class situation’ we wish to designate as ‘status situation’ every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor. This honor may be connected with any quality shared by a plurality, and, of course, it can be knit to a class situation” (Weber, “Class, Status, Party,”187).

31. Social closure applied to markets for labour • Ease/difficulty of access to market relationship (48). • Closure implies restriction of access to the CEO position through non-market criteria

32. Historical development of the bases for closure • A social and cultural system based on the belief in the charismatic CEO (50). • Hiring priorities changing through rise of shareholder activism by institutional shareholders. Actual historical analysis not part of the readings.

33. Three attributes on which closure occurs (205) • Previous position • Performance of previous firm • Status of previous firm

34. Mechanism for closure (205) • Social matching, not market matching. • Artificial scarcity of CEO candidates by preventing those not fitting these attributes from being considered for CEO position, even if otherwise qualified. • Legitimated by broader cultural system

35. big pictureweber and marx

36. Areas of comparison • Social divisions • Basic unit of analysis • Ideas and materials • Motivation • Teleology • Main mechanisms • Methodology

37. response papers

38. Main concerns for next RP • Thesis • Big picture • Citations • Critiques

39. Handouts, syllabus, resources, and office hours available at http://wjh.harvard.edu/~vtan/soc97http://bit.ly/soc97