Organizing Modernity

New Weberian Perspectives on Work, Organization and Society

Larry Ray, Michael Reed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134879168
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book provides a reassessment of the significance of Max Weber's work for the current debates about the institutional and organizational dynamics of modernity. It re-evaluates Weber's sociology of bureaucracy and his general account of the trajectory of modernity with reference to the strategic social structures that dominated the emergence and development of modern society. Included here are detailed analyses of contemporary issues such as the collapse of communism, fordism, coporatism and traditionalism in both Western and Eastern societies. All of the contributors are scholars of international repute. They undertake analyses of Weber's texts and his broader intellectual inheritance to reassert the centrality of Weberian sociology for our understanding of the moral, political and organizational dilemmas of late modernity. These analyses challenge orthodox readings of Weber as the prophet of the iron cage. Instead they offer interpretations of his work which emphasize the reality of modernity as a dual process with the potential for both disarticulation of rational structures and deeper colonization of daily life. Not only is this book essential reading for Weber specialists but it also provides compelling analyses of modernity and the inherently contingent nature of global cultural and stuctural transformation. Martin Albrow, Roehampton Institute; Stewart Clegg, University of Western Sydney; David Chalcraft, Oxford Brookes University; John Eldridge, Glasgow University; Larry J

Chapter 1

Bringing the Text Back in: On Ways of Reading the Iron Cage Metaphor in the Two Editions of The Protestant Ethic

David Chalcraft

Introduction*

One of the central concerns of the essays in this volume is to seek to uncover in Weber’s writings forgotten or previously neglected aspects of his analysis of aspects of modernity which may serve to illuminate contemporary social processes and thereby inform current sociological analysis. As such, the essays in this volume might be described as experiments in, and contributions to, Weberian sociology. The sine qua non of such exercises in Weberian sociology, in my view, is an understanding of Weber texts. In this chapter I seek to approach Weber’s writings less from a presentist concern with undertaking Weberian sociology than from the other direction: that is, beginning with the texts themselves and working towards a Weberian perspective (Seidman 1983:281–97). My starting point is not in Weberian sociology, but, for want of a better term, in Weberology, and the former must needs be based on the latter if the texts are to speak to us in our historical situation. The intention is not to read into Weber answers to our own dilemmas (eisegesis), but to read out of Weber’s texts questions, concepts and perspectives which emerge from an open dialogue with his writings, predicated on an approach which is willing to have its prejudgements and pre-understandings transformed in the process of reading a classical text (exegesis) (Thiselton 1992:31– 54; Gadamer 1979:238ff). Such an openness to the transforming power of the text is necessary with regard to the understanding of the ‘iron cage’ metaphor which is now so familiar that our appreciation of its meaning has become ritualized. The ‘iron cage’ metaphor has become synonymous with Weber’s analysis and assessment of modernity, in particular, with his understanding of the role of rationality in modern life, and of the evils of bureaucratization. In contemporary sociology commentators ritually refer to the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’; we need to make strange again what has become so habitual.

The image of existence within a cage with iron bars, which determines existence so that we live out our lives coerced by an external and inescapable prison, is perhaps the most frequent picture that is conjured up by this metaphor. This chapter seeks to address whether this is what Weber had in mind when he used this metaphor at the close of the Protestant Ethic (PE).

Starting from within Weberology, my central question is not: is Weber’s conception of the ‘iron cage’ more or less accurate as a description of modernity, and is it more or less useful in directing our own researches? Rather, my central question is: how can we understand what Weber was seeking to communicate and by what means can a postulated interpretation be defended? In what follows, therefore, I focus on the meaning of the ‘iron cage’, but in order to defend a particular interpretation I foreground the processes of arriving at any kind of understanding of Weber’s writings. In the discussion of a range of interpretative options I argue that the ‘iron cage’ metaphor needs to be placed within its textual context and this requires paying attention to various linguistic and organizational principles in the PE. Further, I make reference to the fact of the two editions of the PE, since this is the textual reality with which we now need to engage if we are seeking to arrive at understandings of Weber’s text:¹ in other words, the existence of two editions raises the possibility that there is more than one meaning to the PE simply on the basis of there being two versions. In this sense, the meaning of the ‘iron cage’ metaphor may alter if the key to its meaning is the intratextual relations within the PE and if those relations alter because of Weber’s revisions to the text.

Hence, my main concern here is with understanding Weber. Now all of this is of significance for contemporary sociology since the conclusions reached as to what Weber was attempting to communicate will inform Weberian sociology and any attempt to extend, apply or criticize Weber’s ideas in the analysis of modernity and the analysis of the prospects for individual autonomy in a bureaucratic world. The chapter seeks to unravel certain linguistic and organizational principles in the two editions of the PE to arrive at an understanding of what Weber was seeking to convey about the nature of life in modern capitalism, since this is the essential prerequisite for any approach that wants to label itself Weberian.

An engagement with the organizational principles of the PE allows us to witness the central themes in the work and the ways in which these may be undermined in the second edition. What emerges from the analysis is the way in which the PE is crafted to highlight the nature of the modern capitalist order. Weber’s attempt to understand ‘the reality in which we move’ (Weber 1949:72), is predicated on viewing the past from the perspective of the present and the present from the perspective of the past. The juxtaposition of past and present—in an effort to specify what is continuous and discontinuous between various cultural epochs— is the fundamental organizational principle of the PE. For Weber, then, a characteristic feature of modern culture is the intertwining of various inheritances from the past. Modern persons need to be emancipated from some of these legacies (e.g. traditionalism), whereas others need to be inculcated if one is to survive in modern capitalism. But this survival in capitalism cannot simply be reduced, for Weber, to economic existence and while there is a direct link between notions of the calling in old Protestantism, in Franklin and in the modern order, which means that the modern person has to work in one sphere, a variety of lifestyles (as in the past, so in the present) continue to exist: the point is that increasingly these lifestyles are maintained, and define themselves in relation to the ‘iron cage’ of modern material culture.

To ignore the linguistic and organizational principles of the text—the features which direct us to the identification of theme—would be to reduce the PE to a set of propositions about the past, whereas in fact it is also, and perhaps predominantly, a cultural exploration of what it means to live in the modern capitalist order. One of the central questions that needs to be addressed, therefore, in the interpretation of the PE, given the existence of two editions, is whether the meaning of the text alters in the process of Weber’s revisions (Hennis 1988:22–61; Tenbruck 1989).

Weber’s Writings as Texts and Interpreters as Readers

Before any systematic conclusions can be reached concerning the significance of the textual variants for the understanding of the two editions of the PE, it is necessary to critically examine where we consider meaning to reside in Weber’s work(s). One way of entering into such a discussion is to pose the following type of question: what factors do we appeal to in our engagement with Weber’s writings to support interpretations? For example, is the key to the meaning of Weber’s writings the texts themselves and how we consider them to ‘work’? Or, is the key to be found in the reader’s questions, locations (historical and institutional) and experience of engaging with Weber’s texts? Then again, does the meaning of the PE reside in the relationship between this text and Weber’s other writings and the relationship of Weber’s work to his sources (both academic and literary)? Further, what role should be accorded to the extra-textual contexts of the cultural and historical location of the text? Does the meaning of the PE depend on the author’s intentions and what is the relationship between the text and Weber’s personal experiences and values which constitute his motives and worldview? Finally, in the light of two editions, is the meaning of the PE now to be located in the interface of these editions: an encounter of a third kind since the understanding of one or the other cannot be achieved independently of, or in innocence of, the other?²

These questions are of significance for assessing the ways in which textual changes may affect the meaning of the PE. For example, we need to ask: what types of textual change or change in context would actually constitute a change in meaning rather than merely suggesting ways in which Weber’s development and relation to his context can be understood? Is the meaning of the PE affected by changing circumstances of composition, context, author’s intentions and author’s biography or by alterations in how the text ‘works’? If we accept that the way the text works is a central part of the uncovering of the meaning of the PE how do we reach such an understanding of how the text does actually ‘work’? Is argument about how a text ‘works’ to be located in the recovery of an author’s intention or in the interaction of the reader with the text? If meaning is related to the active reader who is engaged with the text, is it only possible to describe this as an exercise in subjectivity or are there controls which keep the reader’s interpretations within reasonable bounds? While we may accept that there will never be a correct interpretation—in terms of final, all-encompassing, noncorrigible interpretations—we tend to hold that some interpretations are more correct than others: the task is to seek to elaborate criteria by which ‘more correct’ interpretations can be judged.

These hermeneutical questions may seem to be more apposite to literary, legal and theological texts but these issues are important for Weber studies for the following reasons. First, Weber’s writings are texts. By this I mean simply that they are linguistic communications in written form. If we want to know what Weber said we need to read what he wrote. To acknowledge that Weber’s works are texts means that his thought does not exist independently of the form in which it is presented nor the language used for its articulation. Secondly, if the former is unlikely to be accepted without debate, it is certainly obvious that the fact of two or more editions/versions of a particular work is, by definition, a textual problem. Since this is the case, philological, textual and literary criticism is of more than peripheral interest.³ Thirdly, if engagement with Weber is first and foremost a reading of what he wrote, theories of meaning creation and the diversity of reasons for reading Weber need to be foregrounded.

In what follows, rather than provide a theoretical discussion of hermeneutical issues,⁴ I focus on the various contexts of the two editions of the PE in an attempt to illustrate the ways in which various alterations in the text and context interweave to raise complex interpretative issues. I begin with a brief examination of the extra-textual dimension of author’s biography and the question of intentions. In the second part of the chapter I turn to consider the intratextual context of the PE: namely, the linguistic and organizational principles of the text. I dwell on this aspect of the discussion since it brings the text into central focus and is generally where I consider meaning to reside. I seek to provide an introduction to various organizational principles of the text and in the process propose a new translation for ‘iron cage/stahlhartes Gehäuse’ which illustrates the role of linguistic criticism in determining Weber’s meanings. Further, the discussion of this issue leads us to the heart of Weber’s analysis of the fate of the individual in modernity. Finally, I turn to consider the intertextual context of Weber’s use of sources.⁵

In each of the discussions what I am seeking to put across is that the intratextual dimension is central to the creation of the meaning of the PE, and while the author’s intentions, sources and other contexts have a role to play in interpretation, and are of course not totally unrelated to the meaning of the two editions, and hence for the understanding of the ‘iron cage’ metaphor, it is the former context which must be given priority: it is the point of departure and the final court of appeal in any interpretation. In this light the other contexts would serve as controls for the reconstructions proposed on the basis of the engagement with the text itself.

The Text and Its Contexts

The Extra-Textual Context: Author’s Biography and Intentions

Biographical studies have an uneasy status in Weber research. On the one hand there is a fascination with Weber’s life and loves which shows no signs of abating. On the other hand, there is a resistance to assessing Weber’s work in the light of his life. The analysis of the PE from a biographical perspective is a case in point. Perhaps more than any other of his writings the PE ‘is connected with the deepest roots of his personality’ (Marianne Weber 1975:335) and bears its stamp, and yet such a relation to his personal life, it is argued, should be restricted to questions of genesis. For example, Poggi defends the biographical introduction to his study of the PE in the following way: ‘I raise these matters at the beginning of the discussion because by and large, in my view, it is here that belong questions pertaining to the genesis of a text—not because I attribute to such matters a direct and substantial bearing on the elucidation of that text, much less on the validity of its content’ (Poggi 1983:1, my italics).

However, it does seem that Weber was deeply involved with the questions he addressed in the PE and it seems possible to delimit the range of what the PE can be said to be about, and what his attitude to the culture of the calling in modernity was, from knowledge of that personal interest and his biography. As is well known, Weber wrote the PE in the context of his struggle with his mental/ physical incapacity. One side of the experience of this illness was the moral dilemma it placed Weber under. This can be gathered quite clearly from the following letter written by Marianne Weber to Helene Weber (his mother) in 1902:

In the meantime he has again expressed himself about what torments him most. It is always the same thing: the psychological pressure of the ‘unworthy situation’ in which he draws a salary and will not be able to accomplish anything in the foreseeable future, combined with the feeling that to all of us—you, I, everyone— only a person with a vocation (Berufsmensch) counts fully.

(Marianne Weber, 1975:261)

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Weber, organizations and modernity: an introduction
• 1. Bringing the text back in: on ways of reading the iron cage metaphor hi the two editions of The Protestant Ethic
• 2. Max Weber and contemporary sociology of organizations
• 3. Work and authority: some Weberian perspectives
• 4. Accounting for organizational feeling
• 5. Max Weber on individualism, bureaucracy and despotism: political authoritarianism and contemporary politics
• 6. Commerce, science and the modern university
• 7. Max Weber and the dilemmas of modernity
• Conclusion: autonomy, pluralism and modernity
• Index