What follows is a dialogue, in the Platonic sense, concerning the justifications for "business ethics" as a vehicle for asking questions about the values of modern business organisations. The protagonists are the authors, Gordon Pearson – a pragmatist and sceptic where business ethics is concerned – and Martin Parker – a sociologist and idealist who wishes to be able to ask ethical questions of business. By the end of the dialogue we come to no agreement on the necessity or justification (...) for business ethics, but on the way discuss the uses of philosophy, the meanings of integrity and trust, McDonald''s, a hypothetical torture manufacturer and various other matters. (shrink)

The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (- the human being is an end -): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. (Friedrich Nietzsche1) The question which leads us beyond the grave of our own generation is not 'how will human beings feel in the future', but 'how will they be' ... We (...) do not want to train up feelings of well-being in people, but those characteristics we think constitute the greatness and nobility of our human nature. (Max Weber2). (shrink)

This article provides an application of Alvin Gouldner's dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism to the constitutional process of European identity formation. Gouldner introduced his dialectical sociology in a critical attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any fixed idea of order. In an attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any Romantic or classical idea of Europe, this article shows how Europe's identity, as it has been represented in the Constitutional Treaty (CT), as well as in sociological works, is being shaped by (...) predominant Romantic and classic thought structures and social movements. The central argument is that the dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism in Europe is most clearly observed in the debates about democracy, human rights and rule of law — the classical values that constitute the EU's entry criteria. (shrink)

Working within an Archerian morphogenetic framework, I suggest that we need to pay more attention to practices. Instead of the mainstream focus on practice as action, I argue that we should pay attention to practices as a key structural and cultural element of analysis. Practices cannot be simply read-off from beliefs, that is, they are not an inevitable practical counterpart to belief. Although belief is relevant, it does not provide the full explanation for the presence of practices. Therefore, the same (...) or similar beliefs can result in significantly different practices depending on factors such as advances in technology and changes in modes of dissemination of theological doctrine. To illustrate my argument, I consider historical work on comparative religious practices, specifically the distinction between rituals and routines. A focus on the latter, as the conditions of possibility for the former, leads to some implications for the thesis of the morphogenesis of contemporary society. An analysis of the relationship between religious rituals and routines stresses the importance of placing both in their wider cultural and structural context. (shrink)

An examination of the practice of self-examination in Scottish Presbyterianism shows the value of following the later Foucault in the examination of religion as a social practice. His attention to the influence of pastoral power on governmentality is shown to have been embedded in a Roman Catholic heritage leading to a stress on the confessional. By contrast, an examination of one aspect of Protestant pastoral power indicates the genealogy of practices of self-help. An historical examination of both the structure of (...) the Scottish church and the diaries of believers indicates the emphasis placed in this tradition on accountability. It also points to the need to reassess Foucault's treatment of Seneca, whose place in the Christian tradition, as exemplified by the Scottish experience, was more important than Foucault allows. (shrink)

Kendal Mobley replies to Christopher Catherwood's article ‘Nationalism, ethnicity and tolerance: some historical, political and biblical perspectives’, published in Transformation, Vol 14, no. 1, January 1997, p. 10.

This article examines the recent work of the sociologist Arpad Szakolczai as he attempts to conceptualize the programme of ‘reflexive historical sociology’ in the ‘life-works’ of Max Weber, Eric Voegelin and Michel Foucault as well as Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Particular attention is paid to the innovative manner in which the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner is used to explore the biographies of these social theorists as in effect performative life-works in which crucial liminal periods and (...) experiences are seen as facilitating new understandings. It is suggested that the life-work approach to social theory adds an important reflexive dimension to the analysis of social thought. (shrink)

Although scholars have long recognized the importance of "elective affinity" as a key word in Weber's sociology, surprisingly little systematic research has gone into understanding this metaphor in Weber's writing, or the source from which he drew the term. For Weber, this was an implicit reference to Goethe's novel, well known to Weber's educated German audience, entitled Elective Affinities. In this article, I provide a systematic account of Goethe's conception of elective affinity as a chemical metaphor, and of the way (...) that it is related to Weber's uses of the term in the Protestant ethic essays and in his critical rejoinders. By understanding elective affinity as a Goethean chemical metaphor we can better understand the causal claims that Weber makes in his famous essay: Weber's argument is best understood as an analysis of emergence in the chemistry of social relations. (shrink)

This article examines the interlinked impacts of gender and race on occupational prestige, segregation, and earnings. Included are occupations about which Bose and Rossi reported prestige ranks and about which the 1980 census reported earnings and relevant gender/race breakdowns. White men are used as the comparison group. Contrasted to them are the gender/race groups of white women, Black men, Black women, Asian-American men, Asian-American women, Hispanic men, and Hispanic women. Race has a more powerful impact than gender on the prestige (...) level a worker is likely to enjoy, but gender does affect prestige within particular racial groups. For segregation and earnings, the strongest effects are those of gender, although there are clear race effects too. Segregation examined in terms of the prestige of occupations in which different groups find themselves shows race and gender effects. Many researchers have pointed to the need for considering both gender and race in examining the American occupational structure. Our findings strongly support that call. (shrink)

This article explores the importance of environmental perception in the context of alternative agrarian social relations. Because environmental perception is socially constructed, the article is concerned with how those with an alternative agenda for agrarian practice attempt change, and the likely difficulties faced due to the structural requirements and effects of the dominant paradigm of development. It explores the need for a clear model of change, both in its outcomes and its change strategies, and the difficulties that may be faced. (...) The article draws on a case study of a rural landsharing collective in Australia to contextualize these broader issues, and considers some of the implications of the findings for instigating the broader concern of an ecologically sustainable agrarian practice based on permacultural design. (shrink)

Max Weber famously wrote that world images determine the tracks along which societies move. This article examines the relation between world images and the so-called tracks of society, which in this metaphor resemble the current concept of institution. This concept is now associated with the ‘new institutionalisms’ in social science and has no connection to the civilizational level of analysis that Weber used. This article reexamines Weber’s usage of the terms and employs the terms to analyze differences in the principles (...) of legitimacy between those emerging in the West and those in China, differences that Weber himself did not recognize. (shrink)

Power and organizational hierarchies are ubiquitous to social institutions that form the foundation of modern society. Power differentials may act to constrain or enhance people’s ability to make good ethical decisions. However, little scholarly work has examined perceptions of this important topic. The present effort seeks to address this issue by interviewing academics about hypothetical ethical problems that involve power differences among those involved. Academics discussed what they would do in these scenarios, often drawing on their own experiences. Using a (...) think-aloud protocol, participants were prompted to discuss their reasoning and thinking behind their ethical decisions. These interview data were content analyzed using a semantic analysis program that identified a number of distinct ways that academics think about power differences and abuses in ethical situations. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itself, not a means to other ends. Yet logically, when one makes a deliberate choice, one treats freedom of action as if it were not an end in itself, for one uses this freedom as a means to the ends one hopes to achieve through one's action. The tension between deontology and the logic of choice is reflected in the paradoxical nature of the ?right to do (...) wrong?; and in Rawls's unsuccessful attempts to justify to acting agents their interest in such a right, embodied in his conception of agents as ?self-validating sources of claims.? A self-validating source of claims is akin to God as envisioned by voluntarist theologians such as Ockham. Leibniz's critique of voluntarism, then, is applicable to the Rawlsian subject: like the voluntarist God, she would be unable to act if it were indeed the case that her action validated itself. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the concepts of social position and social status, the types of social position, as well as the determinedness of social statuses by the given positions in a new approach. In the first, introductory part of the article, I emphasize that the institutional sociological conception of social position in my approach is relatively closest to the structuralist position conception. In the second part, I introduce two different concepts, labelled social position and social status, and briefly review (...) the social determinedness of social status. In the third part, social positions are typified from the point of view of the two components of social position: on the one hand, from that of social power relations and on the other from that of interest relations. I point out that the different social positions promote the realization of interests to different degrees, that is, they make it possible to attain different social statuses. In a related article, I illustrate the concepts and connections in question with a case study carried out on an industrial shop floor. (shrink)

Single mothers spark what Nancy Fraser calls “needs talk,” the language for translating daily life into professional practice and social policy. The author analyzes expert needs talk in 709 case vignettes, published in the United States between 1900 and 1988, in which experts turn single mothers into “file persons,” the basic unit of bureaucratic welfare management. The author shows how expert needs talk in these sources determines single mothers' worthiness for philanthropic or government support according to their conformity with historically (...) specific notions of proper womanhood. Demographic, political, institutional, and especially professional changes help explain the observed shifts in expert needs talk and the social construction of single motherhood. (shrink)

This research was inspired by Werner Callebaut's (1993) classic in which he interviewed major contemporary philosophers of science (specifically of biology) at a time when the interdisciplinary label of "science studies" had hardly been invented. The "real" in his title, Taking the Naturalistic Turn: How Real Philosophy of Science is Done, was a playful reference to debates over realism in Philosophy—the title as a whole drawing attention to his intent to study science studies empirically. That, for Callebaut, was "real" philosophy.In (...) the research reported on here, the works of ten major theorists of the scientific/scholarly process were studied (but not exclusively of biology and chosen from a larger set which .. (shrink)

This article investigates the status assigned to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a case study on the development of the concept of theory in twentieth century sociology. I trace this development in the interplay between scholars in the United States and Germany and distinguish three waves of meaning given to the text. The transitions between these phases were brought about by an initial process of mystification of the text in the 1930s and a dynamic (...) of de- and re-mystification beginning in the 1980s. Following this process of (re)interpretation over time, I show that at the beginning of the century the work was perceived as an empirical inquiry, while at the end of the century it was treated as pure theory. Based on the example of the peculiarities of the Weberian expert communities in the United States and Germany, I analyze how the invention of a concept of theory as independent from empirical evidence helped to stabilize the value of scholarly expertise on Weber in the face of otherwise declining resonance of the text. The analysis of this paradigmatic case adds to our understanding of the development, uses, and meaning of theory in contemporary sociology. (shrink)

Weber’s claim that Calvinism eliminated magic from the world, inserted into The Protestant Ethic in 1920 and arising out of research reported in The Sociology of Religion, entails a sociological but also a theological proposition identified in this article. Weber’s conceptualization of magic permits his examination of the economic ethics of the world religions. Non-European cases, including China, are examined by Weber to confirm his Protestant Ethic argument regarding modern capitalism. He holds that Confucian rationality, associated with bureaucratic order, is (...) compromised by its tolerance of magic. Weber contrasts this with the Calvinist rejection of magic. Weber’s claims regarding Calvinist demagicalization are made without regard to the Reformation Calvinist obsession with satanic witchcraft, in which the efficacy of magic is accepted as real. The distance between Calvinism and Confucianism, essential to Weber’s argument, is thus narrowed. (shrink)

El presente artículo se basa en el libro titulado “Para comprender las nuevas formas de la religión” (Mardones, 1998), y sus reflexiones sobre los principales aspectos de lo sagrado desde una mirada fenomenológica, el concepto de religión desde una perspectiva más sociológica, y la distinción de tipo conceptual entre lo sagrado y la religión.

Peter Lassman, ed., Max Weber. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2006. 674 pp. £165.

Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

This article is a close reading of Edward Said’s image of the intellectual and offers a critique and restatement of that image. Said characterizes the intellectual in contrast to two other images:...

ABSTRACTWhat is the relationship between structure and agency? French philosopher Michel Foucault weighed in on this question, and I argue that some of his writings indicate that he held views that were strongly structuralist. If I am correct in my interpretation of Foucault in these works, was he right to think this? Is there evidence in his work that perhaps agents do have more influence than his concept of structuralism can account for? I suggest that this is the case and (...) will argue that Foucault's structuralist views are incomplete and result in an incoherence. I then offer a critical realist account of structure and agency which seems to be able to resolve the incoherence and thus offers a better explanation of the evidence that Foucault provides. (shrink)

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving (...) the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals. (shrink)

This article explores the social and historical conditions under which “people changing technology” overshadows that of “technology changing people” through its influence on human life, society, and the biosphere. Social construction and determinism are thus two sides of the same coin. However, both ignore the inseparability of thoughts and action from lives, lives from communities, and communities from their historical journeys. This hides from view the possibility of technology becoming a secular myth, in the sense of cultural anthropology. The current (...) discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor treats the living world as if it were structured the way technology is. As a result, human life has become “digitized,” since the process of industrialization transformed human life and society to make the computer and information revolution both possible and necessary. It has also misdirected our sense of responsibility for technology. (shrink)

The strengths and weaknesses of the discipline-based organization of our professions can help us understand both the enormous successes of our civilization and its equally spectacular failures. Placing engineering and other professions under greater public scrutiny is recommended as a first step toward addressing our deep structural economic, social, and environmental crises. Doing so can facilitate university reforms to adjust the discipline-based approaches to scientific knowing and technical doing, to permit future graduates to make decisions with better ratios of desired (...) to undesired effects. In the meantime, our war on ourselves rages on. (shrink)

A standard view in ethics is that ethical issues concern a different range of human concerns than does politics. This essay goes beyond the long-standing dispute about the extent to which applied ethics needs a commitment to ethical theory. It argues that regardless of the outcome of that dispute, applied ethics, because it presumes something about the nature of authority, rests upon and is implicated in political theory. After internalist and externalist accounts of applied ethics are described, “mixed” approaches are (...) considered that contain inevitable political dimensions. A feminist alternative, Walker’s metaethic of responsibility, shows that authority is best understood as relational and that situations of unequal power are therefore often the places where applied ethics arises. Furthermore, in a democratic society, commitments to democracy should shape the account of authority, and, thus, the nature of applied ethics as well. (shrink)

This study explores the role feminist ideology played in long-term structural changes in feminist organizations. The vehicle for this exploration was a comparative case study of 14 feminist women's health centers that were started in the 1970s and were still in existence in the early 1990s. Drawing on interviews and site visits, the author describes the early collectivist structures, highlights some of the crises these organizations faced, and describes three structural ideal types that emerged in the 1990s. The analysis suggests (...) three ideological issues that directed structural change: the importance of maintaining a system for the equitable distribution of power, the importance of growth versus autonomy, and the importance of feminism as an organizational outcome or internal process. (shrink)

This article identifies the emergence of the problematic of the body as a consequence of the forces of technology and bureaucracy which have run through the 20th century. It explores the hypothesis that the problem of the body has emerged out of the wreckage of the aura of the individual. It is proposed that aura was destroyed in the First World War, but it is also shown that for Benjamin anticipations of the destruction can be found in the technologies of (...) photography. Yet, out of the ruin of the auratic individual, there emerged a vision of the armoured body in the work of fascist writers such as Ernst Jünger. A variation on the theme of armour can also be found in Kracauer's discussion of the Tiller Girls. The article concludes that the Holocaust can be read, at least in part, as a logical product of the destruction of the aura of the individual and the subsequent identification of the individual with her or his body alone. (shrink)

Definitions may seem marginal to the sociological enterprise but can be very useful; however, they can also lead to serious errors. Examples of both are given in this article. Different types of definitions are presented, and their relevance for sociology is highlighted. A stipulative definition, for example, is very useful in sociology, as opposed to lexical and ostensive definitions. The definition of a concept that is used in a sociological analysis has to be sociological in nature, and the concept cannot (...) have the same meaning as it has in everyday language. Additional items to bear in mind when a definition is put together are discussed, including some tips on how to proceed that come from political science (Sartori, Collier, Goertz). A definition can also be very helpful in the research process itself by indicating which are the important aspects of some phenomenon to focus on (Weber, Blumer). On the negative side, a term that is not properly defined may lead to misunderstandings as well as to a false sense of agreement with other uses of the term. (shrink)

While Weber’s distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests is one of the most enduring aspects of his theoretical legacy, it has been subjected to little critical commentary. In this article, we revisit the theoretical legacy of interest-based explanation in social theory, with an eye to clarifying Weber’s place in this tradition. We then reconsider extant critical commentary on the ideal/material interest distinction, noting the primarily Parsonian rendering of Weber and the unproductive allegiance to ‘generic need’ readings of Weber’s action theory. (...) We reconstruct the basis of the ideal/material interest distinction in the work of Rudolph von Ihering and provide a sounder basis for its analytic role in Weber’s ‘grand’ project. (shrink)

The ArgumentAs the American economy became more complex and differentiated in the post-1850 decades, so too did the demand for manufactured products, creating wide markets for both mass-produced standard goods and batch-produced specialties among consumers and producers alike. These developments conditioned the emergence of distinctive work cultures within the two broad spheres of manufacturing, as well as distinct approaches to technological selection and use, labor, marketing, and management. As the mass production dynamic has been well documented, this essay focuses principally (...) on elaborating the practices of industrial specialists for comparison with those of “managerial capitalism.” Conditions and controversies in the textile, woodworking, and metalworking trades provide an in-depth example of larger patterns among batch-oriented sectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including issues of the politics (i.e., power relations) in production and the recording of masculine identity and values. The role of public policies in facilitating the universalization of mass production rhetorics and practices is considered at the close. (shrink)

I am grateful to Felicia Cohn for saying that my commentary “miss[ed] the real role credentialing has in professionalization”, and hope that I can rectify the situation by including...