Abstract
As has been shown, the sociology of organization developed primarily in the USA, from where it was imported to Germany primarily by Niklas Luhmann and Renate Mayntz from the 1960s onwards. One, if not the central, point of reference for early US organizational sociology is Max Weber’s sociology of rule. This is surprising in that Weber cannot easily be considered an organizational sociologist.
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Notes
- 1.
In his biography of Weber, Jürgen Kaube judges that the history of organizational sociology, “initiated by Weber, represents a single critique of his machine analogy and his picture of hierarchical control” (Kaube, 2014, p. 262). W. Richard Scott even judges that Max Weber’s influence on organizational theory was evident from the beginning – “indeed, in many ways it was the beginning!” (Scott, 2003, p. 166).
- 2.
For a highly instructive critique of this interpretation, see Tyrell (1981, p. 46f.).
- 3.
The extent to which Weber’s material analyses already anticipate Luhmann’s insights into organizational sociology with regard to informal structures – without, of course, achieving (or even striving for) a comparable degree of generalization and theoretical systematization – can be seen, for example, in his debate speech at the Vienna conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1909, which he concludes with the remark that a “business officialdom stripped of its divine nimbus” and susceptible to corruption, such as he thinks he can identify in the USA, England or France, is under certain circumstances more “efficient” than the “highly moral, authoritarian transfigured German officialdom” (Weber, 1988b, p. 416). The echoes of Luhmann’s notion of “usable illegality” are hard to ignore. Weber’s purely power-political value considerations, towards which “illegality” is supposed to be more efficient than rigid conformity, are admittedly different from those of Luhmann, who relates the concept to the problems of adaptation and self-preservation of organizations in general. Structurally, however, they are descriptions of the same phenomenon.
- 4.
Of course, such a critique must not forget that the formal type of bureaucracy alone was not sufficient for Weber to justify the “superiority” of occidental forms of organization, but that he sought above all to emphasize the extra-organizational, especially religious, preconditions of civil service discipline, which remains a central component of the efficiency of bureaucracies.
- 5.
For a recent, quite elegant attempt to interpret Weber’s work from such critical-normative positions, see Marty (2020, p. 22ff.).
- 6.
The closedness as a social system is already contained in Weber’s concept of the “organisation” (Verband). Only the autonomy and autonomous capacity to act seems to contradict Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, since at the head of his bureaucracies there is typically no rationally trained bureaucrat, but a hereditary or official charismatic ruler standing outside the bureaucratic order (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 401). However, the dependence of bureaucratic rule on specialist and official knowledge in particular often causes a tendency for the bureaucratic apparatus to become independent of its master, whereby it itself gains autonomy and, so to speak, collective “agency” (cf. Breuer, 1997, p. 121f.).
- 7.
At this point, Weber also uses the word “Organisation” in German, whereas instead, where the English translation speaks otherwise of organizations, he usually uses the word “Verband”.
- 8.
Another reason is probably that America’s modern large corporations were already described in terms of state bureaucracies and structured according to them during their rise towards the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Graeber, 2015, p. 11f.). The concept of a “bureaucratic administrative staff” therefore also seemed appropriate for private capitalist organizations.
- 9.
That Parsons was well aware of the difficulties of translating economy and society is shown by the countless footnotes he added to his attempt to translate the first three chapters. And it is also undeniable what Lawrence A. Scaff remarks about this very translation: “pried loose from their linguistic matrix, some concepts lose too much of their original connotation”. Whether Parsons’ translation can therefore already be considered “as close as we can come to Weber’s last words in social theory”, however, remains more than questionable (cf. Scaff, 2011, p. 237).
- 10.
The same is the case for Keith Tribe’s translation, which as the most up-to-date translation is nevertheless used here.
- 11.
For more recent findings on contractual wage labor in the first known great empire of Assyria, see also Radner (2015, p. 333ff.).
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Jakobs, P. (2022). Max Weber and the Sociology of Organization. In: Max Weber and the sociology of organization. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7_2
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