Current uses of Weber's rationalization theme

“Rationalization” is a sturdy device for appraising Weber's primary achievements. It is superior to other possible choices (charisma, value-freedom, ideal-types, status groups, bureaucratization), because Weber's best working years were spent exploring it. In addition, this key set of linked processes, unlike other phenomena he studied in detail, still seems to be enlarging its range of meaning in contemporary societies rather than becoming a part of inessential history. Paradoxically, rationalization might also be viewed as the simplest to understand of all Weber's principal innovations to social and economic thought. His discovery, if it can be so called, held that modern societies are forever striving to order what in its “natural” state is less ordered or even randomly occurring. Where people once noisily milled about, now they are put in rows or ranks of quiet obedience; where fiscal accounting was done from memory and rough approximation, now it is taken to the hundredth of one percentage point, or beyond; where music was the work of a single minstrel inventing melodies and lyrics as he strolled, now it requires an orchestra that plays perfectly in unison from a printed score, willful deviation from which is a cardinal sin. Weber realized that the organization of thought and action into regimented forms had virtually replaced religion as the unquestioned, motivating creed across much of “advanced civilization.” And while he recognized in these developments admirable achievements, particularly in the production of material goods, he saw as well those seedbeds of pathology that affected individuals as much as the societies in which they struggled, vainly he thought, to maintain their individuality and freedom.