Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In sociology, the iron cage is a concept introduced by Max Weber to describe the increased rationalization inherent in social life, particularly in Western capitalist societies. The "iron cage" thus traps individuals in systems based purely on teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control.
But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Page 181, 1953 Scribner's edition.) Weber maintained that while Puritan religious ideas had significantly impacted the development of economic systems in Europe and United States, there were other factors in play, as well.
One of the most prominent examples of this was the work of German economist and social theorist Max Weber; Weber focused on the organizational structure (i.e. bureaucracy) within society, and the institutionalization created by means of the iron cage which organizational bureaucracies create. In Britain and the United States, the study of ...
Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control.
Rationalisation caused the West to be trapped in the stahlhartes Gehäuse ("iron cage" or "steel-hard casing") that was the modern capitalist economic order. [164] Meanwhile, ideal types were representative figures, or case studies, that represented concepts.
Weber was genuinely alarmed by the prospect that an institutionalized, morally vacuous or pernicious instrumental, and especially, formal, rationality might be used to justify morally questionable ends. Such rationality could potentially strip individuals of their freedom and dignity, placing them, metaphorically, in an 'iron cage' of despair ...
In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society.The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. [1]
Weber knew (and personally regretted) that European societies had been rejecting supernatural rules of behavior since the Age of Enlightenment. He called this discrediting of value-rational ends " disenchantment ", [ 3 ] and feared that placing faith in practical conditional ends destroys human freedom to believe in ultimate moral ends.