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This is a blog for a community of students in Mike Levien's sections of Sociology 101B: "Sociological Theory," in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2009.
Theory Rocks!
This is the informal blog spot for Mike Levien's section of Sociology 101B. For the rest of the semester, we'll use this blog to clarify the work(s) of Durkheim, Weber, Foucault, de Beauvoir, MacKinnon, and Collins. Feel free to endlessly post, and don't forget: Theory Rocks!
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2009
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April
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- Bureaucracy in concrete
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy within East Bay Conso...
- Bureaucracy and the Human Rights Campaign
- Military and Rational Bureaucracy
- The Spirit of Capitalism
- Rational Bureaucracy and Safe Passage
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy in Maganda
- An Institution of Rational Bureaucracy
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy and the Children's Sh...
- Rational Bureaucracy in Professional Baseball
- This short memo illustrates the fundamental featu...
- Rational Bureaucracy in The Western Hemisphere Ins...
- Bureaucracy in School
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy in Public High Schools
- Rational Bureaucracy in the American Red Cross
- Weber' Bureaucracy in a Middle School Tutoring Agency
- Bureaucracy and the Men's Story Project
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Max Weber argues that the Spirit of Capitalism is the ethic of duty to increase Capitalism. He sees the Spirit of Capitalism as an end to itself, in which the individual has a duty to prosper. The spirit of capitalism is the rational pursuit of economic gain. It is discovered through religion, mainly through the engagement of worldly activities. The Spirit of Capitalism comes from Protestantism, which offers a concept of worldly “calling.” The first protestant concept that Weber indicates is Lutheranism. Luther’s idea of the calling (giving worldly activity a religious importance) was the product of reformation. Luther believed that the calling is the fulfillment of an individual’s duties by “his position in the world.” However, Weber believes that Luther’s idea of worldly activity cannot be fully connected to the spirit of Capitalism (80-81). Therefore, he specifies the concept of predestination (damnation or eternal salvation), which is rooted from Calvinism. The elements within the belief of predestination include the work for the glorification of god; not knowing god’s way creates anxiety, and mutual surveillance- behavior determining who is or who isn’t saved by the power of god.
ReplyDeleteThe loss of religiosity underpinning capitalism leads to mechanized industry. The Spirit of Capitalism loses its religiosity, and instead traps people into the iron cage of a rule based life (176-182). Therefore, Capitalism becomes a machine; there is no escape. Work becomes passionless, because workers enter into a vast machine of work, which makes life meaningless.
Theater cannot be entirely related to the Spirit of Capitalism, because it does not encompass the concept of religiosity. However, the “spirit” can relate to the passion and emotion that performers engage in during a performance. Performers are able to express themselves and drive a force of strong meaningfulness to the performance on stage. Performers engage in daily rehearsals and hope to continue on a consistency of improvements to engage themselves fully with the characters they are playing. The stage performances are very meaningful to the actors and dancers, for they are emotionally dedicating themselves to prosper on stage and be qualified for higher levels of opportunities. In contrast to the spirit of capitalism, a performer’s duty to prosper is not for the glory of god, but for his or her own passion and sake of living a decent and passionate life style.
Theater can relate to Weber’s concept of the Spirit of Capitalism. Performers experience many downfalls in the theater world, which traps them in an iron cage. This iron cage consists of daily routines of hunting for jobs through repetitive auditions. It becomes impassionate and meaningless when actors and dancers begin to really struggle through their experiences to find jobs.
Weber believes that the iron cage traps people and no matter what, they are unable to escape it. This is not fully related to theater. Although performers can be trapped in this iron cage, there is a possibility to escape from it. This escape can happen through their power to take a different path in their lives, such as finding job unrelated to auditions or by gaining more experiences through deeper educational opportunities.