The Philosophy of Social Science

Emile Durkheim is argued by many to be the founder of sociology. One of DurkheimÆs most important works was The Division of Labour in Society, including one of his most significant concepts, anomie. Durkheim viewed the division of labor as the chief guiding force of human societies and their progress. He felt that this force extended past economics and also guided political, administrative and judicial institutions. Durkheim did not believe that the division of labor stemmed from any propensity in human nature, but was rather a process of significant generality.

Max Weber is also considered a founder of modern sociology. In his most significant work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the Puritan tendency to eschew worldly materialism actually served as a driving force of material acquisition. The humility within Protestantism and its focus on acceptance of mundane tasks and duties provided no evidence of upward-mobility or desire for acquisition. H

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ble signs of their status, such as expensive clothing, property, and other material goods (186-190). In his theories of bureaucracies, Weber proposed a specific theoretical context; he warned that the rationalist spirit ushered in by asceticism had achieved a momentum of its own under capitalism, and that the bureaucracy was the manifestation of the rational spirit. An ôiron cageö was thus created, according to Weber, in which humanity would become increasingly trapped; bureaucracies would, over time, become so efficient and powerful a means of controlling men and women that their momentum would be irreversible (Weber 230-233). WeberÆs criteria for bureaucracy have shifted along with the shift in the engine for organizational rationalization. Whereas Weber offered three causes for bureaucratization (i.e., competition among capitalist firms in the marketplace, competition between and among states, and bourgeois demands for equal protection under the law), it is possible to argue that the causes of both bureaucratization and rationalization have changed. The state and the corporation are thoroughly bureaucratized; organizations remain, no matter what their specific external or internal structure, basic examples of bureaucracies.
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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