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Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary thinkers are pessimistic about the endurance of transnational communities. The deviant case of the century-and-a-half-old transnational Esperanto community features a process that can explain transnational community survival: rationalization. Rationalization manifests in Esperantists reproducing a form of community logic integrating symbols, principles (justifications, values, etc.), communication practices and technologies, and organization centered on the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language and community logic enable unifying Esperanto activities across space and time. The Esperanto case suggests that community rationalization and language rationalization – an element thereof – are global phenomena integral to modernity. Having affected communities and language too, rationalization as a global process appears to be more extensive than previously suggested. Transnational communities can endure as manifestations of a global community institutional order organizing social life alongside but largely independently of nation-states, science, professions, and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers work and life of Joel S. Kahn, a Professor of Anthropology at La Trobe University, Australia. He was subject to the play and limitations of professional location, researching and writing in interdisciplinary ways that embraced contextual and comparative analyses, historical sensibilities, and to social strictures and structures. According to Kahn new universalism is a for cosmopolitanism that is built on exchanges and relations between selves and others and privileges.

In this article, we re-examine the McDonaldization thesis in light of social changes that occurred since the 1990s and notably in light of the onset of digital forms of consumption. The argument is presented that while the theory of McDonaldization remains profoundly relevant to the consumption of bricks-and-mortar locales, it is even more applicable in the digital age, as well as "bricks-and-clicks" consumption sites. The ways in which McDonaldization is played out in three iconic companies, namely, McDonalds, Amazon, and Wal-Mart is critically interrogated. On this basis, the article seeks to understand what the intensification of McDonaldization means for our understanding of the contemporary consumption experience. Arguing that theories are routinely outpaced by the pace of social change, we contend that the digital speeds up processes of rationalization while intensifying levels of consumption. The article concludes by reflecting on what this might mean given that we now live in an age of networked individualism, for our understanding of the relationship between place and consumption: the degree to which digital platforms appear to consumers to be "natural" and thus ideologically powerful, being of particular concern. For this reason, we suggest that the McDonaldization thesis is, in fact, more relevant in the digital future than it was in the bricks-and-mortar past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to demonstrate the analytical utility and value-added of 'relational ontology' for studying region-making and regional institutional developments. Relational ontology stands in sharp contrast to the dominant individualistic ontology found in mainstream theories of regionalism. I make the case theoretically and empirically that relational ontology offers a better analytical fit with the investigation of regionalism. Analytically, the crux of relational ontology is the notion that the structure of identity and interests emerges and develops relationally in the process of one's making contact with and subsequently marking boundary with others in relevant contexts. More concretely, I develop a three-stage analytics of boundary-making. The analytical framework proposes three sequential stages of 'proto-boundary', 'yoking', and 'rationalization' towards the making of a boundary that creates 'inside' by defining 'outside'. This boundary-making practice is empirically observable in the politics of membership when regional institutional buildings occur. I illustrate the validity of the relational analytical framework with a case of the exclusive East Asian financial regionalism. My empirical focus is on the institutional development of the Chiang Mai Initiative (the CMI/CMIM (Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization)) over the past 15 years, a regional financial safety net in East Asia. In terms of membership, the ASEAN plus Three (China, Japan, and Korea) developed it while excluding the United States from membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lego Movie is analysed as a consumer-capitalist myth reworking audience expectations and frustrations under contemporary capitalism into a comforting and consumable story. It does so by summoning two heterogeneous mythical topoi which are available as slates in the Western cultural repertoire, namely that of Plato's demiurgic cosmogony and Erotic anthropology to represent a producerist engineering ethos, and the Native American Coyote stories to represent a consumerist ethos of bricolage. Posing as a narrative of empowerment, it promotes the activation of consumer inventiveness in 'prosumption' as a solution to the Simmelian tragedy of culture while containing the subversive potential in the recognition of extra-organisational creativity. The ideological 'function' of the Lego myth is a contribution to the legitimacy of a system whose modus of existence is that of permanent crisis against a nostalgic yearning for bygone certainties. For its audiences, it provides a therapeutic narrative that facilitates the interpretation of their experience of continuously contradictory role expectations as meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent concepts from the sociology of science stress novel sites of knowledge production (e.g. government, industry), they ignore international organizations’ (IOs) growing research capacity. Conversely, prevailing theories of IOs stress their regulative and normative influence in national policymaking, equally neglecting their scientific work. Using bibliometric data for a large sample of 1325 international organizations, this work examines, for the first time, the evolution of scientific output from international intergovernmental research organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations in the period 1950–2015. The analysis finds a striking increase in scientific activity since the late 1980s and particularly since the early 2000s across organizational types, sectors (e.g. law, nutrition), research fields (e.g. life science, social sciences), output formats (e.g. articles, books), and geographic areas. Indeed, some of these organizations are among the most productive science producers worldwide. Additional analyses of IOs’ research collaborations suggest strong cross-organizational diversity reflecting wider trends of scientific internationalization and integration. The article argues that IOs’ scientization requires a thorough revision of theories of institutional change in science and research systems and of theories about the nature and role of IOs. These organizations reflect, and, indeed, spearhead, wider trends of the rationalization of social order and evidence-based global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the “classic” diagnoses of modernity, the German scholar Max Weber is often ascribed the role of the creator of a “theory of rationalization.” If there had to be one keyword for which Max Weber is constantly mentioned today, it would probably be “rationalization.” This term denotes the vast context in the history of ideas which comprises Weber’s alleged “theory” of a universal, occidental “rationalization.” I myself do not really place this “theory,” which has been attributed to Max Weber, into the portfolio of sociological theories in the strict epistemological sense, but rather into the reservoir of “Great Narratives,” as Jean-François Lyotard has called them, “Les grands récits.” Max Weber has bestowed his great narrative of universal, occidental “rationalization” upon the self-understanding of humanity by sociology as a discipline during its roughly 150 years of history up to the present day. Whoever wants to refer to this Great Narrative by Max Weber cannot forbear to reconstruct it from his texts. At best, only the outlines of this Great Narrative can be indicated here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current political economy imposes cost-saving rationalisation within home care work. In this context, a key question is whether home care aides act with indifference to clients or whether home care aides continue to espouse and act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care to clients. This article assesses the thesis of the caring self within a context of rationalisation in relation to home care aides in three organisations. The article brings qualitative and quantitative research to bear on this question. It finds that despite the processes of rationalisation occurring in home care work, home care aides’ overall satisfaction with client relations, and their ability to satisfy clients continue to have significant links to their job satisfaction, and discretionary effort. This offers support for the thesis of the caring self within the context of rationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the rise of ''test-optional'' college admissions policies since the 1990s. I argue that the rationalization of college admissions policies after World War II contributed to the rise of ''meritocratic'' stratification (in policy) and standardized tests, like the SAT, but it also led to the expansion and legitimation of the roles of student and school personhood in the admissions process. Schools more committed to enlarged conceptions of student personhood are more likely to adopt a test-optional policy, in order to recruit students who fit the distinctive characteristics of their school identity. To test the argument, I use a comprehensive data set of 1,640 colleges and universities in the United States and discrete-time event history models from 1987 to 2015. I also assess alternative arguments that emphasize economic or prestige-driven motives. Liberal arts colleges and schools committed to several dimensions of student personhood are more likely to adopt test-optional policies, net of other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While understanding values of bureaucratic work has been a fundamental concern of organizational sociology, research has remained divided over the nature of the values that underpin it. Examining the more generalized sociological insights on the values of bureaucratic work using a rigorous approach to value measurement, this study contributes to the reconciliation of the divergent conceptual insights on these values. Using the European Social Survey data of highly rationalized societies, this study finds employed senior managers to place systematically higher value on self-enhancement and openness to change and lower value on self-transcendence and conservation than their self-employed, entrepreneurial counterparts. The study also contributes to the understanding of the values of bureaucratic work, by examining the value implications of the duration of the employment of senior managers in bureaucratic organizations, and the organizational and the managerial bureaucratization of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber's corpus is characterized by four tensions: the epistemological between subjective values and objective knowledge, the sociological between social rationalization and irrational myths, the political among conflicting values, and the tragic between human conscience and worldly affairs. I explore how three of Weber's successors struggled with these tensions. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in the early postwar writings, sought to resolve them, as did Carl Schmitt--although in diametrically opposed directions. Hans Morgenthau sought to keep them alive but did not refine them. They remain very relevant to contemporary international relations theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology was founded as a positivist and universal science that obscured its national parameters. A first response was to attack false universalism with the particularism of indigenous sociologies, but this effectively reproduced the domination of northern sociologies. A second response has been to recognize and trace the superimposition of national traditions in a hierarchical world. With the movement toward commodification and rationalization of knowledge production, however, national sociologies have been aligned with and merged into the global field of sociology. Opting out of this field leaves one in the wilderness, so the third response is to enter struggle on the terrain of this global field, which in turn requires accountability to publics. To be sure there are limits to these struggles, but they are nonetheless important in keeping sociology alive as a distinct discipline, that is keeping alive the critical standpoint of civil society against the over-extension of the market and its accomplice the regulatory state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review essay, the problematic relationship between socialism and eroticism is discussed, in defense of the erotic. The purpose of this essay is to keep sociological focus on the erotic sphere as a central source of creativity and transformation. The erotic – the transfiguration of sexual energy into cultural inventiveness by the imagination – is thought of as containing the potential to mitigate everyday disenchantment in rationalized worlds such as socialism. Megan Daigle’s From Cuba with Love and Everett Yuehong Zhang’s The Impotence Epidemic are reviewed as two important, fascinating, and well-investigated accounts of the erotic sphere in societies in which socialist regimes imprint their schemes of rationalization. Through a discussion of their works, this essay seeks to find out what happens with the erotic when eroticism is outlawed and the body is governed according to socialist doctrines, and made available for state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how developments within the neurosciences might be applied to advance sociologists' (and other social scientists') understanding of social selves and social processes and, importantly, why this might be a fruitful pursuit despite some residual reservations within the discipline. With respect to the latter, the argument presented is firstly approached by briefly reflecting upon sociologists' lingering reticence with respect to engagement with biology, albeit that there has been some softening of this position over the last decade or so. This piece asserts that overcoming remaining sociological reservations regarding the biological offers considerable potential, in terms of enhancing our theoretical models and understanding of aspects of the social world, potentially offering fresh insights with respect to some perennial issues and concepts. Here, an example of this potential is offered through a neurosociological reframing of the foundations of social structure and the rationalization of conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A World Without Why collects essays, of which some are new, others already published, on topics that interest Raymond Geuss, including architecture, theology, Marxism, tragedy, ethics and the (lack of) unity of academic philosophy as a discipline. A theme running through the essays is a critical, or at least skeptical, stance towards the ‘Enlightenment project’ of explanation and rationalisation, familiar from the Frankfurt School. In Geuss, that stance may in the end express, despite everything, a thwarted Kantian hope: that reason, and it alone, can make things make sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The İstanbul Gezi Park protest (June 2013) was the first multicultural and humorous youth uprising in Turkish history. The protests were begun by a group of environmentalists to protest the uprooting of the Istanbul Taksim Gezi Park trees for the reconstruction of Artillery Barracks. However, these protests turned into a large, leaderless forum that used slogans, humorous graffiti, and music to express suppressed feelings and thoughts regarding human rights and to criticize Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s restrictive and uncompromising acts and his disproportionate use of police force. This article provides an identity profile of the protesting youth based on their humorous messages during the protests. However, it primarily concentrates on how Erdogan rationalizes authority and power through contradictory mental cognitions by referring to mythical dichotomies regarding the protesters, himself, and his supporters and, further, how he configures a specific concept of democracy. The research was based on contextual analysis utilizing critical discourse analysis tools. The research derives conclusions regarding the identity of the protesting youth and the type of identity that Erdogan is seeking to enact for the protesters, himself, his supporters, and the country. This article’s contribution lies in its elucidation of the main characteristics of a unique Turkish protest movement, the rhetorical divide between the protesters and the Prime Minister during the protests, and, particularly, how Prime Minister Erdogan rationalized the contradictory cognitive dichotomies to maintain his power, thwart the democratic demands of the protesters, and manipulate his supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is often condemned as an imprecise concept, alienation continues to flourish as critique in contemporary philosophy, theology, and psychology, as well as in sociology. Historically originating in Roman law, where it referred to the transfer of land ownership, alienation has since been applied extensively to analyses of labor relations, politics, and culture. In the 19th century, Marx showed that workers’ alienation, their dehumanization and estrangement, was a consequence of the structure of exploitation in capitalist industry. The concern was echoed in Weber’s metaphor of the ‘iron cage’ as an outcome of rationalized structures, as well as in Durkheim’s conceptualization of anomie as a variant of alienation causing socially induced psychological states. Today, while research in the structural tradition does not assume that people necessarily are aware of their condition, researchers who assume that alienation is a conscious experience have invented scales to measure its intensity. Continuing both the structural and the psychosocial traditions, researchers now study alienation in relation to uses of digital technologies and new forms of exploitation in work, as well as in politics and popular culture. Alienation is also studied in families, especially in investigations of parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Braverman’s analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being “unbundled” and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming “just-in-time,” deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the influence of the ‘communities of practice’ perspective, research on organizational learning has lost sight of the role of science and technology. As a result, theory development in this field too often takes archaic work forms as its starting point. Based on a structural and materialist interpretation of Marx, this paper proposes an alternative approach that theorizes organizational learning as an outcome of contradictory processes in which the productive forces are progressively socialized, albeit unevenly. This approach leads to a very different perspective on tacit/explicit knowledge, work formalization, identify formation and the roles of managers and engineers. This structural-Marxist theory of organizational learning offers a more fruitful account of learning in technologically advanced, competitive sectors such as the manufacturing and process industries. Increasingly, it also applies to private and public service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Max Weber was pessimistic regarding the effects of rationalization and bureaucracy on human life and freedom, he saw the disenchantment of the world that results from the ascent of science and rationalism and the decline of religious and mystical interpretations of human experience as expanding the capacity for human freedom and moral responsibility. Moreover, he saw agonistic politics as checking the power of bureaucracy. Consequently, despite the conflict between the politicized character of American public administration and Weber’s views on the role of public administrators, his ideas on value pluralism and politics have important implications for American public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, this article explores the problem of ‘distance’ in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres. Distance refers to a way of not seeing those below us in the hierarchy; this might mean that we act in ways that display little thought or concern for the experiences of others. It is argued that the ‘distance’ created between human beings through bureaucratic ways of organizing is potentially debilitating. Academic accounts often strive for objectivity and, in doing so, they tend to stand at a distance from the suffering of those they seek to represent. By contrast, fiction elucidates distance in a more emotional, passionate and, therefore, engaged and engaging way. This article draws on Kafka because his work is subversive and it highlights the need to create ways of organizing and being that promote empathy with ‘others’. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that distance can be eliminated because it is fundamental to how we develop our sense of self and it is ingrained within processes of rationalization. The article is distinctive because although numerous accounts have used fiction to theoretically analyse organizations few have sought to use fiction to analyse empirical material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies belief formation for two kinds of religion. The main conclusion is that they follow different mechanisms. Specifically, for religions relying on supernatural powers, people formulate beliefs based on their prior beliefs and experiences, and they may claim their beliefs for some realistic considerations. For religions based on self-sufficiency, mainly Buddhism, beliefs are formed by an awareness of suffering and dependent arising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habermas does not rule out the possibility of violence in language. In fact his account explicitly licenses a broad conception of violence as ‘systematically distorted communication’. Yet he does rule out the possibility that language simultaneously imposes as it discloses. That is, his argument precludes the possibility of recognizing that there is an antinomy at the heart of language and philosophical reason. This occlusion of the simultaneously world-disclosing and world-imposing character of language feeds and sustains Habermas’s legal and political arguments, where he states that in order to achieve consensus rational deliberation must eliminate force. In this paper, I claim that this argument operates through a manoeuvre that leaves Habermas’s position curiously blind to its own predicament. To explain why, I turn to Kant’s treatment of the problem of evil in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here, as in the Western philosophical tradition more generally, evil has no separate existence: it is folded back into Kant’s philosophical scheme. Arendt notes that as soon as Kant identifies the problem of evil he rationalizes it into comprehensible motives. I will show how, through a move that is structurally similar to Kant’s rationalization of evil, Habermas rationalizes and attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In Habermas’s work, law and language appear as ciphers for reason. The case to be made here is that Habermas’s inability to recognize the paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to the violence in which it is unavoidably implicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The non-static interpretation of the Eighth Amendment was first introduced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Weemsv.United States. It was further named “evolving standards of decency,” in Tropv.Dulles. Although evolving standards of decency began as dicta, the principle is now enshrined constitutional doctrine. This article traces the history and application of evidence in identifying evolving standards of decency, from its philosophical origins through its influence on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The article concludes by tracing the Court’s post hoc rationalization, which makes use of the doctrine controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The corporation is implicated in a wide range of activities that are profoundly deleterious to human well-being. The Holocaust, as organized and carried out by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP; the Nazis), is arguably the outstanding example of organized malevolence in modern times. Beginning with the realization that the corporation and the Holocaust are both organizational phenomena, the present research mines a wide range of literature on the Holocaust and the corporation to identify similar practices and then analyzes those practices to discern how they contributed to the Holocaust and may contribute to the various adverse consequences associated with the corporation. Important similarities are identified and analyzed in respect of organization; relationship to unskilled and low-skilled labor; the involvement of professionals, scientists, and engineers; the pervasive use of secrecy and deception; and fascism. These similarities produce their adverse effects both individually and collectively. Collectively, they disempower or eliminate potential countervailing forces and thereby augmented the capacity of the NSDAP, in one case, and may augment the capacity of the corporation, in the other, to carry out destructive acts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The negotiation to end apartheid – which was initiated in secret in the 1980s – solidified in the 1990s when FW de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP), Pan African Congress (PAC) and other political and social movements, as well as struggle icons, prominent among whom was Mandela. The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) emerged within the euphoria surrounding Mandela’s release and the negotiations to end apartheid. SADTU combined its educational struggles with the political struggle to end apartheid rule. Drawing on documentary (mainly archival), newspaper reports and oral evidence, this article examines SADTU’s struggles for recognition, its resistance against education restructuring, and its defiance campaign against inspection from 1990–1993. I suggest that SADTU’s contentions during the period were rooted in the political struggle to end apartheid rule since it regarded the apartheid education departments as illegitimate structures needing to be dismantled. In addition, the socio-economic undercurrents that characterized the transition were carried into education restructuring and thus pushed SADTU into militancy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We offer an institutional explanation for the contemporary expansion of formal organization—in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion lies in areas far beyond the traditional foci on technical production or political power, such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency. We argue that expansion is supported by widespread cultural rationalization in a stateless and liberal global society, characterized by scientism, rights and empowerment discourses, and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalization principles, driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones. The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors as much as functionally effective entities. They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction. So expansion creates organizations that are, whatever their actual effectiveness, structurally nonrational. We advance institutional theories of social organization in three main ways. First, we give an account of the expansive rise of “organization” rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization. Second, we explain the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors, rather than passive bureaucracies. Third, we show how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization, and the associated interpenetration with the environment, dialectically generate structures far removed from instrumental rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dissertation abstract and reflection commentary present the work of Dr. Sunita Sah. The abstract provides an overview of three main research questions that address conflicts of interest in medicine. Sah first explores why physicians accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers that appear, to many critics, to be unethical. Second, she investigates situations that may increase or decrease bias in advice. Finally, Sah examines the impact of conflicted advice on advisees, particularly when they are aware of the conflict. Disclosure (informing advisees about the conflict of interest) is one of the most commonly proposed and implemented solutions to address conflicts of interest but can have surprising and unintended effects on both advisors and advisees. The reflection commentary discusses the author’s views of the research process as a junior scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Macromarketing has traditionally accounted for the influences of political, social, technological, legal, and economic forces on marketing. Equally powerful and prevalent, the ethical and equitable expectations resident in the environment have more typically been addressed at the more granular level of relationships. Here, the authors introduce these factors as a priori, macro-level environmental influences shaping consumer expectations for ethicality and the equitability of the exchange environment at the macro level. Empirical examination of the insurance industry reveals that consumers’ expectations arising outside of the contractual realm govern perceptions of actual or anticipatory exchange equitability, including the rationalization of otherwise unethical acts and their normative standing. The more complete model addresses the interplay of the macro- and consumer-level variables contributing to the perpetuation of a socially sanctioned, dysfunctional relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber's portrayal of modern society as disenchanted was implicitly a way of considering the rationalization of social futures. These are futures derived from empiricist understandings of world mastery and regarded as devoid of mystery. Yet he devoted some writings to charisma and magic that were incongruent with his focus on rationality, suggesting alternative social futures that highlight mysteries for the recovery of meaning. By examining these writings in the context of his critique of modernity, it is possible to draw out some of his ideas on re-enchantment as the key to understanding alternative social futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three classics of sociology are discussed for how they treat music as a social symptom of modernity's rationalization process, as a conceptual model of modern sociality, and as a generic resource for sociological writing. Where parts of Max Weber's The Rational and Social Foundations of Music focus on the distinctive 'ethos' of creative composition within the rise of modern music, passages in Georg Simmel's Schopenhauer and Nietzsche address the specific 'logos' of modern performance as an autonomous expression of metaphysical will, and the final chapters of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk are concerned with the 'pathos' of listening as a potential way of transcending social divisions. The social contexts, cultural contents, and personal motivations of these proto-sociologies of music are shown to articulate a contrapuntal or 'lyrical' sociology which is attentive to the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural forms along with the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic aspects of social life itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores a range of motifs in the writing of the Austrian émigré novelist and essayist Hermann Broch, that point to themes in the sociological thought of Max Weber. Although explicit citations of Weber's name appear rarely in Broch's writings, the thematic and stylistic contents of Brochs first novel of 1930-1 The Sleepwalkers indicate a plethora of ways in which the Austrian author engages with ideas he can only have first assimilated by means of a more or less conscious programme of reading in texts by Weber and by other thinkers of the same milieu and generation, including Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert. Most notably in the 'Excursus on the Disintegration of Values,' in Part III of The Sleepwalkers, Broch elaborates what might be seen as a certain poetic extension of the Weberian vision of modernity in terms of rationalization, disenchantment and the fragmentation of value-spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's students have grown up in a world structured by the forces of rationalization, making it difficult for them to comprehend the scope and magnitude of the transformations Weber described. In this paper, we outline a plan for helping students appreciate Weber's theoretical achievements, as well as teaching them to think more critically about what constitutes "the good life" in rationalized societies. We use Ritzer's best-selling book The McDonaldization of Society as a vehicle for encouraging students" interest in Weber's work. We describe a set of field exercises that bring Weber to life and provide rich material for active learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers a question that Weber scholarship seems to have left untouched: is Weber's concept of value rationality coherent? In making the case that it is not, I begin with the premise that value rationality is a product of processes of value rationalization that operate in value spheres. Because of self-destructive defects that undermine Weber's analysis of these processes, his account of value rationality is invalidated as well. I conclude with some skeptical observations on his distinction between value rationality and instrumental rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writings of Weber and Taylor have some strong affinities. Both start from the anthropological idea that man evaluates his position in the world and constitutes the social world by values. Their analyses of values aim at an understanding of those intersubjective meanings that have constituted western modernity. But, at the same time, their anthropological starting point leads to different interpretations of modernity. Historically, both argue that rationalization (as instrumental rationality) is one of the most influential Kulturbedeutung of modernity. Weber's thesis of rationalization is, however, entangled in a paradox. Overemphasizing the rationalized elements of modernity, he fails scientifically to grasp certain counter-movements in modernity, such as individuation, subjectivity and new life forms. Taylor, investigating the moral sources of expressivism, shows that these life forms are an inherent part of modernity. Yet his method of articulating the sources of modernity is insufficient to transform it towards a causal explanation of behaviour in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]