Showing papers on "Ideal type published in 2000"

Max Weber's methodology : An ideal-type

Abstract: Weber dealt-in contrast to the textbook image of his method-with rational and nonempathetic explanatory interpretation. His ideal-type for social action emerged in a very formative period, as a mediation between history and theory and can be characterized as releasing what was inherent in a historicist tradition in crisis. Theoretical elements from Austrian marginalism provided Weber with the prototype for developing contrafactual schemes into ideal-types. Weber as a scholar at the crossroads resolved the problem of uncontrolled value-intrusion in a way that provided rational evidence and limited objectivity, in the form of instrumental means-end analysis. His methodology was coherent over time but gradually emerged when contemporary polemics called for his voice to be heard.

What's in a Name? Conceptual Issues in Defining Electronic Commerce

Abstract: Definitions of electronic commerce are many and varied. They indicate a lack of consensus about what electronic commerce is. ‘A ‘definition’ implies a direct and unproblematic correspondence between the phenomena and the way a researcher identifies it. However, electronic commerce presents a reality that is too complex for a mere definition to extract its true ‘essence’. Weber’s ‘ideal type’ provides a construct to interpret complex phenomena at a less simplistic level. The ideal type acts as a yardstick for assessing actual situations but is never seen as a direct definition of that reality. To provide an improved basis for theorising, we attempt to construct an ideal type for electronic commerce and use it to develop closer approximations to reality. We conclude that definitions provide a gauge of current conceptual problems in seeing what electronic commerce is. Once we have applied the ideal type methodology to electronic commerce, definitions provide us with a point of orientation for building features, developing and refining understanding of its complexities.

Affirmative action and equal opportunity policies—the relevance of a dead German

Abstract: The aim of this article is to place affirmative action and equal opportunity policies in the context of Organization Theory. It does this by relating these policies to the ideal type of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber as well as his conception of rational action. One of the main arguments raised is that affirmative action and equal opportunity policies have contradictory implications for the ideal type of bureaucracy. Another is that acceptance of affirmative action, in particular, may require us to go beyond Weber's conceptual scheme. These ideas are illustrated by means of a consideration of the Employment Equity Act recently passed by the South African legislature.

Verstehen, ideal types and situational analysis for institutional economics

Abstract: This paper is a critical analysis of the potential for application of situational analysis principles to institutional economics. It may seem a little odd to write of the potential for application. The three related subjects of verstehen, ideal types and situational analysis date to debates between Menger and the German Historical School of the late nineteenth century, prior to Weber’s attempts at unifying scientific and historical analyses, and were developed further by Schutz (Craib 1992, Giddens 1976, 1977, Weber 1947). Interest in situational analysis has recently been re-invigorated by Langlois, who, in a series of papers, has developed an argument that situational analysis should be adopted as a methodological basis for institutional economics (Langlois 1986a, 1989; Langlois and Csontos 1993). Situational analysis necessarily involves a commitment by researchers to principles of verstehen and to forming ideal types of situation and agent. Verstehen and ideal types can be recovered in much economics research, but a commitment to situational analysis involves explicit consideration of these issues in forming theoretical propositions or explanations. The recoverability of principles of verstehen and forming ideal types of agent and situation from established economics theorizing is emphasised in Langlois and Csontos’s (Ibid) argument that institutional analysis unite, or at least clarify relations between, institutional economics and neoclassical economics. This paper includes historical analysis prior to discussing contemporary applications.

Modernization, Democracy, and Morality: The Work of Barrington Moore, Jr.

Abstract: This review considers three recent works from Barrington Moore, Jr.'s illustrious career. Moral Aspects of Economic Growth is a collection of essays that are generally concerned with, but not limited to, the problem of morality and markets. Moral Purity and Persecution in History is aptly titled, as it considers the problem of moral purity among the ancient He brews, in prerevolutionary France, during the French Revolution, and in Asian traditions. Democracy, Revolution and History is a Festschrift edited by Theda Skocpol in which a collection of outstanding scholars evaluate and extend Moore's most important work, The Social Origins of Dictator ship and Democracy.1 In this review, I will try to place Moore in the history of social thought, and interpret and assess his contribution to our understanding of the rise and meaning of modernity. Barrington Moore may not have the impact of Max Weber or Karl Marx, but he nonetheless made a rare contribution to the tradition they represent. The two books by Moore under review here often remind this reader of Max Weber. Moore is sometimes in dialogue with Weber, as when he rejects Weber's ascetic image of early capitalists and sometimes makes use of Weber's methods or ideas, as when he crafts an ideal type. Like Weber, Moore explores the nexus between economics, institutions, and ideas and has little use for mono-causality or teleology. The most striking resemblance, though, is the breadth of history and geography Bar rington Moore can cite. Moore may not call on ancient Egypt quite as often as Weber?he himself cites the omission of Islam as a weakness of Moral Purity and Persecution in History?nonetheless, his comparative history draws on China, India, ancient Hebrew traditions, and medieval and modern Europe. And like Weber again, Moore's comparative history leads to the present. Stalin, Mao, Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher are also present.

Ideal types, equity, linkages, and change in sustainable systems

Abstract: I am little satisfied with journal articles that use "sustainable" as a bandwagon for income redistribution schemes. The review of a recently submitted manuscript promoting "more-fair" sustainability, and little else, triggered a memory of faded newspaper accounts of a 19th-century communal settlement on the Dakota plains. Excluding the local historian, few people now residing in the area retain any knowledge of the once-brave dream of Russian Jewish immigrants to farm with distributional fairness. If the sustainability research model is constrained by distributional fairness it will likely enjoy an academic permanence similar to that of the forgotten immigrant commune. Just as early socialists and social scientists favored utopian communal experiments, economists, sociologists, and planners still tend to view sustainable systems as subject to social engineering or abstract economic maximization. For example, a classic economic social welfare model taught to mid-level students, Pareto optimality, requires that policy change make no person worse off: "... the simple assumption is made that only if all individuals are made better (worse) off can we definitely state that a given movement is good (bad)" (Samuelson, 1965, p. 236). A policy-action accompanied by a definitionally true Pareto optimum outcome has probably never been recorded. Weber's ideal type, like Pareto optimality, was a construct meant to point out "characteristic features" of a system that would provide insight in furthering our understanding of complex phenomena like sustainable systems. The ideal typical concept will help to develop our skill in imputation in research: ... it (Ideal Type) is no 'hypothesis' but it offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses.... In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia (Weber, 1949, p. 90, emphases in text). When a manuscript posits that to be sustainable a system must enhance not only inter-generational but also intra-generational income distribution equity (e.g., see Farrell & Hart, 1998), the ideal-type is transformed into a non-Weberian hypothesis. To use social science to advocate Pareto optimality, a more ideal-type social system, or sustainability that has zero negative impacts on people, plant/animal species, or water systems is to fabricate not objective science but utopian fiction. For example, if we define organic agriculture as non-use of all man-made chemicals, fertilizers, and laboratory genetics, then sustainable organic agriculture on a scale larger than a micro-environment will not exist for long before vanishing, like the 19th-century Russian immigrant commune. A natural agriculture, thus defined, will achieve little success because of the failure to incorporate benefits of production processes derived from technological innovations. This failure is abetted by intellectual blindness to complex inter-linkages that characterize human-based production systems. Ongoing changes in technology, economic organization, and societal institutions compromise sustainability processes. We are a species that is too changeful to achieve sustainability as a utopian ideal type. Economic and social systems will by definition change or fail before systemic sustainability is achieved. Strict sustainability can only be defined in that it does not exist in the past, does not exist now, and most likely never will. (1) In this light the equity of development processes between more and less developed economies are no more empirically transparent than income redistribution processes among communities within one region of a country. AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF DAIRY SUSTAINABILITY An integrated modeling approach now in development illustrates the complexity of sustainable dairy production in the Susquehanna watershed that flows into the Chesapeake Bay, an area of much environmental interest at this time. …