DOMINANCE-DEPENDENCE
The social order characteristic of our modern society has been attributed to the diffusion of 'rationality'.
The autocephalous unit, as conceived by Weber, orients himself to his situation in terms of rational self-interest.
Rationality, on the one hand, obliterates the reliance on custom and tradition and, on the other,
places reliance on values which assume relative position through individual competition and compromise.
The rational age also introduced concepts of society and individual. It was at this time that the philosophers of Europe began to
question the monarchy, not certain of its replacement. The age started as a certain liberation — as all social transitions seem to do —
but it stabilized within a new order of relations. It presupposed rational money accounting — meaning effective prices
determined by a competitive market. Production was determined by demand to the extent that it was 'effective' in the market.
This means that it does not respond to actual social wants unless their possessors are in a position to make them
effective by sufficient purchasing power in the market
(Weber, 1947; 195)
Engels stressed the role of the modern state of producing order from the irreconcilable class conflicts,
and this by essentially oppressing the ruled classes. And, with qualifications, this may be the case —
in the modern state which rationalizes its existence on the principles of Engels himself: the centrally planned socialist state.
But society may be equally heteronomously determined within a laissez-faire state — as Weber points out — in a formally voluntary way.
This is the case where unequal distribution of wealth, and especially capital goods,
forces the low-income group to comply with the authority of others in order to obtain any return at all for the utilities
they can offer on the market
(Ibid; 213).
This, says Weber, is the fate of the entire working class. In the 'formal rationality' that Weber gives to us,
this is the most economic thing to do:
The expropriation of workers in general from possession of the means of production depends on the following principal economic factors:
(a) The fact that, other things being equal,
it is generally possible to achieve a higher level of technical efficiency if the management has extensive
control over the selection and the modes of use of workers, as compared with
the situation created by the appropriation of jobs or the existence of
rights to participate in management. These latter conditions produce
technically, as well as economically, irrational obstacles to efficiency. ...;
(b) in a market economy a management which is not hampered by any established rights of the workers,
and which enjoys unrestricted control over the goods and equipment which underlie its borrowings, is in a superior
credit position. (c) from a historical point of view, the expropriation of labour has developed since the sixteenth
century in an economy characterized by a progressive development of the market system, both extensively and
intensively, by the sheer technical superiority and actual indispensability
of a type of autocratic management oriented to the particular market
situations, and by the structure of power relationships in the society. ...
(Weber, 1947; 246, 247)
Weber gives as his final justification that free labour and the complete appropriation
of the means of production create the most favourable conditions for discipline
(Ibid; 248). But 'formal rationality' is
only one of a duality that he defines. 'Substantive rationality'-- the ultimate values which legitimize the economic-- has often
disagreed.
Weber then goes on to state the stages of this rationality - meaning toward capitalism:
There are the following stages in the development toward capitalism:
(a) Effectual monopolization of money capital by entrepreneurs who have used it as a means to make advances to labour. ... ;
(b) apropriation of the right of marketing products on the basis of previous monopolization of knowledge of the market and
hence of market opportunities and monopolization of money capital. ...;
(c) the subjective disciplining of workers who stood in a dependent relationship in the puting-out system, and the supply of
raw materials and apparatus by the entreprenuer. ... ;
(d) the development of work shops without a rational specialization of labour in the proces of production,
by means of the appropriation by the entrepreneur of all the non-human means of production. ...;
(e) the final step in the transition to capitalistic organization of production is the mechanization of the productive process
and of transportation and its orientation to capital accounting. All the non-human means of production become fixed or working capital;
all the workers become 'hands'. As a result of the transformation of enterprises into associations of security owners,
even the management itself becomes expropriated and assumes the formal status of an official.
Even the owner becomes effectively an agent for, or unofficial representative of, the suppliers of credit, the banks.
(Weber, 1947; 258, 259)
The organizational manifestation of this rationality is the bureaucracy — a dendritic pattern of vertical control.
This is the process of centralization which, according to Weber, is the most rational known means of carrying out
imperative control over human beings
(Ibid; 337).
The spatial manifestation is the industrial-complex — the process of concentration which owes itself to the
formalistic conceptions of scale and agglomeration. It is the spatial manifestation that shall occupy our minds presently.
We will consider the organization in turn.