THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP: ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL THEN AND NOW.

Karl Emil Maximillian “Max” Weber was a German sociologist, philosopher and a political thinker. He was born in 1864, in the Erfurt province of the then Prussia. Educated at University of Heidelberg and University of Berlin, Weber was influenced quite early on in his life, by the marital tensions between his parents. Many of his writings are a testimony of this fact. Weber is regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology along with Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. But unlike Marx and Durkheim, Weber believed that the study of society should focus on social action and not so much on the social structures. He argued that structures in society were not independent of individuals but were an effect of interplay of human actions and it was sociology’s task to find the true meaning of those actions.

If Weber somehow came to know about the influence his theories wield in the field of management today, he would be more than bemused. For in his lifetime, Weber was revered more for his political thoughts than his theories in management. In fact, Max Weber was part of a committee setup to draft the constitution of the Weimer Republic. Weber’s rise to prominence in the field of management is credited to two of his books: The Rise of Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he linked the Calvinist morality (his mother was a staunch Calvinist) to capitalism and The Theory of Social and Economic