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Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism

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The human race is considered to be made up of organisational animals as we communicate and organise our relationships with one another. We are defined through our various organisational memberships as well as communicative connections which we make throughout the course of our lives. However, organisations have become a tedious creation evoked through the great sense of complexity created by the organisation itself. The relationships which we form depend on our own perspective and character; a person who is closed off will have a different view of organisations than his outspoken friend.

Organisations are bodies which elicit control - for example a social organisation is a well though-out arrangement of human communication. It is the co-ordination …show more content…

The organisational bureaucracy is a system of rule with many different formal structures with roles which both able as well as constrain human beings. Max Weber is a very important in social science. His work focused mainly on organisational communication and management. Through his work he sought to explain the historical development of the various civilisations by examining, political, legal, religious and economical systems. Weber analysed the question 'What is the connection between religious systems and the development of particular economic structures and organisational form?' and in his work of In his works 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' (1905) he presented his theory of the 'iron cage'. Through his work Weber brought about a cautiously chronological explanation of how the strong Protestants work believes in living meagrely aided in nurturing the development of the capitalist economical system in the Western world. Weber elucidated that as the influence of Protestantism diminish in the social life in due course, yet the system of capitalism remained still as well as the social structure and the principles of bureaucracy which has since then progressed with it. The bureaucratic societal structure and the values, principles which reinforced and continued to sustain it in order to shape one's social …show more content…

They themselves become the vital forces in society. Most of us are born in a society which is organised in the manner - with division of labour as well as the hierarchy of social structure which it bears along with it. The hierarchy of social structure is a system of organisation in which people or else things are divided into levels of importance - starting at the top we find the most important person such as the boss. One simply cannot live in such a society without conforming to the hierarchy of society or else he or she would be considered to be a pariah. According to Weber; how someone life and worldwide views are formed through the constraints of the 'iron cage' to the extent that people within it cannot imagine an ulterior way of being and living. We are born into this cage that dictates how we are to live our lives and we bear off springs this will be the case as well as everyone is born in such confinements. The 'iron cage' is simply an ideology put forward by Max Weber to depict the constrain that the bureaucratic organisational life brings with it. With the existence of such a cage, human beings are never truly free - even if they consider themselves to be. They are trapped within the hierarchy which is imposed on

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As a whole, during the Gilded Age “the middle and upper-middle class seemed to be becoming, in part as a result of its wartime experience, less sensitive to the suffering and hardship of the poor” (Ginzberg 207). Subsequently, “[m]iddle-class Protestantism became increasingly defensive of privilege, insensitive to the poor, and harsh towards efforts to change from within” (Ginzberg 207). In fact, “[m]any ministers came to endorse a corporate defense of property and expressed hostility to labor organizing” and it was believed that in no place “did the business spirit find greater favor than in the Protestant church” (Ginzberg 207). Similarly, Carter finds that the Gilded Age “was a time when the gospel of Christ was felt to be in full harmony with the Gospel of Wealth” (Ginzberg 207 fix citation). Had it been religion that shaped the morals of the people during the Gilded Age then the protestant church still would have reflected the same “self giving love seen in Christ” (Latourette 83) that christianity was built on.

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In his most famous publication, Weber studies the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the emergence of contemporary capitalism. He accounts bureaucracy as a key feature in modern society. This is in no way a detailed account of Protestantism itself but instead an introduction to his later studies such as “The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism” or “The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism”. Weber argues that the “spirit” that defines capitalist ideas originates in the Protestant Reformation.

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