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Record W2084334296 · doi:10.1177/0270467604263181

Max Weber and the Iron Cage of Technology

2004· article· en· W2084334296 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueBulletin of Science Technology & Society · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicWeber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDisenchantmentTechnocracyBureaucracyRationalitySociologyContext (archaeology)AmbivalenceEpistemologySocial sciencePositive economicsPolitical scienceLawEconomicsPoliticsPhilosophySocial psychologyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Max Weber is seen by mainstream social scientists as a sociologist, social theorist, and theorist of bureaucracy. In this reassessment of Weber’s social science and its methodology, it is suggested that Weber can also be seen as a compelling early 20th-century critic of science and technology. The theme of technology, and Weber’s ambivalence about it, is approached through a discussion of his notion of disenchantment. In the modern, disenchanted world, social scientists are compelled to choose the values that guide research, but research is constrained by the technocratic requirements of large, bureaucratic institutions that sponsor and fund it. The article asks whether Weber’s notion of individual values is still applicable in the context of social science in the early 21st century. In a line of thought that can be traced to Postman and Ellul, it is asked whether the choices social scientists make can puncture the dense web of bureaucratic-technological rationality of which Weber was critical.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.276
Threshold uncertainty score0.894

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.108
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.257 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it