Beyond Weber: Social Change between Disenchantment and Rationalization Processes in Plural Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Weberian approach to social action More than a century after Max Weber, the issue of axiological neutrality, or in Weber's terms 'value-freedom' in the social sciences, is once again being raised with exceptional acuteness in the realm of education.The freedom to research, publish, teach, and learn a variety of subjects stemming from different and sometimes conflicting value spheres is being hotly contested.For instance, in Palm Beach, Florida, a teacher's contract was suspended 'after complaints that he was indoctrinating students during his lectures on racial justice' (Pelletier et al., 2023).Consequently, 'Gov.Ron DeSantis signed legislation ordering Florida state colleges to publicly share the textbooks and instructional materials required for "at least 95 percent of courses" offered in an academic term' (Pelletier et al., 2023).This measure, in practice supported by the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the 'Stop WOKE Act', amounts to 'unconstitutional classroom censorship that restricts teachers and students from learning about and discussing race and gender' (Woodward, 2022).Politicians like DeSantis not only try to dictate which among countless thematic subjects should be open to critical reflection and regarded as socially relevant for students' academic development; they also decide which perspectives should be privileged for discussion in the classroom.Indeed, 'he accused the university of betraying its values-based mission by being "complacent" on an important topic like race' (Marcus, 2023) under the pretext that it was politically motivated by woke culture (Marcus, 2023).This stance decidedly contradicts Max Weber's staunch support for 'ethical passion for academic freedom' (Shields, 1949, p. v;Wessely, 2011), which he understood as valuefreedom (Wertfreiheit) in research and the freedom to teach and learn (Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit) in the classroom; it also runs counter to his emphasis on preserving intellectual integrity and objectivity in the social sciences (Kemple, 2023).In fact, as Shields points out (1949, p. ix), Weber contributed to clarifying the problem of conflating 'the false identification of an apolitical attitude with scientific integrity,' and his arguments should help us 'to refute the unfounded charge that the social sciences are ethically relativistic or nihilistic in either their logical implications or their empirical consequences.'However, Weber would not be surprised by these positions.He believed that 'the "points of view," which are orientated towards "values," from which we consider cultural
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.097 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".