Unit 8 - Rationalization

Lecture

During the past few weeks we’ve been talking about how technologies interact with large scale social processes to shape our culture. Volti describes this interactive process in Chapters 13 & 14 as he shows how cultural events such as war spur the development of certain technologies and retard the diffusion of others. He also shows, quite clearly, how technologies “take over” our lives and control how we perform certain social activities. Once tanks were developed, war on horseback was no longer possible no matter how much the military wanted to keep their horses and their traditions. Airplanes carrying bombs meant that civilian populations would be much more vulnerable to attack no matter how much we believe that non-combatants should be left out of the battle. Because Volti does a wonderful job of describing how technology operates in this social context, we can use this opportunity to understand a large scale social process underlying the changes in the warfare and much else that has happened in our society over the past couple of centuries. Many sociologists would attribute the technological & cultural changes in the military and most other institutions to a process we call “rationalization”.

Max Weber (pronounced Veber) was a sociologist who lived from 1864 until 1920. During his adult life he saw the industrial revolution become entrenched in Europe and the United States, urbanization become a way of life in industrial nations, science take over as the most important way of knowing, and capitalism become the dominant economic system in the world. As he studied these social processes in Western societies he became interested in one that seemed to him to be a dominant, underlying explanation for much that he observed. He called this particular large scale process rationalization.

When Weber wrote about rationalization, he didn’t conceptualize it the way most of us commonly think about it. We tend to think of rationalization in a psychological way (as a way of justifying our actions or making excuses for things we want to do) or in an economic sense where rational means acting in our own self interest. Weber, in contrast, defined rationalization as the process through which the modern world has become increasingly dominated by a concern with efficiency, predictability, calculability, and “dehumanization.” Weber saw all of these elements as complementing and reinforcing each other as they supported industrialization and capitalism. They were first apparent in governmental bureaucracies but have spread to all parts of society. While Weber did not define them as a system, he was clearly thinking in systems terms as he linked all of these large scale social processes. The scientific discoveries and technological innovations during the last two hundred years have played a key role in this process of rationalization.

It is probably useful to break down the various parts of Weber’s definition. It contains a lot of concepts that need to be understood. By predictability he meant a desire and necessity to predict the future. While humans have always, it appears, been concerned with knowing about the future, predictability has become far more important to us than it was in the past. The need and desire to know what will happen permeates every aspect of our daily lives from the weather to elections to how many parts we will need in the factory next year. Hours and hours of television are devoted to political pundits attempting to predict the President’s next move. Hours and hours of corporate time are spent trying to figure out what consumers will want next year. Everything from traffic signals to airline schedules are examples of how much we like to be able to predict things. Calculability refers to a concern with numbers. Counting, tabulating, scoring, and statistics all involve numbers. One of my favorite examples is the sign McDonald’s restaurants used to display, before the numbers got too big, touting how many hamburgers had been sold. Such displays tell us nothing about quality but the numbers are impressive. Another example is a college student’s grade point average. We manage to sum up a whole college career in one number – the GPA and use it to predict success in a career. Isn’t that efficient! (See how all these concepts connect?) Sports statistics are another example of calculability or a concern with numbers. Sports fans are endlessly fascinated with home run averages, passes completed, or baskets scored. No need to talk about how calculability affects businesses. The concern with the “bottom line” says it all. Efficiency speaks for itself. It is a goal most of us strive for because we must. It is very difficult to survive in modern society if one is not efficient. Businesses certainly can’t. Wasting time or money is fatal in our competitive marketplace. Individuals, like ourselves, who juggle home, work, school, and maybe a bit of leisure time, can’t afford inefficiency either. We’d get behind! We struggle to find the most efficient ways to do things, partly because we have come to value efficiency as a good thing in its own right (who wants to be inefficient?) but mostly because we must. We buy millions of gadgets every year (palm pilots, food processors, diet plans, educational software) hoping to become more efficient and buy ourselves more time.

I hope that you can see that these processes, predictability, calculability, efficiency, are not freely chosen. They, together with other elements, form a system that pushes us around in our daily lives. They shape how we live our lives and, ultimately, the people we become. They are interconnected with our technologies to shape how we spend our time. Automobiles allowed us to become more efficient, to get from place to place faster and faster. Trucks enabled us to transport goods quicker and at a lower cost. We could also be more confident that we or the things we sent would arrive on time. So, it became necessary that we and our things and our things arrive on time. And then it became essential. We use automobiles but they control us in many ways. And so we come to the fourth component in Weber’s concept of rationalization – dehumanization or the use of technology to control human behavior. The societal and cultural stress on predictability, calculability, and efficiency combine to give us fewer and fewer choices about the way we spend our lives and use our time. We are dehumanized by the very technologies we use. Assembly lines are the classic example of using technology to control people but there are hundreds of others. Fast food restaurants are designed to move people in and out as fast as possible to make room for more. They even design the seats to be uncomfortable so people don’t stay long! Most large companies have now implemented automated answering systems that require you to push forty-seven (I know, I’ve counted them! Get it? Calculability?) buttons before you get to talk to a real person. That’s dehumanizing. Standing in long lines at Disneyland, being subjected to strip searches at airports, and not being able to fix your own car because it has too many computerized parts are the result of rationalized processes in the modern capitalist economy and all treat us as parts of system rather than as individuals with special characteristics and needs.

Note that no sociologist is saying that dehumanization is the result of a plot by the government or corporate CEOs to control us. Quite the contrary, it is the result of large scale social processes inherent in our society and dependent on the technologies we have available. We, all of us together, have created and participate in a system that uses technology to control our lives. Given the time and place in which we live, rationalization probably makes sense and is certainly unavoidable. It meshes so well with our modern economic, educational, and political institutions that it would be impossible to change without a serious disruption in society. Like it or not, we are sort of stuck with rationalization. The best we can do is to understand the process, the consequences, and the trade-offs. That’s our goal in this class. Let’s use the medical institution to look at the consequences of rationalization in a very personal part of our lives. Keep in mind how the sociological imagination suggests that large scale social processes and the technologies that support them determine what happens to us and the kind of people we become.

Like all of our other institutions health care, or what sociologists call the medical institution, has become rationalized over the past 50 years or so. It has become more efficient, predictable, calculable, and it has become more dehumanized. When I was a child, not all that long ago, my physician made house calls. He had a small office downtown and lived in a modest house in a modest neighborhood. We sometimes went to his office and occasionally to his house if we happened to cut a finger on Sunday, but if we had the flu or chicken pox or just a high fever he came to see us. Now this wasn’t very efficient. He couldn’t see very many patients in a day. But then he wasn’t counting. His practice wasn’t based on calculability. He didn’t need to predict his HMO corporate profits for the upcoming quarter. My parents didn’t worry about calculating medical bills either. Dr. Brown charged what he knew people could afford and he didn’t mind if people took some time to pay him. He didn’t have a lot of expensive equipment to pay for and his wife ran the office. No, it wasn’t very rational, but I had a sense of security. I knew, as a child, that Dr. Brown would take care of me. He knew me, as a person not just a patient. We were human beings to each other.

Now, of course, we have better medical care. We have more and better drugs, diagnostic equipment, and surgical procedures. Physicians do amazing things – cure cancer, restore severed limbs, replace damaged kidneys. They have more knowledge about what we need to do to stay healthy. All of this has been accomplished through the rational process of science. Predictability, efficiency, and calculability have contributed to wonderful things in medical care. And I’m glad of all that. There are people I love who would not be here if the medical system were not rational. But I miss Dr. Brown. When I need health care, I have to go to a large, impersonal office building and face a lot of red tape. I don’t feel taken care of by the medical system. When I use my HMO to go to a large medical facility, I feel like a number. When I call with what seems to me to be an important matter, and it takes me a month and a half to get an appointment, I feel dehumanized. Sometimes I don’t call at all because I don’t know how to explain my concern to the receptionist. That’s dehumanization. See the trade-offs?

Many of our concerns about the future of healthcare and technology are really concerns about the effects of the rationalization of the health care system. We are uneasy about biotechnologies but cannot deny their uses. Genetic testing and organ cloning strike at the very heart of our moral and ethical beliefs about what it means to be human. These rational technologies, products of a rational system, do, in a way, make life itself an industrial product – the ultimate in dehumanization. But wouldn’t it be great to have a new heart of your own making if you needed one? Antibiotic resistance is a classic example of how ultimate rationalization leads to irrational consequences. Antibiotics are wonderful. It is rational, in every sense of the word, to use them when we need them in humans and in the animals that are the source of our food supply. But use them too much, or in the wrong way, and they disappear. An irrational consequence of a very rational process. The incredible spread of the HIV virus is clearly a result of modern technologies that allow us to travel freely and interact with people we would never have even heard of in previous centuries. AIDS appears to have been confined to a small area of the world before air travel. Biography meets history again. It seems to be possible to control the spread of the virus in the individual and in the population if enough resources can be devoted to it. We’ve accomplished that in industrialized nations but not in poorer ones. There the modern rationalized health care system, that requires payment for drugs and preventatives, works against the needs of people. Dr. Kervorkian’s work is also rational. It allows us to be efficient when dealing with pain and suffering and to predict and control the ultimate unknowable, death. I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves if it is dehumanizing or liberating.

Weber’s concept of rationalization allows us to understand a great deal about the modern systems we live in. It illustrates how the sociological imagination can be used to see the processes that affect our lives and how we live them. I hope you find it useful for understanding science and technology in a social context.