Weber’s Methodology: Understanding and Ideal Types
If the social sciences have their own specific object - meaningful social action - then they also have their own specific methodology. This Weber described as interpretive understanding - hence the use of ‘interpretivist' to describe this approach.
Weber used the German word ‘verstehen, sometimes translated as ‘empathy, an emotional identification with the actors we are trying to understand. Weber himself makes it clear that this translation is not correct: verstehen involves an understanding of what is going on in the actor's head, and this in turn involves an understanding of the logical and symbolic systems - the culture - within which the actor lives. Leat (1972) makes this clear with a discussion of the way we understand statistical correlations. If, for example, there is a significant statistical correlation between the number of people living below an officially defined poverty level and an increase in theft, we are likely to think that the two are related. In a society where there are large and increasing differences in wealth, we might also find a statistical correlation between increasing numbers of poor and an increase in sales of more expensive consumer goods - say computers. A meaningful connection between these two would not strike one as likely.Why do we react to the two correlations differently? The answer is that we have a common-sense and shared understanding of the meanings which situations have for people. In the case of theft, the one we take seriously, we reason that living in poverty is likely to leave the individual more open to the temptation to steal and that the more people who live in poverty the more likely we are to see an increase in theft. On the other hand we do not expect the poor to scrape together whatever money they can find and carefully save it so that they can surf the net. We need a little more thought to understand the second correlation in the same way as we do the first: if disposable income is rising for some groups, we can expect the temptation for people in these groups to buy computers will become more difficult to resist.
More computers are sold not because there are more poor people, but because of an increasing number of comparatively wealthier people. We can, then, understand what Weber calls the ‘states of mind' of the actors concerned (Weber 1922, 1947: 87). More fundamentally we know the meaning of the symbols - we know what computers are, we know what poverty means and so on, and we know the sorts of connections that people make between financial states and purchases - we know what we might call ‘the logic' of their behaviour. The shared culture is essential to interpretive understanding.Weber talks of two types of understanding: observational and explanatory. Observational understanding is simply a matter of recognizing what somebody is doing. I see somebody standing on the kerbside, peering up and down the road. This is simply a description of what the person is doing - it is what I see in front of me. An explanatory understanding is achieved when I understand the reason they are standing there - perhaps to check that the road is clear so that he or she can cross over; there is an even fuller explanation available if I can discover why this person wants to cross the road. There is a sense here in which an explanation is as full a description as one can achieve. This would be the case as long as the person whose actions I try to explain is behaving in a rational, instrumental way - each stage of the action leading on to the next in a chain which leads to the person's desired goal.
If interpretive understanding is the method by means of which the social scientist studies his or her object, then the tool that he or she uses is the ‘ideal type' (Weber 1949). This is not ideal in the sense that it is desirable, something to be aimed at, but ideal in the sense that it is a construction in the social scientist's head, an idea. For Weber the process of thinking rationally produces knowledge, and the ideal type is an account of what the object being studied would be like in its most rational form.
Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy, therefore, is not a model of bureaucracy, nor is it something which can exist in the real world, nor is it an average type: it is a rational construction, a catalogue of purely rational procedures and organizational structures. We can then use the ideal type and compare it with bureaucracies that exit in the real world and so learn how real- world bureaucracies differ, and so better understand their functioning. Similarly, Weber, in his account of the connection between Protestantism and capitalism, constructed ideal types of both.The next question is: ‘How do we judge our explanation of social phenomena?' It should be evident that what Weber is suggesting is that we construct stories about the social world. We do not aim to discover universal laws of society - he suggests that even should we find such a law it would not be of much use to us because the task of the social scientist is to understand individual events and explain them through the meanings that the individuals involved attach to their actions (Weber 1949). This also means that we cannot refer, as many social scientists do, to collective bodies such as social classes or the state. Strictly speaking such bodies cannot exist, but we can talk about them if the people we are studying think they exist and act as if they really exist. Weber modifies this position a little when he talks about class and status groups, but for him the general rule is that we can talk about such groups only when people think they exist or are conscious of belonging to them.
However, none of this takes us very far towards judging the explanations that we do construct - it just lays out the sort of ideas that we should not use in our explanations, or only use in limited circumstances. Weber suggests that there are two criteria. The first he calls ‘meaning adequacy', or adequacy on the level of meaning. This seems to be a matter of telling a reasonable or believable story about those we are studying.
The story has to be rational: it should be credible, for example, that the beliefs held by the members of some Protestant sects should encourage them to adopt a particular attitude towards work and towards reinvestment of profits, and that the attitude that they adopted to work should result in business success.The second criterion is causal adequacy, but by ‘cause' here Weber means something different from what natural scientists mean by the term. We cannot give any overarching or general account of the rise of capitalism, but we can identify a number of contributing factors, so at different points in his work Weber discusses the legal and the economic preconditions for the rise of capitalism, and his argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05, 1930) is that Protestantism is the decisive factor. This is established on the level of cause by his other religious studies, which show that in certain situations the other preconditions for the rise of capitalism existed but the missing condition was an equivalent to the Protestant ethic. Establishing causal adequacy, then, involves a comparative examination of different but similar situations, trying to identify crucial features leading to different outcomes. This sort of comparative analysis is sometimes seen as the social scientist's equivalent to laboratory testing.