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To reexamine the Weber Thesis pertaining to the relationship between ascetic Protestantism – especially Calvinism – and modern capitalism, as between an economic “spirit” and an economic “structure,” in which the first is assumed to be the explanatory factor and the second the dependent variable.

The chapter provides an attempt to combine theoretical-empirical and comparative-historical approaches to integrate theory with evidence supplied by societal comparisons and historically specific cases.

The chapter identifies the general sociological core of the Weber Thesis as a classic endeavor in economic sociology (and thus substantive sociological theory) and separates it from its particular historical dimension in the form of an empirical generalization from history. I argue that such a distinction helps to better understand the puzzling double “fate” of the Weber Thesis in social science, its status of a model in economic sociology and substantive sociological theory, on the one hand, and its frequent rejection in history and historical economics, on the other. The sociological core of the Thesis, postulating that religion, ideology, and culture generally deeply impact economy, has proved to be more valid, enduring, and even paradigmatic, as in economic sociology, than its historical component establishing a special causal linkage between Calvinism and other types of ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” and “structure” of modern capitalism in Western society at a specific point in history.

In addition to the two cases deviating from the Weber Thesis considered here, it is necessary to investigate and identify the validity of the Thesis with regard to concrete historical and empirical instances.

The chapter provides the first effort to systematically analyze and distinguish between the sociological core and the historical components of the Weber Thesis as distinct yet intertwined components.

This article examines Max Weber’s theory of value spheres as a basis for a polytheistic religious sociology of institutional life. Weber’s approach implies institutional theory as a form of comparative religion. Two problems present themselves. If the values of the spheres are to be considered as “gods,” they do not align easily with Weber’s sociology of religion. Given that love was central both as a driver and a constituent in Weber’s understanding of salvation religions, it also implies that love be incorporated into our theorizing of institutional life, something entirely absent in the way we think about enduring forms of social organization. Taking the second seriously may enable us to fabricate a solution to the first.

Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been created, but that wealth has been unequally distributed. Such inequality has meant that large numbers of young people have not been able to find the kinds of jobs and careers that provide the “goods” life extolled in a consumer society. Nor do the dominant values of rationality, neo-liberalism or secularism hold much appeal. These conditions have encouraged the emergence of a number of subcultures of transgression, identity-granting communities of meaning which provide members with a sense of community with recognition and empowerment. As many such subcultures repudiate dominant norms, we note how they resemble the medieval carnival, which Bakhtin showed was a time and place of inversion, transgression, and celebration of the grotesque. It allowed the common people encapsulate realms of agency to articulate disdain and resistance. Yet this served to reproduce the dominant system.

In much the same way, insofar as globalization is intimately tied to cities, we have seen the growing importance of cities as nodal points for global commerce as well as sites for entertainment and tourism. These factors, together with the longstanding anonymity and toleration of the city, have become focal points for the emergence of a number of oppositional subcultures. They include those who embrace extreme body modification, numerous forms of body adornment through piercings (rings, posts, studs), tattoos, and surgical modifications such as implanted horns, furrows, or split tongues. Following Simmel, adornment can be seen as a means of inclusion within a group and differentiation from others. The practitioners of extreme body modification label themselves “urban primitives,” who see themselves rejecting global modernity, the occupation-based status hierarchies of the dominant occupational system and its shallow, materialistic culture. They see themselves as a moment of the “transvaluation of values” in which Dionysian passion triumphs over Apollonian control and restraint. This is especially evident in various genital decorations in which what heretofore has been private and exposure was a matter of shame. There has been a “cultural transformation of the pubic sphere.” While such groups find community, identity and recognition, they must also be understood as a key ingredient of the city in a global age in which diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the offbeat constitute essential moments of urban ambience.

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).³ Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.⁴

Michel Foucault and Max Weber dominate contemporary organisation theory. At least in part, Foucault can be read as an extension of Weber's concepts of bureaucracy and rationalisation. Or, more profitably, Weber can be read through Foucault and vice versa. Central to the development of the bureaucracy was the construction of the career as a life-long project of the self. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, British banks developed extensive forms of surveillance predicated upon the career. Not all clerks satisfied the banks' close inspection of the individual's personal life. Here, we use Weber and Foucault to tell the story of William Notman, a Scottish bank clerk who successfully sued his employers for dismissing him because he married against their wishes.