Weber: Social Actions
Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the founding fathers of Sociology. Weber saw both structural and action approaches as necessary to fully understand society and social change. Max Weber observes that social action is that action of an individual which is somehow influenced by the action and behavior of other individuals and by which it is modified, and its direction is determined. Weber writes, “A correct causal interpretation of concrete course of action, is arrived at when the overt action and the motives have both been correctly apprehended and at the same time their relation has become meaningfully comprehensible.”
Types of Social Action
Weber classified social action into four types as follows:
Zweckrational Action (Rationally Purposeful Action):
This is purely rational action. It means that the actor is fully conscious of this end and selects the appropriate means towards the attainment of his goal. Economic behaviour is purely rational in the sense that a producer chooses the most cheap and efficient means in the production of goods. Every entrepreneur aims at optimum level of production using the best, efficient means to achieve this end. Hence, he chooses between the innumerable alternatives open to him to achieve this goal and exercise rationality principle. His decision is purely rational in economic terms. This is referred to as “Zweckrational action” by Weber.
Wertrational Action (Value Rational Action):
The second kind is Wertrational action, in which values govern the actor. Here logicality refers more to the means than to the end because the ends may or may not be true. Religious behaviour, in which people engage in a number of activities to achieve certain things, is typically an example of this kind of social action. Whether a devotee does achieve his ends through a particular religious means cannot be known, but the fact that he engages in prayer and other related activities denotes that he is influenced by religion as a value.
Affectual Social Action:
Affective action fuses mean and ends together so that action becomes emotional and impulsive. Such action is the antithesis of rationality because the actor concerned cannot make a calm, dispassionate assessment of the relationship between the ends of action and the means that supposedly exist to serve these ends. Rather the means themselves are emotionally fulfilling and become ends in themselves. Thus, the feelings of the people are considered here. It's an action unplanned, resulting from the actor's emotional state of mind. A mother patting her child on his back affectionately is the best example of this action.
Traditional Social action:
Traditional social action is performed merely because it has always been done. All customs, folkways, and mores belong to this category. A particular way of dressing, for instance, is followed because that is what people before have been following, observance of several rites and performance of ceremonies is a matter more of custom than rationality.
Weber broadly classifies the above four kinds into rational and irrational typologies. However, this classification is not mutually exclusive because a particular action may fall into the above categories. Marginal causes are not uncommon in sociological knowledge. However, the typologies of social action propounded by Weber have been the banes of not only “social action” as such but that of the ‘ideal type’ analysis, Ideal types, referred to as standards for comparative methods, are based on the Zweckrational classification of social action and these formulations in modern sociological theory are indeed immense.
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