The second type of understanding is Eklarendes Verstehen – or Empathetic Understanding – in which sociologists must try to understand the meaning of an act in terms of the motives that have given rise to it. However, observational understanding alone is not sufficient to explain social action. For example, it is possible to observe what people are doing – for example, you can observe someone chopping wood, or you can even ascertain (with reasonable certainty) someone’s emotional state from their body language or facial expression. He distinguished between two types of understanding.įirst he referred to Aktuelles Verstehen – or direct observational understanding, where you just observe what people are doing. Weber argued that before the cause of an action could be ascertained you had to understand the meaning attached to it by the individual. This final point can be illustrated by a quote from one of his most important works ‘Economy and Society’, first published in the 1920s, in which he said ‘Sociology is a science concerning itself with interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.’ Max Weber – NOT a happy bunny Social Action and Verstehen Positivism and Interpretivism in Social Research thirdly, he still argued that structure shaped human action, because certain societies or groups encourage certain general types of motivation (but within these general types, there is a lot of variation possible).secondly, he believed we could make generalisations about the basic types of motivation for human action (there are four basic types) and.Firstly he argued that ‘Verstehen’ or empathatic understanding is crucial to understanding human action and social change, a point which he emphasised in his classic study ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’.
MAX WEBBER SOCIOLOGY FULL
Weber saw both structural and action approaches as necessary to developing a full understanding of society and social change.įor the purposes of A level Sociology we can reduce Weber’s extensive contribution to Sociology to three things: Max Weber: Three Key Points Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the founding fathers of Sociology.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
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