The hardest part of starting a blog to discuss my academic work and interests has been coming up with a name. It’s fair to say I’ve said to plenty of people that I am working on a blog but, rather than writing, it’s been waiting for a suitable name that’s taken the most time. In the end I’ve decided to go with Weber’s term Substantively Rational (with a question mark) as the title for the blog.

For those unaware of the term, substantive rationality refers to one of Weber’s four types of social action and describes actions:

“…determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success” (Weber, 1968: 24-25)

This is contrasted with formal or instrumental rationality which describes a system (economic, legal, bureaucratic) where the means (rules, procedures) are often considered over the ends they achieve. The conflict between these two forms of social action is often described in terms of “means justify the ends” and the “ends justify the means”.

Though the terms are infrequently used within my academic writing, it is this contrast that has been the overall guiding principle for my research interests. As a young undergraduate I was fascinated by my first encounters with Weber and the contrast between the means and ends of social actions. When applied to the bureaucratic effectiveness of the Holocaust through Bauman or McDonalds’ Fast Food through Ritzer, I was both fascinated and then depressed.  With an avid interest in music it didn’t take long for me to see the instrumental rationality in X-Factor. When I applied for a PhD scholarship, it was initially to examine the art-commerce conflict in pop music and written in terms of instrumental/substantive action. Though I’ve moved on from Weber explicitly within my research, that spirit is there implicitly throughout – my number one hero, Pierre Bourdieu, was always a Weberian at heart (see Bourdieu, 1994; 1998; Bourdieu et al, 2011).

The reasons then for founding a blog named Substantively Rational? are two-fold. The purpose of the blog will firstly be for me to write about and publicise my research – a lot of public sector money has gone into my research and certainly this seems like one suitable means for its dissemination. But secondly, the blog allows me to talk about things that interest me that broadly fit within this theme of substantive vs. instrumental rationality – be it, art-commerce conflicts in cultural production, education, language, etc.

To illustrate, I’ll use the example of education that is continually in and out of the news. I’m always quite reflective of the education I’ve received: with a business management degree I have arguably one of the most instrumental of undergraduate degrees on offer. Similarly, I was always told in careers advice that I should go for a degree that has a job at the end of it (starting in Computer Science and rebelling to Business Management). Recently, we’ve seen this instrumental/economistic view on education itself being reaffirmed with an elected official for education apparently downgrading the “value” of arts and humanities education. But this value is always explained in terms of skills gaps or employment prospects. Is there any value in education for its own sake?

In that spirit I always found this video from my favourite comedian Stewart Lee articulates best what the purpose of my research is but discussed in terms of education (rather than art, music, language, etc.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDEZ2h41t0I

More thoughts next week.