Talking About Organizations Podcast

Coming soon! We return once more to Max Weber and look at one of his most important and noteworthy speeches, “Science as a Vocation,” delivered in 1918 at Munich University. This speech may be seen as a text assigned to rising graduate students in many fields, owing to its exhortations to go beyond researching and writing about important knowledge and consider the ethical and moral implications of that research.

This is an expanded version of the supplement from the original Episode 6 on Max Weber's Bureaucracy. This release includes both the original supplement from Dmitrijs along with an extended commentary from Tom to cover contemporary views on bureaucracy since the original episode's January 2016 release.

In this release, we take a retrospective look at Weber's famous work and our original episode. How has our views about bureaucracy changed over the past decade (2016-when the original Weber episode was released) or century (1918-when the speech was delivered).

This is an edited re-release of our Episode 6, Part 2 on Max Weber's bureaucracy, originally from January 2016. Next week, we will provide an additional discussion where we bring Weber's ideas to contemporary times.

We are revisiting an older episode, our Episode 6 on Weber’s bureaucracy. The original episode explored the work objectively, trying to understand how Weber was encouraging the use of rational rules and hierarchical systems to foster greater stability in society rather than efficiency. But it never seemed to happen as bureaucracies became a dominant organizational form. By re-reading Weber through the lens of institutional logics, we hope to better understand why this is the case. This week, we release an edited version of Part 1 of the original episode.