Chapter 3. Culture
3.4. Culture as Restriction: Rationalization and Commodification
The previous section examined culture in its innovative guise. Culture, as a source of innovation, is the site of “all thoughts, dreams, ideas, beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness” as Wade Davis (2002) put it. Culture provides the imaginative capacity that enables humans to go beyond the “given” of their biological and social reality. The innovations of high culture in expanding the range of human sensibility and the inventiveness of pop culture, subculture, and globally hybrid culture in creating and diffusing new cultural forms attests to the innovative side of culture. However, culture can also be examined in its restrictive guise, as a dimension of social life that confines human possibilities. Two contemporary modes of culture as restriction can be seen in the processes of rationalization and consumerism.
Rationalization
Max Weber’s analysis of modern society centers on the concept of rationalization. Arguably, the primary focus of Weber’s entire sociological oeuvre was to determine how and why Western civilization and capitalism developed where and when they did. Why was the West the West? Why did the Western world modernize and develop modern science, industry, military, and democracy first when, for centuries, Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East were technically, scientifically, and culturally more advanced than the West?
Weber argued that the modern forms of society developed in the West because of the process of rationalization: the general tendency of modern institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of instrumental reason — choosing the most efficient means to achieve defined goals — and the overcoming of “magical” thinking (which in Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology was referred to as the “disenchantment of the world”). In modernity, everything is subject to the cold and rational gaze of the scientist, the technician, the bureaucrat, and the business person. “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play… rather… one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted” (Weber, 1919). As impediments toward rationalization like religious belief and tradition were removed, organizations and institutions were restructured on the principle of maximum efficiency and specialization. Older, traditional (inefficient) types of organization were gradually eliminated. Weber’s question was, what are the consequences of rationality for everyday life, for the social order, and for the spiritual fate of humanity?
Through rationalization, all of the institutional structures of modern society are reorganized on the principles of efficiency, calculability, and predictability. These are the bases of the “technical and economic conditions of machine production” that Weber refers