ABSTRACT
Why read Weber any more? The answer to this question has not always been self-evident, for at least three reasons. First, recent systems approaches and empirical research on organizational structure (such as the Aston studies referred to by Stuart Clegg) suggested the obsolescence of Weber’s apparently mechanistic, monocratic and closed model of institutional organization. Secondly, critical social theorists tended to see Weber as a nationalistic anti-socialist theorist who predicted the inevitability of bureaucratic domination, in contrast to the more liberating theories of Marxists, Foucauldians or postmodernists. Thirdly, for those who view Weber as theorist of the iron cage, the organizational developments of the past two decades or so—flexibilization, post-Fordism, disorganization—further point to the irrelevance of Weber’s conceptual framework for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, it has been argued here that these are poor reasons for rejecting Weber, since each is open to challenge.
