ABSTRACT
Instrumental action is rooted on the one hand in desired outcomes and on the other hand in beliefs about cause/effect relationships. Technical rationality can be evaluated by two criteria: instrumental and economic. Complex organizations are built to operate technologies which are found to be impossible or impractical for individuals to operate. The essence of the instrumental question is whether the specified actions do in fact produce the desired outcome, and the instrumentally perfect technology is one which inevitably achieves such results. Technical rationality, as a system of cause/effect relationships which lead to a desired result, is an abstraction. It is instrumentally perfect when it becomes a closed system of logic. Mass production manufacturing technologies are quite specific, assuming that certain inputs are provided and finished products are somehow removed from the premises before the productive process is clogged; but mass production technologies do not include variables which provide solutions to either the input- or output-disposal problems.
