In Part 2, we bring Max Weber’s speech about Science as a Vocation to the present day and show that many of the same themes and concerns Weber express are still relevant. Modern technologies such as artificial intelligence may have changed academia in compelling ways, but the worthiness of scientific pursuit remains a valid concern.

We return once more to Max Weber and look at one of his most important and noteworthy speeches, “Science as a Vocation.” The speech includes a number of major themes such as what is the worth of science, what are the roles of junior academics as they establish themselves as scientists, and what constitutes proper teaching. Controversial in its day, but required reading for many graduate programs today.

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.

Coming soon! We will re-examine one of our earlier episodes which deserves another look. Weber’s chapter on the meaning of bureaucracy (Episode 6) remains one of the most popular episodes on the program, but given how bureaucracy has become so dimly viewed, we wanted to give it another look with fresh eyes. Is there something we missed as bureaucracies formed?

In Part 2 of our episode on Gieryn’s 1983 article “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from non-Science,” we review the main points in the context of contemporary tensions over society’s growing distrust of scientists and rejection of science. What factors may be contributing to this trend after so many decades where scientists have been considered noble individual or science considered an inherently good thing? What might be necessary to stem or reverse such trends?

We continue our series of discussions on the sociology of science and cover a seminal article that is commonly found as required reading in doctoral programs -- Thomas Gieryn’s 1983 article “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from non-Science” from the American Sociological Review. This commentary draws from three different historical case studies to explore where the boundary is between what is or should be considered science or the autonomy granted to scientists and what is considered other forms of intellectual pursuit. In Part 1, we explore the cases that involve competition between the world of science and those of religion and engineering, of true science vs. pseudo-science, and of scientific openness and collaboration vs. national security and commensurate need for secrecy.