Macromethods Research Paper

1. Webers Protestant Ethic As An Illustrative Case

Weber’s (1958) The Protestant Ethic exemplifies the meaning-oriented (verstehende) and explanatory goals and strategies of macrointerpretive work. Noting a historical association between the Protestant reformation and the rise of capitalism in Western Europe,

Weber outlines a puzzle. How could a religion leading to more conformist behavior than did Catholicism become associated with radically innovative economic behavior? Unraveling this historical and theoretical puzzle requires understanding the cultural beliefs occasioned by the Reformation and the dilemmas they created for the Protestant believer. Detailing exactly how the new beliefs provided for social control allows Weber to make sense of a culturally significant and historically specific pattern of institutional change.

To do this, Weber constructs the ideal types ‘capitalist ethos’ and ‘Protestant ethic.’ Ideal types are analytic tools for interpretive, explanatory work. The social scientist creates ideal types by abstracting elements from concrete historical situations, then combining the elements into a meaningful conceptual whole. The ideal type does not exist in empirical reality, but it is constructed inductively from that reality to illuminate something of cultural significance (Weber 1958, p. 47, 1949, pp. 91–111, 1978, pp. 18–22).

According to Weber (1958, pp. 51–68), the spirit of capitalism combines two elements: an absolute ethical duty to accumulate capital and to do so in a rigorously calculating rational way. The ideal-typical capitalist must increase his or her capital as an end in itself, methodically identifying and following courses of action that lead to profit-making, while strictly avoiding any enjoyment of life. Weber argues that any account of the rise of modern capitalism must explain how this ethos, which then helped transform economic institutions, evolved.

The ideal-type Protestant ethic analytically com- bines three elements ( Weber 1958, pp. 79–154). First is Luther’s idea of the calling—that people have a moral duty to their work. Second is ascetic mastery of the world, the idea that at each minute of every day, the individual must bring God’s glory to fruition in the world, rather than by withdrawing to a monastery or nunnery. Third is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, arguing that by the decree of God for the manifestation of God’s glory, some people are pre- destined for grace and others for damnation. Only God knows which people are which, and nothing people do in their lives can change their preordained fate.

Once Weber has theoretically constructed his object of inquiry—the capitalist ethos—and his explanatory concept—the Protestant ethic—he creates the interpretive links tying the two together. He asks and answers the question, what does predestination mean and how is it likely to orient behavior for the people who believe in it, given that they also believe in the calling and ascetic mastery of the world? He then argues as follows.

In its extreme inhumanity, this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation [that] surrendered to its magnificent consistency. This was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual. In what was for man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity … the complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments was what formed the absolutely decisive difference from Catholicism (Weber 1958, p. 104).

Attaining salvation is so central that believers will question constantly whether they are saved. Since there is no way of knowing, most people will feel intolerable psychological strain. Strain is amplified because at the same time that participation in Protestant churches and rituals cannot guarantee salvation, believers are told by religious leaders that it is ‘an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen … lack of self confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace’ (Weber 1958, p. 111). It becomes imperative to resolve this ‘Catch-22’ situation and justify certainty in one’s salvation.

What will the believer do? Faced with a preordained outcome, some people might become fatalistic and others might commit suicide. To explain why believers do not take these paths, Weber situates predestination in its broader belief context. Because of the conjunction of belief in predestination with beliefs in the calling and ascetic mastery of the world, the Protestant believer is likely to try and relieve his or her incredible psychological insecurity by bringing God’s glory to fruition through efficacious action in a calling in the world. ‘Good works’ cannot bring salvation, but they do provide an effective way to get rid of the fear of damnation, assuming that the believer lives an entire ‘life of good works combined into a unified system’ (Weber 1958, pp. 115–17).

In short, predestination and the need for proof of salvation provide a psychological basis for constant self-regulation and the rational ordering of moral life. The other elements of the Protestant ethic explain how and why the solution to the need for proof will be found in the systematic rationalization of moral life in the world rather than being found elsewhere. As a meaningfully interpreted whole, the Protestant ethic is powerful brew. The interpretive link to the capitalist spirit now is clear: purposive-rational orientation to capital accumulation as an end in itself is a strategy to provide the believer with a clear, continuous and unambiguous sign of his or her own salvation. As a collective attribution of meaning and action orientation, the strategy—and the macro religious structure that created it—unintentionally reorders economic behavior and institutions.

2. Key Features And Tensions In Macrointerpretive Work

As illustrated by Weber, imputation of chains of meaning, motivation, and consequent likely courses of action are a hallmark of macrointerpretive explanation. Because actors are front and center, with social institutions providing the cultural scripts that orient actors’ attributions of meaning and their behavior, macrointerpretive work is ideally suited to reconciling agency and structure (Sewell 1996). Similarly, macrointerpretive work is profoundly historical, although it is not necessarily historicist in the narrowest meaning of that term.

Because most macrointerpretive work is concerned with imputing actors’ meanings, culture and ideology loom large as objects of inquiry or as explanatory factors (Wuthnow 1989, Mahoney 1999). However, macrointerpretive methods also signal the interrelated construction of historical narratives and social science concepts to interpret historical wholes, processes or particularities, so that they are rendered meaningful to us as social scientists (Ragin 1987). These two analytically distinct aspects of macro interpretive work tend to be found together, as in Weber’s Protestant Ethic, but they sometimes appear separately (Mahoney 1999).

Macrointerpretive scholarship is enriched by multiple analytic techniques including diverse formal and nonformal narrative and comparative methods (see, e.g., Ragin 1987, 2000, Griffin 1993, Stryker 1996, Mahoney 1999). Some scholars view strategies such as narratives stressing sequence, path dependence, and ‘eventful temporality’ and comparisons emphasizing the divergent structural and cultural contexts of events as alternative approaches to doing macrointerpretive work (Griffin 1992, Sewell 1996). However, others argue these strategies are complementary (Quadagno and Knapp 1992, Stryker 1996, Mahoney 1999).

Like Weber’s own work, macrointerpretive scholarship embodies a tension between the concrete and particular and the abstract and general (compare Bendix (1978) with Moore (1966)). Often, macro interpretivists resolve the tension between specificity and generality, as did Weber, by using the concepts they create to resolve puzzles and explain historically specific events and event sequences, while also seeking limited historical, or conditional, generalizations (Quadagno and Knapp 1992, Stryker 1996, Mahoney 1999, Paige 1999). The underlying assumption about the relationship between history and social science theory guiding macrointerpretive work is that history is theorized at the same time as theory is historicized. In other words, the two are ‘mutually constructed’ and ‘mutually adjusted’ so that they are ‘logically interdependent processes’ rather than ‘analytically independent things’ (Stryker 1996, p. 312).

Macrointerpretive work often is portrayed as wholly inductive. But as Weber’s Protestant Ethic demonstrates, it cannot be characterized fairly in this way. Neither can its practitioners be characterized as formalistically applying Mill’s method of agreement, indirect method of difference or some combination of the two. Notwithstanding much literature describing comparative variants of macrointerpretive methods in terms of Mill’s canons, Goldstone (1997, p. 108) shows why ‘Mill’s methods cannot be used and are not used by comparative case-study analysis.’ Instead, Goldstone (1997) likens case-oriented comparative methods to sophisticated detective work. Like all macrointerpretive analysis, these methods involve a constant interplay of ideas and evidence to solve anomalies, they carefully combine inductive with deductive reasoning, and they involve attending to the complexities of multiple and conjunctural causation (Stryker 1996, Goldstone 1997, Ragin 1987). A final hallmark of macrointerpretive scholarship is selection of research topics according to their ‘value-relevance’ and ‘cultural significance’ for the scholar and intended audience (Weber 1949, pp. 76–7, Sewell 1996, Mahoney 1999).

This run-down of multiple currents and tensions within macrointerpretive work is not exhaustive, but it should suffice to show that macrointerpretivists debate (a) whether or not interpretation must involve causal explanation as well as imputing meaning and (b) the prominence that should be accorded to narrative as opposed to comparative techniques. Much, but not all, macrointerpretive work is explicitly or implicitly causal-analytic (Skocpol and Somers 1980, Ragin 1987, Goldstone 1997). Similarly, much macro interpretive work is explicitly or implicitly comparative, even as it relies heavily on narrative strategies (Skocpol and Somers 1980, Mahoney 1999). For a good introduction to diverse causal-analytic strategies and to the multiplicity of comparative techniques employed by macrointerpretivists, see Skocpol and Somers (1980), Skocpol (1984), Ragin (1987), Rueschemeyer et al. (1992), Goldstone (1997), and Mahoney (1999). For a good introduction to the diversity of narrative techniques, including very different concepts of narrativity and its role in macro interpretive social science, see Stone (1979), Griffin (1993), Sewell (1996), Stryker (1996), and Somers (1997).

A final tension involves questions of subjectivity and objectivity in social science. Some contemporary scholars—notably feminist standpoint theorists such as Smith (1990) and Collins (1990)—suggest that it is neither possible nor desirable to transcend the lived experience of the actors one studies. Meanings should be imputed through dialogic techniques practiced with real subjects or, if this is not possible, with historical texts, so that the actors studied would recognize and verify these meanings as their own.

Deconstructionist critiques such as these have been useful to elucidate how class, race, gender, and other categories of domination and subordination are implicated in the production of social science knowledge. However, most macrointerpretive scholars follow Weber (1949) in assuming that interpreti e Objectivity is both possible and desirable. Although there is substantial disagreement over which concepts and procedures are best, most macrointerpretive scholars presume that if the analyst is clear about his or her concepts and how they are operationalized and if he or she employs an explicit set of procedures to establish the interpretations he or she makes, he or she can arrive at interpretive objectivity. Here Weber’s (1949, 1978) discussion of the use of ideal types, counterfactuals, and principles of objective possibility to arrive at explanations that are causally adequate and adequate on the level of meaning is seminal. Contemporary promotion of techniques of ‘strategic narrative,’ (Stryker 1996), of formal qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and its extension into fuzzy set logic (Ragin 1987, 2000), and of event structure analysis (Griffin 1993), can be seen as updates on Weber’s (1949) rules for achieving objectivity in macrointerpretive social science. In these extensions, issues of validity, reliability, and replicability are emphasized.

3. Conclusion

In sum, there is no one macrointerpretive method. Macrointerpretive scholarship is built around a diversity of techniques. Both old methodological stalwarts and new developments are playing their role in generating the culturally significant findings of macrointerpretive research. In the twenty-first century, there is an enormous body of writing illuminating the rich variety found within macrointerpretive methods. What all varieties share with Weber’s Protestant Ethic is an emphasis on imputing meaning to render large scale social actions and processes intelligible. As comparisons of such diverse studies as Wallerstein’s (1974) on the world system and Somers (1997) on English working-class formation suggest, macrointerpretive scholarship of all sorts is well suited to forming and empirically examining concepts, hypotheses, and theories that help us understand how social structures work, how they reproduce themselves and how they change. Although macrointerpretive scholarship relies on analytic logic completely different from that of frequentist statistical methods, it proceeds based on coherent methodological principles and procedures.

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