The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 647–684, 2001  2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain 0039-3681/01 $ - see front matter

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The Ontology of the Questionnaire: Max Weber on Measurement and Mass Investigation Robert Michael Brain* Although contemporary sociologists of science have sometimes claimed Max Weber as a methodological precursor, they have not examined Weber’s own writings about science. Between 1908 and 1912 Weber published a series of critical studies of the extension of scientific authority into public life. The most notable of these concerned attempts to implement the experimental psychology or psycho-physics laboratory in factories and other real-world settings. Weber’s critique centered on the problem of social measurement. He emphasized the discontinuities between the space of the laboratory and that of the factory, showing how several qualitative and historically conditioned differences between the two settings rendered the transfer of instruments and methods between them highly problematic. Weber’s critical arguments prepared the ground for his greatest foray into empirical sociology, a survey he directed for the Verein fu¨r Sozialpolitik investigating the conditions and attitudes affecting the lives and performance of industrial workers. Using a different measuring instrument — the questionnaire — Weber tried to implement a concept of social measurement which implied a different ontology, drawn not from natural sciences but from the historical sciences.  2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Max Weber; Social Measurement; Industrial Psychology; Psycho-Physics; Emil Kraepelin.

One of the few subjects which does not generally spring to mind when contemplating Max Weber’s scholarly legacy is natural science. This has not prevented sociologists of science from finding important resources in Weber’s work, however; the work of the great sociologist often appears to hover about the field like the ghost of a late grandfather.1 If sociologists of science have drawn resources and methods * Harvard University, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 235 Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 021387, U.S.A. (e-mail: [email protected]) 1 This is especially true, of course, in one of the earliest approaches to the sociology of science, the famous thesis of Robert Merton, which sought to extend Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to the character of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. See Merton (1970). But the spectre of Weber has also frequently haunted the sociology of the Edinburgh Strong Programme

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from Weber, they have done so believing that they were bringing them to a domain for which Weber had little concern.2 It remains little known that Weber was there first, examining the sociological character of several early twentieth-century natural sciences, and in ways which often presage many of the concerns of science studies at the end of the century. Between 1907 and 1909, Weber launched a series of critical assaults on various attempts to extend the laboratory disciplines to social problems, potentially or actually under way in real world settings. He began with a critical examination of attempts to merge marginal utility theories in economics with psycho-physical studies of consumer behavior.3 After that he turned a harsh pen to the energetics movement spearheaded by the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay.4 This series of critiques culminated in an extensive, yet understudied, monograph-length examination of the psycho-physics of industrial work.5 Weber’s interest in these topics stemmed from his realization that when the natural sciences extended their dominion to social institutions they not only brought new rules and protocols, but they imposed a new material and social order. Moreover, Weber recognized, the natural sciences produced their own brand of sociology, inasmuch as they formed a distinctive network of relationships, specific modes of contact between university laboratories, private enterprise and government, as well as proffering a complete image of human beings in society. In Weber’s view, natural science offered an appealing, but misguided, solution to the political crisis of Wilhelmine Germany.6 The decline of liberal political culture had left a generally unacknowledged chaos of value-standards competing in the public sphere.7 In the short-lived heyday of liberal political culture in Germany, classes and interest groups could find a basis for agreement in fundamental terms of discussion. But the withering of liberal political institutions brought, Weber opined, a corresponding rejection of the older belief in rationality itself, which was now replaced by the categories of culture and psychology.8 As Weber argued in his famous article on the ‘Objectivity’ of social scientific knowledge, in the present age the struggle extended to the ‘regulative standards of judgment them-

and its descendants, as well as ethnomethodological studies of science. See Barnes (1974), Shapin (1988) and Lynch (1993). 2 Law (1994), p. 8. 3 Weber (1908), pp. 384–9. 4 Weber (1909a), pp. 575–98. 5 Weber (1995a). See also the excellent introduction to the new edition of Weber’s monograph, recently published in English translation by Schluchter (2000). For further studies of this and related texts by Weber see S. Frommer (1994); Hinrichs (1981), pp. 85–106; Oberschall (1965), pp. 111–36; and Rabinbach (1990), pp. 189–202. 6 Proctor (1991), pp. 134–55. 7 In his compelling study of Weber, Lawrence A. Scaff (1989) finds the defining context of Weber’s work in the perceived decline of liberal political culture and the rise of a psychologizing tendency in culture. 8 Woodruff D. Smith agrees with Weber’s view in his history of the cultural and social sciences in Germany (see Smith, 1991, and Haas, 1994).

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selves . . . because the problem extends into the domain of general cultural questions’.9 Weber contended, moreover, that under such conditions science cannot claim the high ground on the basis of any kind of natural necessity, since ‘belief in the value of scientific truth is a product of specific cultures and is not given in nature’.10 Science, in other words, offered a form of life and a value-system like any other, rather than a source of authority rooted in the truth of nature. The expansion of scientific authority, Weber recognized, hinged on the projection of the laboratory, its special operations and forms of life, to new domains of culture. Measurement conferred a natural necessity and an aura of value-neutrality upon scientific claims, making it an appealing route to avoid the inevitable conflict which accompanied social decision-making.11 But Weber maintained that measurement, too, was a cultural practice, which often concealed an array of social and intellectual conditions. When measurement remained within a scientific discipline, these conditions were usually well known, enabling it to function unproblematically as a type of intellectual currency. But when measurement was presented as a coherent practice from one discipline to another, it opened the door to problems and mischief. Close scrutiny of measurement practice within a discipline — just how instruments are designed, set up, calibrated and handled, and how readings are taken and interpreted — not only revealed great differences and discontinuities across disciplinary boundaries, but also showed severe constraints attaching to any attempt to introduce these practices beyond the established disciplinary sites. To illustrate this problem, Weber called attention to the growing number of ‘attempts that have been made especially but not exclusively in Germany . . . by an entire array of innovative professional psychologists to find a route from the measuring techniques of the laboratory to mass investigation’.12 One of the most characteristic examples — already exposed by German psychologist — could be found in the criminal identification system of the French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon, which used anthropometric measures and a statistical filing system to make a nearly foolproof technique for distinguishing the identity of individuals from one another. When numerous French psychologists, including Alfred Binet, Victor Henri and others, pursued a similarly conceived ‘psychology of individual differences’. German psychologists were quick to observe that this was nothing other than ‘the Bertillon police-system in psychological garb’.13 But that was primarily a French story. Closer to home, in Weber’s Germany, experimental psychologists had made similar attempts to extend the psychology laboratory to social institutions, as reflected especially by the growing concern for 9

Weber (1904), p. 153. Weber (1904), p. 28. 11 For rich insight into this theme, see Porter (1995). 12 Weber (1995a), pp. 218–9. Weber also called attention to the ‘pedagogically interesting’ attempts that had been made in France and America. 13 Weber (1995a), p. 219. On the transfer of methods from anthropometry to experimental psychology, see Carson (1999) and Sokal (1987). 10

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the problem of the mass-measurement of the effects and conditions of modern work. The involvement of German experimental psychologists in this issue placed them on a collision course with Weber and his colleagues in the Verein fu¨ r Sozialpolitik, who claimed the conditions of German work as their special area of expertise. ‘It seemed unavoidable to me’, Weber acknowledged to the psychologist Hans Gruhle, ‘to make the attempt to confront the methodology of experimental psychology with our usual means of research (such as wage-books, effective work calculations of factories, etc.) in order to show how large the cleft is between us.’14 But Weber, as usual, also had other things on his mind, such as history. His engagement with the psycho-physical problems of industrial work from 1909–10 coincided with his participation, in the very same journal, in heated debates with economic historians over what he meant to say in his famous 1905 work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Many remarks suggest that Weber regarded the contemporary scientific project of industrial psycho-physics as a continuation of many of the themes of his genealogy of the infamous ‘iron cage’ of modern vocational humanity (Berufsmenschentum), out of its origins in the ‘black cloak’ of Protestant moral asceticism.15 In response to his critics Weber emphasized that the ethical ‘style of life’ invented by early Protestants had become unmoored from its spiritual foundations, achieving a remarkable ‘victory in the “souls” of human beings’.16 In another formulation, Weber asserted that the inner-worldly accomplishments of Protestant moral asceticism had become ‘objectified’ in the ‘tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order’, most evidently in large-scale enterprise resting on merely ‘mechanical foundations’.17 What had once been a free and spontaneous, if somber, act of world-making had now become a ‘fate’. reified in and through mechanization. ‘This order is now bound to the technical and economic presuppositions of mechanical, machinelike production’, Weber wrote, ‘which today determines with irresistible force the life style of all individuals born into this mechanism, not only those directly engaged in economic enterprise, and perhaps will determine it until the last ton of fossil coal is burned.’18 If the conditions of machine-like production reigned everywhere, it was in the factory that the crucible of modern asceticism was forged. In the factory, Weber wrote, with ‘its hierarchic authority structure, its discipline, its chaining of the workers to the machines (in comparison with the spinning rooms of the past), its formidable accounting system that reaches down to the simplest hand movement of the worker’, workers became but cogs in a large system.19 Like machine parts,

14

Weber to Hans Gruhle, in Weber (1990), pp. 674–5. Razell (1977). Weber (1968). 17 Weber (1958a), p. 181. 18 Weber (1958b), p. 18. 19 Weber (1995b), p. 149. 15 16

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they also became objects of measurement, measured with instruments derived from the very machines they tended. In practice, the modern psycho-physics laboratory built upon this already machine-like character of the modern factory, using industrial instruments and concepts to configure human beings and their labor. Weber effectively recognized what contemporary science studies have often found, that scientists take hold of the world in a manner very much like the factory, securing a position as a site of productive equipment that needs to be managed.20 From Weber’s perspective the laboratory, as the crucible of precision measurement, thus served as the factory’s historical Doppelga¨ nger and unindicted co-conspirator in the development of the iron cage of vocational humanity. In its application to industry, even the very term ‘psycho-physics’, moreover, reduced the grand Weberian formulation of ‘spirit’ and ‘capitalism’ to a pair of banal mechanisms, clumsily grafted together with the thin connecting wire of the hyphen.21 Against the backdrop of the historically conditioned character of the extra-mural psycho-physics laboratory, Weber struggled to articulate the hidden conditions operating at the heart of its apparently seamless practices. But Weber never intended his critique of laboratory measuring practices as an end in itself. His purpose was not, as one might suppose, to extinguish scientism and place Diltheyan hermeneutics or Lebensphilosophie in its stead. He sought rather to furnish, for himself as well as his colleagues and students, a method of measurement which captured a different social ontology, specifically one in which the workers’ attitudes and states of mind might be discovered both on the workers’ own terms as well as within the contingent historical field in which they operated. From this critical point of departure Weber launched the most ambitious empirical sociological initiative of his career, a project he deemed a failure, but which has been judged ‘the most carefully thought through piece of empirical research of the prewar period’.22 1. The Survey of the Verein fu¨r Sozialpolitik Although Max Weber had concerned himself for several years with experimental psychology, he came to the problem of the ‘extra-mural’ laboratory through a somewhat indirect route.23 Beginning in 1907, Weber and his fellow members of

20

See, for example, Galison (1997), Krieger (1992) and Pickering (1995). The term ‘psycho-physics’ originated with Gustav Theodor Fechner to describe ‘the exact science of the functional relations or relations of dependency between body and soul or more generally between body and mind, or physical and psychological worlds’, which are assumed to exist in parallel to one another. Fechner and his successors developed quantitative and statistical methods for measuring absolute and differential thresholds (or their inverse, sensitivity), as well as computing values in various sensory continua. On Fechner, see Heidelberger (1993). 22 Oberschall (1965), p. 8. 23 For thoughtful discussions of Wundt, Muensterberg and other proponents of the new experimental psychology, see Weber (1975), pp. 93–208. On Weber’s engagement with psychology, see Frommer (1994), pp. 239–58. 21

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the Verein fu¨ r Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), considered proposals for a collaborative mass investigation of the problems of workers and the conditions of work in Germany. At the general assembly of the Verein, held between 30 September and 2 October that year, several proposals circulated representing a range of different conceptions and approaches, with the proposal by Alfred Weber garnering especial favor. A subcommittee was formed to oversee the design of the survey, with the economist Karl Buecher appointed to serve as its director. One year later, after many lively and at times strenuous negotiations, a research plan and specific survey form gained approval, and 10,000 Marks were allotted to carry it out under the direction of Heinrich Herkner. Over the course of the year Max Weber became increasingly involved in the planning of the project, and by the time of its approval had become its unofficial head. In this capacity he composed the two most important conceptual documents to emerge, a long memorandum intended as a guide to the design of the survey entitled Survey of the Selection and Adaptation (Vocational choice and vocational fate) of the Workforce in Large Industry (Erhebungen u¨ ber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Großsindustrie), and a critical review ‘On the Psycho-Physics of Industrial Work’. The new initiative met with strong support from many members of the Verein, for it reinforced the society’s original concern with the ‘worker’s question’ (Arbeiterfrage; sometimes also called simply the ‘social question’), the conflicts between the entrepreneurial and working classes, which served as one of the most heated and intractable issues of Wilhelmine Germany.24 As Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe´ reflected in a 1904 editorial, the Verein and its central organ, the Archiv fu¨ r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, distinguished themselves by aiming to develop a science of the ‘actually existing’ that would in turn shape and inform policy issues. Unlike other social science journals, they observed, the step which distinguished the ‘Archiv’ from its predecessors was that it placed the problems identified under the heading ‘the question of labor’ in the most general context, and that it grasped the ‘question of labor’ in its cultural significance as the outwardly most clearly visible expression of a much larger complex of phenomena: the fundamental process of transformation experienced by our economic life and thus by our cultural existence as a whole through the advance of capitalism.25

Alfred Weber’s research proposal would further this longstanding concern in a manner attuned to new developments in the public discussion. It would also counter bitter charges within the Verein that the organization had drifted away from its practical concerns into something more like an academic publishing society.26 Contempt for the professorial ‘lectern socialists’ (Kathedersozialisten) was already rife 24

Boese (1939); Campbell (1989); Lindenlaub (1967); vom Bruch (1985). Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe´ , ‘Geleitwort’, Archiv fu¨r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 19 (1904), quoted in Scaff (1989), p. 84. 26 Boese (1939), pp. 116–20. 25

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within entrepreneurial and some government administrative circles, while representatives of a range of rival disciplinary discourses had begun to vie for influence over policy regarding the labor question.27 Despite their resolute desire to provide practical policy guidance, the Verein had always sought to bring increased methodological sophistication to social analysis. German policy had for several decades been driven by an incessant number-gathering by government statisticians, what Ian Hacking has called ‘the avalanche of numbers’.28 Around 1900 the situation began to change, as a variety of different disciplines and approaches clamored for a say on the pressing problems associated with the social question. These included biomedical studies of nourishment and hygiene, alcoholism and industrial accidents; physiologists and psychologists concerned with exact measurement of output, fatigue, muscle movements and the effects of various factors such as temperature, lighting, noise, diet, rest intervals, and so on; economists’ studies of the division of labor, problems of value or marginal utility; studies by engineers and factory managers concerning production and accounting methods and their relation to the length of the working day and wagelevels; and, finally, the contributions of journalists, often with a literary bent, who published accounts of the experiences of workers, either directly from the workers themselves, or by going to work in a factory disguised in some fashion as a member of the working class. All of these disciplinary approaches were represented to varying degrees in the Verein discussions surrounding the conception and design of the survey. Max Weber took it as part of his task to find a way to triangulate these programmes as a means of accomplishing several objectives at once. In the first instance, it would be strategically wise to do so, for it would not only effectively address widely held concerns, but would define an original, yet politically neutral voice for the Verein. Moreover, Weber emphasized, the survey should not overstep the limits of the special competencies of its members, which were limited in several fields, particularly in the natural sciences. This line of argument pleased Buecher and Herkner, who opposed the interest in biological questions such as heredity and degeneration promoted by several influential committee members, notably Alfred Weber.29 Max Weber shared their skepticism, but demanded that on such matters the survey not ‘remain silent’ since ‘somewhere and somehow these problems might play a role’.30 27 Lexis (1909–11), pp. 804–6. On the strife within the Verein at the time of the survey, see Schluchter (2000), pp. 61–6. 28 Hacking (1995). See also Gorges (1980) and Oberschall (1965). 29 Alfred Weber had initially become interested in evolutionary thought as a means of undermining bourgeois sexual ethics, but his fascination soon began to approach a more encompassing biologism in social questions. As Wolfgang Schluchter (1995) shows, this intellectual trajectory exacerbated growing strains between Alfred and Max Weber. 30 Max Weber to Alfred Weber, 19 September 1906, in (1990), pp. 661–2. Three years later, at a session on ‘Race and Society’ convened at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society (1910), Weber censured the ‘utopian enthusiasm’ of the racial biologists with a stern appraisal of their value for sociology: ‘What we expect from the racial biologists and what we no doubt % will one day obtain from them, is the exact proof of concrete, single relationships, that is, the overwhelming importance

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Besides the various biological approaches to the worker’s conditions, Weber and his colleagues took particular interest in various methods of cost-accounting developed by engineers, scientists and managers. As the historian Robert Locke has shown, German cost-accounting stood in the midst of a dramatic revolution in the first decade of this century.31 Among the many different systems of social accounting, two proved of particular interest. In a special review of the so-called ‘energetics’ movement of the Leipzig physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and his Belgian ally the industrialist Ernest Solvay, Weber scathingly criticized the assumption that the sciences of energy might furnish a universal system of accounting, not only for the sciences and industry, but for social and cultural life as well.32 In contrast to his condemnatory treatment of Ostwald and his allies, Weber regarded the methods of the physicist and manager Carl Ernst Abbe´ as important innovations in understanding the conditions of factory work. Abbe´ was a physicist who, after important work in optics, joined the Zeiss optical works, eventually becoming the head of the firm. Because of his own working-class origins, Abbe´ took a keen interest in labor relations, aiming to replace talk of ‘worker against capitalist’ with ‘progressive worker and progressive capitalist against backward worker and backward capitalist’.33 In the late 1890s he conducted experiments on varied lengths of the working day and their effects on productivity. In these rigorously designed trials, piece-rate workers worked some weeks at nine hours per day and some at eight hours per day. Complete records of their earnings and production figures were kept, and these were supplemented by measures of the number of kilowatt hours of electricity used by their electric tools. After carefully breaking down the data according to age, difficulty of task and other important variables, Abbe´ found that workers performed consistently better when they worked an eight-hour day.34 In 1901 Abbe´ introduced the eight-hour day at the Zeiss optical works, the first industrial manager to do so in Germany. Beyond the relatively straightforward finding in favor of the shorter working day, Abbe´ tried to interpret his data to discover why productivity increased with more rest time. Comparing workers’ output with power consumption he found that during the shorter days workers used their machines more intensively, that is, they worked harder. Abbe´ argued that this had nothing to do with improved spirits, nor of concrete hereditary factors. That proof, gentlemen, is lacking up to now . . .’. See Ploetz (1911), p. 156. 31 Robert Locke (1984) provides a fascinating account of the many ways in which industrial costaccounting permeated the universities, and vice versa. Under the heading ‘Americanization’ this would become one of the themes of Weber’s famous essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Weber, 1946). 32 Weber’s harsh criticism probably derived from a perception of a brewing rivalry between the Verein fu¨ r Sozialpolitik and the Institut Solvay in Belgium, which at about the same time launched a survey entitled Recherches sur le travail humain dans l’industrie. The Solvay survey’s goals resembled those of the Verein, but it proceeded with methods and assumptions akin to those attacked by Weber in Weber (1909a) and Weber (1995a). See Weber’s letter to Gustav Schmoller, 1 December 1909, in Weber (1994), pp. 322–3. 33 Ernst Abbe´ , quoted in Wittig (1989), p. 115. 34 Abbe´ (1906).

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with feelings about the boss or any other spiritual or psychological condition that might befall the worker. Instead, he contended, it had everything to do with the physiological and psychophysiological conditions of fatigue, for which there were natural thresholds. Abbe´ cast his analysis in the psycho-physical equation V=E, where V was the amount of energy spent (Kra¨ fteverbrauch, also Ermu¨ dung) and E was the amount of energy replaced (Kra¨ fte-Ersatz, also Erholung), which was a matter of the worker’s individual metabolism.35 Weber admired the rigor of these studies, as well as the humane conclusions that were drawn from them. But he found it troubling that they denied the validity of any talk of the meaning of factory work for specific workers, and for the cultural problems of factory work more generally. These were, after all, some of the principal concerns for conducting a Verein survey, and especially for selecting Herkner and Buecher to steer it, since each had published different kinds of work around these questions. Herkner had published a highly regarded study on the conditions of workers.36 In 1896 Buecher published an extraordinarily popular piece of economic anthropology entitled Work and Rhythm (Arbeit und Rhythmus), one of the most diverting reads ever produced by the dismal science, which contained an extensive polemic against the conventional notion that factory work must inevitably result in monotony, automatism and fatigue for the worker.37 Buecher’s treatise intervened in a Europe-wide debate about whether clock-timed factory work forced an irremediable constraint on the hours and modes of industrial labor.38 While numerous physiologists sought to define the biological limits to productivity under such conditions through machine studies, Buecher suggested a more imaginative and radical approach to the problem, contending that the human experience of time was less rigid and ‘objective’ than machine-based measures.39 The economist drew upon studies of his Leipzig colleague Wilhelm Wundt showing that the intuition of time derives from patterns of association, which in the end are nothing more than rhythm.40 For Buecher this was a monumental finding, for it 35 Abbe´ developed complex equations to solve for each worker’s metabolism and the particular task they performed, which also drew upon physiological research. See Abbe´ (1906), pp. 248–9. 36 Herkner (1894). 37 Buecher (1899). 38 See Herkner’s summary of the debate in Herkner (1909–11), p. 1201. On the European debate see Cross (1988); and Cross (1989), pp. 103–128; see also Rabinbach (1990), pp. 206–38. 39 The indispensable study of European fatigue research and the science of work more generally is Rabinbach (1990). 40 On the Leipzig circles which connected Wundt and Buecher, see Smith (1991), pp. 204–18. Wundt’s account of the intuition of time, upon which Buecher based his argument, ran roughly as follows. The intuition of time arises from a succession of varied representations, each of which remains disposable in consciousness, when a new representation enters. Each representation leaves a trace, a certain effect, which persists with the new representations that enter. It is not, then, the real reproduction of representations which gives rise to time, but the representation of their possible reproduction. Wundt gave the example of acoustic impression — the swinging of a pendulum at regular intervals. The first beat has its place in consciousness; its image persists until the second follows. This reproduces the first immediately. By virtue of a general law of association, identical or analogous states of consciousness excite each other. But at the same time the second beat encounters the image that has persisted during the interval. The new beat and the image are referred to the first perception, which gives to the repeated

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enabled him to recast assumptions about the time-frames of industrial labor. By the much discussed ‘intensification of work’, Buecher observed, it was assumed that it is ‘the changing relationship of the amount of work to the time of work, considering work thus as a qualitatively fixed item, of the same magnitude at all times, that lends itself to measurement and quantification and which people sooner or later draw together as a unity of time’.41 Once one began to rethink the constancy of time in relation to productive work, it began to become possible to conceive of different temporalities, different ‘rhythms’ of the organization of productive life. Buecher illustrated the possible variety of productive rhythms with a vast ethnological survey of non-industrial, ‘natural peoples’ (Naturvo¨ lker). Through careful analysis of the role of song, chant or dance in work practices, the economist demonstrated that pre-industrial peoples typically imparted a highly developed ‘rhythmical patterning’ (rhythmische Gestaltung) to their labor. These rhythms, moreover, integrated work with the rest of life, with cycles of eating and sleeping, with religious activities, and with different forms of sociability. European observers, Buecher contended, often misperceived these rhythms as signs of laziness or lack of civilization, failing to see their value as a ‘disciplining element of great significance’ that enabled peoples to maintain optimal levels of productive energy and to suffuse work with a sense of joy and harmony. Buecher argued that his findings had enormous policy implications, for they implied that if workers would be allowed to regulate their own working rhythms, gains in productivity and social harmony would result. For Weber the insights of Buecher and Herkner provided a resource to triangulate the discourses of Social Darwinian biologism and managerial accounting. But it would require methodological innovation at a level never before attempted by a Verein survey, since the position the sociologists would seek to occupy had already been staked out by another opportunistic discipline: experimental psychology or psycho-physics. Hence, any viable approach to the conditions of workers in large industry would have to begin with a thorough critical review of the strengths and failings of the psycho-physics of industrial work. Weber’s reading of the various approaches to the sociology of work left him convinced that accurate and innovative empirical sociology demanded direct experience of the real conditions of industrial work. To supplement his theoretical preparations, therefore, the sociologist put himself through a rigorous Praktikum, rolling up his sleeves and going directly into a factory, where he reviewed factory records and directly observed the conditions of industrial life. impression its original intensity, while the image remains in a state of memory. Consequently, the present perception is immediately distinguished from its image. In this simple fact, Wundt maintained, are contained a elements of the idea of time: At the instant of the third impression, the notion of time exists entire, all at once, since the three elements are given simultaneously. See Wundt (1893), pp. 83– 93. See also the explanations offered by his student Meumann (1892, 1894). Several Wundt followers took up the problem of work and rhythm in laboratory studies: See Smith (1900) and Awramoff (1903). 41 Buecher (1899), p. 2. On the German debate over the intensification of work, see Groh (1978).

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Weber gained access to factory life through the generosity of relatives in Oerlinghausen, where in September of 1908 (and again several months later) he gained full access to the account books and production registers of the newly incorporated family textile firm the Leinenweberei Carl Weber & Co. Weber initially planned his visit to Oerlinghausen solely for recuperation in the region’s gentle climate amid the gracious hospitality of his cousin Alwine (Wina) Mueller. But the author of the Protestant Ethic ended up spending ‘long weeks plunged deeply in the account books and production registers of the weaving mill’, as his wife Marianne Weber reported.42 The account books seemed to have proved salutary, lifting Weber out of the lugubrious mood brought on by his recent polemics with critics of The Protestant Ethic. His wife noted that ‘the laborious calculations fare well in his hands, he is happy’.43 Besides examining the accounts and production statistics, Weber consulted firm records to learn all that he could about the individual biographies and characteristics of the workers in question. He also plied the shop foreman for information about individual workers, but he did not interview the workers directly. Weber used both his concrete findings and his general insights gained there to inform his critique of the industrial psycho-physics and to shape the design of the Verein survey. 2. The Psycho-Physics of Industrial Work In taking up the problem of the psycho-physics of industrial work, Weber acknowledged that the experimental psychologists had staked out a strong logical claim for their focus on work performance and its effects on the psycho-physical mechanism of the worker. Indeed, he admitted, all of the concerns that social scientists held dear came to bear directly on the worker’s performance: Every process of the ‘division of labor’ and ‘specialization in the modern large enterprise’ but in particular ‘the breaking down of the components of work’ (Arbeitszerlegung) within the modern large enterprise, every alteration of working tools or machines, every alteration of work-time and work-pauses, every introduction or alteration of the wage-system, which aims to optimize the specific qualitative or quantitative work performances, — each of these processes means in each case an alteration of the expectations placed on the worker’s psycho-physical apparatus.44

Moreover, Weber added, it should ‘be possible, in principle, through physiology, experimental psychology, and perhaps even anthropology, to gain insights into the assumptions and the effects of alterations in technical and economic conditions of industrial work’.45 Physiological studies of work, as Anson Rabinbach has shown, multiplied in European factories and workplaces around 1900, supported by a mar-

42

Marianne Weber, quoted in Oberschall (1965), p. 115. Marianne Weber, quoted in Oberschall (1965), p. 115. 44 Weber (1995a), p. 163. 45 Weber (1995a), pp. 163–4. 43

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riage of (Lamarckian) social Darwinian assumptions about functional adaptation and the expansive worldview derived from the sciences of energy.46 The sciences of energy had, of course, been developed in and through the factory and the concerns for the efficiencies of working machines.47 But Weber, following Adolf Gerson, maintained that the expanded vision of energetics as universal economic measure overstepped its legitimate but delimited role by hewing to the fallacious premise that the primary goal of industry was economy of energy (Kraftersparnis), when it was economy of costs (Kostenersparnis) that drove industrial decisions.48 While the physiological sciences could yield valuable data about work performance under specific conditions, Weber suspected that these remained of limited value for the cost-driven interests of industry. Although Weber’s survey of industrial psycho-physics took in a broad crosssection of the international literature, he elected to focus on Emil Kraepelin and his followers, the German researchers most unstintingly dedicated to developing an experimental psychology as in accord with the assumptions of the sciences of energy.49 Kraepelin, a former colleague of Weber at the University of Heidelberg, remains best known today for his work in other areas, particularly psychiatric nosography, where his pioneering differential description of Dementia praecox, and the system of psychiatric classification built upon this distinction, have been revived as the basis of the international psychiatric nosology.50 But at the turn of the century Kraepelin enjoyed a widespread reputation for his attempts to apply his particular brand of psychiatry to a range of social problems, including crime, alcoholism, venereal disease and the problems of malingering workers.51 In Kraepelin’s view, all of these problems shared a common etiology in a weak or senescent will, a condition that could be investigated with the tools derived from the nascent discipline of experimental psychology. After completing his medical education, Kraepe-

46

Rabinbach (1990), pp. 206–37; Sarasin and Tanner (1998). On the general spread of the sciences of work and energy see Smith (1998). On the broad effects of these sciences on culture and the arts, see Asendorf (1989). 48 Weber (1909a) pp. 583–5; Gerson (1902). The ‘energetic culture-theory’ attacked by Weber included not only Ostwald’s general Weltanschauung but the attempt of Ernest Solvay and his colleagues to develop a universal currency of labor-value based on physiological and psycho-physiological measures. 49 In approaching this literature Weber consulted the psychologists Hugo Muensterberg and Hans Gruhle, as well as the psychiatrist Willy Hellpach. During the course of his investigation he also made the acquaintance of Karl Jaspers, then a young intern in psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg. For Weber’s engagement with psychopathology see two articles by Frommer and Frommer (1990a,b). A few years later, Gruhle published a similar critical study of the ergographic methods of Kraepelin, his Doktorvater (Gruhle, 1912). 50 On Kraepelin’s place in the history of psychiatry see Ackerknecht (1968) and Blasius (1995). On the resurgence of Kraepelinian diagnostic categories see Blashfield (1984). Matthias M. Weber and Eric J. Engstrom offer an important reappraisal of Kraepelin’s diagnostic method, showing how Kraepelin’s method for determining ‘natural’ categories of mental illness (he called it ‘breaking nature at the joints’ involved a special method of social measurement based on ‘diagnostic cards’ (Za¨ hlkarten), a variant of a long standing tradition of statistical record-keeping in German psychiatric institutions. See Weber and Engstrom (1997). 51 Engstrom (1992), pp. 111–32. 47

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lin trained in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, the leading figure of the new psychology in Germany.52 Soon Kraepelin imported elements of the Wundtian laboratory armoury into the psychiatric clinic — psychological instruments and a determination to explain psychiatric and psychological phenomena in strictly causal and analytical terms and, wherever possible, supported by precision measurement. This made possible a ‘mechanics of mental illness’ (Mechanik der Geisteskrankheiten), which broke down the observable clinical phenomena into basic psycho-physiological causes and effects. Kraepelin did not confine himself to severe mental illness, however; his everyday practice of psychiatry brought him into constant contact with the ordinary nervous and mental suffering caused by the harsh conditions of modern life. In these cases the instruments of Wundtian experimental psychology promised even more, since such nervous disturbances typically had little or nothing to do with hereditary or deep organic causes. Kraepelin maintained that a great many of the lesser neuroses derived from the changing and severe circumstances of modern life. Disruption, stress and the myriad forms of ‘industrial fatigue’ created by overwork, sensory overload and the wear and tear of shaking, vibrating machinery not only overtaxed the elasticity of bodily functions, but also took a huge toll on the mental constitution of many people.53 The mental pathologies often showed up in disguise, through alcoholism and drug abuse, while in other cases they took more straightforward psychological forms. The prevailing Wilhelmine discourse framed these problems in social Darwinian terms, casting the growth of mechanization and the ‘intensification of work’ as ineluctable effects of competitive industrial evolution. Such trying conditions forced the need for adaptation (Anpassung) and selection (Auslesen), not only among workers, but among the entrepreneurs, and even nations themselves. Kraepelin’s psycho-pathology accepted these terms, perhaps with a measure of doctorly compassion. The purpose of the laboratory would be to identify the functional demands made by modern life, and to specify modalities and conditions of adjustment.54 Every individual possesses his own psychological disposition, Kraepelin asserted, and each ‘processes experiences mentally and emotionally, putting them into actions, often enough under substantial inner distress’.55

52 Kraepelin (1983), p. 22. On the role of Wundt and his students in the rise of German psychology, see Ash (1980). The general literature on Wundt is large. To enter the on-going debate see Bringmann and Tweeny (1980), Woodward and Ash (1982) and Danziger (1990). For an excellent recent addition to the many challenges to the claim of Wundt as a ‘founder’ of experimental psychology, see Hatfield (1997). 53 On the German discussion surrounding technology and frayed nerves, see also Fischer-Homberger (1975), Radkau (1994) and Asendorf (1989) pp. 79–84. 54 Wundt himself eschewed all practical applications of his program, seeking instead to legitimate psychology as an autonomous academic discipline. Kraepelin was one of several Wundt students who sought to extend experimental psychology to extra-academic problems. For differing perspectives on the movement toward ‘applied’ psychology, see Danziger (1990), Dorsch (1963) and Jaeger and Staeble (1980). 55 Kraepelin (1902), p. 459.

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Kraepelin maintained that this processing occurred at a more basal level than that of conscious experience; sensitive instruments and carefully planned experimentation, therefore, could elucidate it in a precise way. Kraepelin reported that he first conceived the problem of measuring mental work in conversations with the British scientist Francis Galton, whose own attempts to measure the productive capacities of British civil servants had failed by his own admission because of methodological shortcomings.56 Kraepelin resolved to improve upon Galton’s methodology by adopting mechanical psychological instruments from the Wundtian armoury. He found just the instrument he was looking for in the ergograph, a self-recording dynamometric apparatus newly invented by the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso. The Mosso ergograph brought to fruition several decades of efforts to measure mental actions in the language of mechanics. Mosso himself came to the instrument after several failed attempts to measure mental activity through changes in cerebral pulse rates.57 During the 1880s several physiologists began to experiment with techniques for measuring functions of mind and brain by using traditional spring dynamometers or self-registering variants to record the effects of mental stimuli upon physiological functions such as respiration, arterial pulse and muscular strength. As Mosso noted in his book on ergographic studies, these instruments proved highly inadequate to the task.58 The spring dynamometers could not give a continuous (temporal) indication, and thus remained incapable of recording muscular action as mechanical work. But even with the self-registering dynamometers, which furnished a continuous, graphic indication, it soon became apparent just how many muscles become involved in a movement such as making a fist, which created problems for any attempt to isolate purely mental phenomena. Mosso answered these problems with an apparatus which used a holster to constrain the hand and forearm, allowing only the middle finger to move without restriction. This finger lifted a small weight up and down repeatedly, leaving a direct trace of its motion on an x-y coordinate grid (see Figure 1). The ergographic recording thus recorded not only the number of times the weight was lifted (Hubzahl) but also the force of each repetition, exhibited in the height of each particular trace (Hubho¨ he) (see Figure 2). By limiting the whole of bodily activity to one tiny degree of freedom, and thus eliminating the interference of other bodily organs and functions, the invisible labor of the mind recorded itself in a measure of mechanical equivalence.59 Kraepelin echoed Mosso’s assertion that the ergograph trace revealed ‘the inti-

56

Kraepelin (1903), p. 7. Mosso (1881). Mosso (1892). 59 Mosso compared the mechanical equivalence of mental work with the classic physical principle of the mechanical equivalent of heat developed by Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer. See Mosso (1892), pp. 55–9. 57 58

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Fig. 1.

Mosso Ergograph, from Die Ermu¨ dung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1892), p. 90. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

Fig. 2.

Ergograph Curve, from Angelo Mosso, Die Ermu¨ dung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1892), p. 90. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

mate and most characteristic feature of our individuality — the manner in which we fatigue’.60 What Kraepelin termed the ‘personal fatigue-rate’ (perso¨ nliche Ermu¨ dbarkeit) thus became another personal equation like the reaction-time, usually measured with the Hipp chronoscope — the experimental value upon which 60 Kraepelin (1903), p. 7. For a more critical assessment of ergograph studies by a Wundt student, see Mu¨ ller (1901). On the place of ergographic studies within the broader history of fatigue studies, see Rabinbach (1990), pp. 133–45.

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Wundt had built an entire experimental program.61 The ergograph marked a personal equation of a very special kind, however; for it measured the individuality of persons in terms of work or energy, the primary concept of modern physics and the currency of industrial engineering. Mosso conceived of the ergograph in these terms, defining the principle of the conservation of energy as the Ariadne’s thread leading modern science out of the kingdom of ignorance.62 Moreover, he emphasized the practical importance of the graphic method as a means of measuring work, beginning with the dynamometers used by engineers and their modifications by physiologists such as Helmholtz, who adapted these techniques to measure the work of the contracting frog muscle.63 By the 1870s the graphic method enjoyed ubiquitous use in the study of physiological function, remaking the laboratory in the image of the factory.64 Already in 1878 Mosso’s mentor and colleague Etienne-Jules Marey, the French physiologist and ardent advocate of the graphic method, implored his fellow scientists to ‘extend this graphic inscription of work wherever mechanical forces are in play’.65 Mosso’s ergograph achieved just this, bringing precision measurement to one of the most pressing areas of application in the late-nineteenth century economy, that of the rapidly expanding number of white-collar employees, the managers, administrators and clerical workers who worked in large-scale enterprise, government and other sectors.66 With such a reliable instrument it might be possible to integrate mental work into the cost-accounting of production systems, about which ‘books of political economy’ had precious little to say.67 Kraepelin similarly emphasized the continuity between the measure of industrial ¨ ber power and mental work in his 1893 programmatic article ‘On Mental Work’ (U geistige Arbeit). ‘Today if a ship makes its trial voyage or the plan of a new electrical lighting system is drawn up’, the psychiatrist wrote, we share the satisfaction of men of culture to read in the newspaper how many indicated horsepower the new engine is capable of generating, or how great will be the numerical intensity of light and how high the consumption of energy will run. Rarely, and only within specific margins does the calculation err. With solid work the machine maintains precisely what its maker promised, and he is even in possession of enough experience to say in what measure the work-performance will vary, when new parts will be needed, and how high the demand for raw materials will be. But it is only in this last instance that these technical products of ours are of the same nature as that which Descartes and La Mettrie glimpsed in human beings. We know rather precisely how much nourishment this or that organism needs, but we have little concept of how much it produces, or what its productive capacity might be.68 61

On the personal equation, see Schaffer (1988) and Canales (in press). Mosso (1892), p. 60. 63 Brain and Wise (1999); Holmes and Olesko (1995). 64 Borell (1987); Mendelsohn (1992); Rabinbach (1990), pp. 84–120; Sarasin and Tanner (1998). 65 Marey (1878), pp. xii–xiii. 66 Kocka (1969) and Locke (1984). 67 Mosso (1892), p. 172. 68 Kraepelin (1903), p. 5. 62

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In much the same way, he continued, we need to compare the mental performance-capacity, (Leistungfa¨ higkeit) of different people with one another. We speak of their greater or lesser ‘labor-power’ (Arbeitskraft), and we gauge this roughly by the number and size of the tasks, which the single person has solved over the course of a lesser or greater span of time. Indeed, in both everyday life and particularly in state administration the practical need has for a long time led to find a way to judge the mental endowment of a specific person . . . Just as we test a ship in its trial voyage, so must we also test those people who would take up responsibility.69

An effective gauge of mental labor would enable more responsible apportioning of employment, fitting suitable people to specific jobs and defining tasks to yield maximum efficiency of mental effort. Kraepelin’s experiments with mental work pursued just this desideratum. In an early paper, coauthored with his Russian student Alexis Oseretzkowsky, the Heidelberg professor examined the variations in mental work performance under a range of conditions: with alterations in the length, frequency and timing of pauses; with changes in the rhythmic character of the tasks themselves; with modifications of the experimental apparatus, especially modifications of the weight lifted by the moving finger; comparing bodily and mental fatigue; assessing the influence of alcohol, tea and coffee; and finally, examining variations in performance at different times of day.70 These exhaustive investigations of parameters underscored the larger programmatic point: the ergograph curve captured the phenomenon of mental work as labor power. Experiment after experiment showed, for example, that when the will remained engaged the subject could continue despite muscle exhaustion. Hence, little doubt could remain that ‘the essential cause for the failure of muscle performance in ergograph trials lay not in the fatigue of muscles, but rather must be sought in the [fatigue] of the central organ’.71 The isolation of the will as a measurable motive force in mental labor opened the door for Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin to test Karl Buecher’s claims about rhythm and the regulation of productive energies. Buecher, of course, had built the entire argument of Work and Rhythm on the Wundtian claim that physiological rhythms were conditioned by the mind, that physiological effects measured in pulse-curves or breathing-rates were altered by the effects of listening to sounds. Putting Buecher’s hypothesis to the test, Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin showed that in specific tasks myriad effects could be boiled down to a precisely measurable rhythm. It mattered little, for example, whether the rhythm was established by jubilant march music, by a metronome, or by electric impulse — high intensity performances peaked at a metronome speed of 120.72 On the heels of this finding,

69

Kraepelin (1903), p. 6. Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901). 71 Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901), p. 599. 72 Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901), pp. 600–4. 70

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Kraepelin turned his attention to the timing, frequency and duration of breaks from work and their effects on productivity, seeking what he deemed ‘the method of optimal pauses’. After a few years, Kraepelin began to revise his program. He became concerned that his ergograph curves captured only an aggregate measure of several processes occurring at more or less the same time. Doubt set in when he began to wonder whether the different conditions of mental fatigue could be so easily disaggregated, whether many or all of them were not usually in play simultaneously to one degree or another. In other words, what he had taken to be a gauge of performance capacity in fact represented a composite of any number of component processes (Theilvorga¨ nge) such as practice-capacity, practice-determination, stimulationcapacity, recovery-capacity, sleep-determination, resistance-capacity, and so on, each of which should be isolable and measurable in terms of its own effects on the subject’s basic physiological substratum. Kraepelin took great pains to caution against granting these particular factors too much sovereignty. Noting new developments in the theory of aphasia, the man often called ‘the Bismarck of German psychiatry’ struggled to ground the empire of psychiatry in a unified concept of the psyche, and decried the increasing number of theories which advanced ‘a splitting off (Zersplitterung) of the soul into an unlimited number of self-sufficient powers’.73 In these views, he added, ‘psychological acts are represented as the result of majority resolutions of the lower house of perceptions and of the upper house of memory-images’.74 Kraepelin, who in 1918 defended the German monarchy to the bitter end, stood resolute in his intention to defend a unified theory of mind. In specific terms this meant that the experimental program should seek to isolate the various components of the work-curve, to elucidate their causes, and to specify their modes of correlation and interaction within a unified framework. In a showcase article in a Festschrift for Wundt, Kraepelin printed a new diagram illustrating just how these components interacted (see Figure 3). Weber launched his attack on just this very composite nature of the Kraepelin work-curve. The trouble began with Kraepelin’s own recognition that the ordinary, single ergograph curve remained inconsistent and seemed to conceal as much as it revealed. If one measures the work-performances (Arbeitsleistungen) of a person working in a specific way in a continuous manner in the smallest intervals of time, either directly through a machine set-up in the laboratory or by determining the products [of work] . . . and one records the results in a coordinate-system as a ‘performance-curve’, then this line a very irregular one, not only at first glance, but also after rather intensive study its course can be difficult that there is only a certain measure of an increase

73

Kraepelin (1895), p. 45. Kraepelin 46. To compare Kraepelin’s views of aphasia with his psychiatric contemporaries in Germany and France, see Hagner (1997) and Harrington (1987). For a longer view of the development of multiplicity of personality, see Hacking (1982). 74

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Fig. 3. Emil Kraepelin, ‘Work Curve’, from Philosophische Studien 20 (1902), table II. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

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that appears at the beginning of the work-period, a certain amount . . . of fall toward the end.75

Weber suspected that Kraepelin’s attempt to break the general work-curve into its component parts set his esteemed colleague on a path leading not to greater precision in his measurements, as Kraepelin assumed, but to incoherence in the conception of just what was being measured. If the inconsistencies of the general workcurve obscured a more complex picture of smaller physiological interactions taking place in a span of work, the same charge might equally be made that each of the basal component parts similarly masked their own intrinsic complexities. The work-curve thus fell foul of the first principle of measurement: a measuring instrument must have the same quality as the object being measured: a measure of length must be extended, a measure of weight must be heavy, and so on. The identity of the graphic measure of mechanical work derived from the notion that physical work was always accompanied by movement, and that movement could be rendered in terms of time and space. But, Weber contended, mental work did not have any real directly correlating movement, and was thus qualitatively different from the graph which proposed to record it. The discovery of the composite nature of the work-curve amounted to little more than an attempt to save the phenomena of the work-curve model, the components playing a role comparable to epicycles in Ptolemaic astronomy. All of this suggested that the model was ill conceived from the start, that the reality of mental labor could not be reduced to a mechanical concept for the simple reason that it extends more to the whole of life and is surrounded by a much wider periphery of mediated relationships. Weber drove home his charge of the reductionism of the Kraepelin model of mental labor with a painstaking analysis of its key components. The most important of these consisted of the dichotomy of fatigue (Ermu¨ dung) and recovery (Erholung). Weber noted the differences among physiologists over the nature of fatigue, whether it resulted from an accumulation of chemical substances — toxins of some soft — in the body or from the depletion of indispensable, nutritive, substances. Either way, the work-curve simply recorded the effect, and it probably made no difference on the measure. A thornier distinction surrounded the difference between the subjective feeling of ‘tiredness’ (Mu¨ digkeit) and the measurable phenomena of fatigue. This distinction mattered because it impinged on the mood a given worker brought to the workplace and the possible myriad causes which informed it. Kraepelin maintained that ‘tiredness’ and ‘fatigue’ should be counted as distinct phenomena. Under ordinary conditions feelings of tiredness had no effect on the work-performance recorded in ergograph curve, although in ongoing situations they could interactively affect how other component processes, such as will, condition performance. Such a distinction, Weber protested, opened a window onto some of the concep75

Weber (1995a), pp. 168–9.

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tual problems of industrial psycho-physics. While it may be possible to measure mental fatigue in this way as a homogeneous event resulting from fatiguing work, any attempt to determine the fatigue-rate of an individual person would ‘not be a unitary quality measurable in the course of single work-curves’.76 Measuring mental work and determining the worker’s personal equation remained altogether different matters. Another basic component of the Kraepelin work-curve was ‘practice’ or ‘rep¨ bung). For Kraepelin this meant an ‘increase in the ease, rapidity, securetition’ (U ity, and regularity of a specific performance’ with the purpose of a more ‘sparing and successful exploitation of the stock of energy (Kra¨ ftevorrats) and the energy capacity of a given psycho-physical apparatus’.77 In practice, Kraepelin observed, this meant that the individual had acquired an ability to ‘bring forth the typical reaction without an articulated act of will’. The work-curve of the ‘practised’ worker was set into motion earlier, rose more moderately, and began to sink earlier. But it did so more slowly, while maintaining a generally higher and more even level throughout its course than that of the beginner.78 Again and again Weber returned to the fundamental problem of the work-curve. He pointed out that although Kraepelin interpreted most of the components of his work-curve in physiological terms, some were attributed to purely psychological causes, which posed all sorts of problems about the causal relationship between the two sides of the psycho-physical equation. Notwithstanding these inconsistencies, Weber acknowledged, Kraepelin upheld the basic analogy with mechanical measurement by privileging the physiological explanation of the components. Hence, Weber concluded, ‘Kraepelin, will always tend more or less, to view the somatic processes as the “Real”, the psychical as the contingent “mode of appearance”. When this occurs, a number of these “components” of the work-curves with which Kraepelin works, plunge into an awkward position’.79 The problem, apart from all details, Weber contended, always came down to the same question: ‘how does the indubitable effect of these, to a great extent purely psychological factors, combine with this strictly physiologically operating theory of fatigue and practice?’80 All of the complications of Kraepelin’s theory, Weber concluded, went into shoring up this fundamental problem with the work-curve. This was hardly surprising, since the very notion of applied psycho-physics aimed to provide an improved form of management and therefore adopted the presuppositions and language of industrial management. Weber could now deliver his knockout punch, which exposed the extreme difficulty of extending the material circumstances of the psychological experiment to

76

Weber (1995a), p. 176. Kraepelin (1903), p. 12. 78 Kraepelin (1903), p. 12. 79 Weber (1995a), p. 226. 80 Weber (1995a), p. 226. 77

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the real-world setting of the workplace. Once the hidden conditions of these apparently seamless measuring practices had been exhibited, it became clear that factory conditions of industrial work contained ‘an array of built-in conditions which are align to the laboratory’.81 Several of these came immediately to attention: housing conditions, as well as dietary and drinking habits of the workers; the workers’ financial needs and interests in the work; the wage-system and how it was perceived by individual workers; the material conditions of work, including not only machinery but the relative ease or difficulty in working with the different kinds of materials on the job. Alien conditions made for misleading conceptual categories. ‘When we trade in the stock of categories that experimental psychology has produced, both the general ones as well as those specifically for the analysis of industrial labor’, Weber wrote, ‘it must be asked whether the possibility exists that these can yield observations in the everyday work done outside the laboratory’.82 Weber contended that conceptual categories of social science come into being in a distinctive material and social context. Experimental psychology derived its concepts from the denuded conditions of the laboratory, where human nature could be reduced to simplified mechanical relations. But outside the laboratory walls in the real-world setting of work these reductive categories proved entirely untenable under the weight of vastly more complex conditions. In contrast, Weber wondered whether the psycho-physical laboratory might be supplanted by a more anthropological approach, whether ‘observations of “everyday work” as it occurs outside the laboratory might be made, which could offer material that was qualitatively similar for use in exact treatment, as with the laboratory exercises’.83 Many of the psychological factors taken up by psycho-physics might be better explained as purely social phenomena, as matters of ‘ethnic, cultural, vocational, or social provenance’.84 One telling indication of the lack of social content was the elision of the workers’ own perspective on their performance. It stands to reason, Weber pointed out, that workers would regulate their exertion according to the wage system, working harder when there was more money to be made, especially in piece work. But there might also be customary practices which the workers brought to the factory from elsewhere, such as agrarian modes of folk calculation. Here Weber harked back to his early work on the East Elbian peasantry, where he challenged mechanistic economic formulations (including Marxist ones) by demonstrating the contingency of conditions — the periodicities of seasons, weather, family life and kinship, the religious calender, etc. — which shaped rural economic life. Buecher’s Work and Rhythm also showed that agrarian Europeans often still relied upon the 81

Weber Weber 83 Weber 84 Weber 82

(1995a), (1995a), (1995a), (1995a),

p. p. p. p.

230. 230. 230. 244.

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pre-modern customs to shape economic activity and give meaning to everyday life. Hence, German workers who brought still-vivid memories of rural forms of life might be operating with a different sense of time, a different sense of daily rhythm. Those who appeared to be ‘pacing’ or ‘malingering’ at work might in fact be operating by a different, yet still productive, method of regulating their energies. If this were so, the whole project of disciplining them, measuring them, would amount to a colossal misunderstanding, a failure on the part of the managers or physiologists to recognize the nature of the problem.85 Similarly, Weber contended that other inherited traditional values and sensibilities sometimes decisively shaped workers’ performance. In Oerlinghausen, for example, there had been a number of female workers from a Pietist background who consistently showed high levels of output. Not surprisingly, this fascinated Weber, leading him to attribute their performance to ‘the shunning of dance halls and other such pleasures condemned by “Pietism”, the consequences of the “asceticism of Protestantism” and of the inner orientation toward the “God-willed” worldly occupation sustained through it’.86 These workers were, moreover, ‘individualistic’ especially in their resistance to social relations with other workers and the pressures to join unions, in a manner which Weber thought derived from the past. ‘That they belong’, he continued, ‘as residues of the past, into the wider currents which I have attempted to analyze elsewhere [in the Protestant Ethic], and that they are still to some extent characteristic of the same forces which were operative in the early epoch of capitalism, seems credible to me’.87 These examples suggested that a vast historical world lay outside the purview of the laboratory apparatus. This was the world inhabited by the workers — the complex of historical forces, contingencies and constraints that Weber elsewhere called ‘the social and economic conditions of existence’ (Daseinsbedingungen) — which remained largely invisible to these instruments and the experts who used them. The task for the Verein survey thus emerged with a newfound degree of clarity. If the psycho-physics laboratory failed because it imposed artificial conditions on the real-life circumstances of the workers, the alternative approach to social measurement would have to be to gain access to the workers in their natural habitat, capturing as many of their self-perceived ‘degrees of freedom’ as possible, and seeking to explain in sociological terms as many of Kraepelin’s psycho-physical ‘components’ as they could.

85 Here Weber envisions the conflict of the factory floor — usually characterized as one between Capital and Labor — as overlapping socially to some degree with the other great theme which preoccupied him, namely, the conflict between the industrial western part of Germany and the agrarian eastern part. On Weber’s reflections on his national political problem, see Scaff (1989), pp. 51–2. 86 Weber (1995a), p. 279. 87 Weber (1995a), p. 280.

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3. The Ontology of the Questionnaire Weber’s critical reflections on the psycho-physics of industrial work revealed his fundamental orientation toward detailed discursive analysis of the kind developed by the German historical economists.88 Although Weber is often thought of today as a sociologist, we must remember that he came to social science via a distinctive reading of historical economics, which he regarded above all as a science of ‘being’, a method of analyzing the ‘social and economic conditions of existence’ that figure ‘the quality of human beings’.89 The moral and practical imperative of the human sciences, Weber pronounced, ‘the question that leads us through thought beyond the grave of our own generation, is not how human beings of the future will feel, but how they will be’.90 Although he did not use the term here, one could describe Weber’s characterization of the problem of social science as a problem of ontology, the philosophical term for the science of being. For Weber the cultural sciences posed problems of ontology in at least two ways. Their primary task involved investigating the elusive notion of the nature and relations of being in society, a kind of ‘first philosophy’ of the social world. From this followed the secondary task of critically stipulating the kinds of entities, specifically abstract entities and concepts, that are to be admitted to the inquiry. It might seem puzzling, even logically questionable, for Weber to invoke the question of the being of people’s lives in the future tense (‘how they will be’). From the standpoint of Weber and his many colleagues who practised a variety of historical social science, who routinely claimed to investigate the relations of being in past societies, it made at least as much sense to speak of ontology in the future as it did in the past. The more vexing objection would be ethical or political, asking how the social-scientist could speak of the problem of ‘being’ in the future without violating the criteria of value-neutrality specified by Weber in his methodological writings? The historian’s risk of writing from a politically interested perspective remained less when considering the past than in the case of social investigations which projected a future condition of their own society. This objection cuts to the heart of what Weber meant by the possibility of value-neutrality in the cultural sciences, a theme that has been plagued with misunderstanding.91 Weber advocated a form of value-neutrality or ‘objectivity’ in which agendas, interests and subjective judgements of the social scientist should not mix with the results of research or 88 Weber’s most extensive writing about German historical political economy can be found in Weber (1975). On Weber’s engagement with the historical schools of economics, see Hennis (1987), Ringer (1997) and Wagner and Zipprian (1985). On German historical economics, see Tribe (1988) and Winkel (1977). 89 Weber (1980), p. 437. 90 Weber (1980), p. 437. On this theme see Scaff (1989), p. 30 Hennis (1987), pp. 117–66; and Hennis (1996). 91 During the last decade numerous Weber scholars have turned to the question anew, seeking to replace sloganeering caricatures with analysis of Weber’s subtle argumentation. See especially Daniel (2000), Gremer (1994), Hennis (1987), Oexle (1996), Proctor (1991), and several essays in Wagner and Zipprian (1994).

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the education of students. But this notion of value-neutrality did not entail the pursuit of a cultural science devoid of value-judgements. Weber held that to be impossible, on the grounds that concept formation (Begriffsbilding) in the cultural sciences proceeds from a stock of a priori value-judgements, beginning with the very notion of culture itself.92 ‘The concept of culture’, Weber observed, ‘is a value-concept’. For us, he continued, ‘empirical reality is “culture” because and as far as we set it in connection with ideas of value it encompasses those portions of reality which are meaningful to us, and only these’.93 Weber’s reasoning here followed the premises of neo-kantians such as Heinrich Rickert in maintaining that value-judgements served as an indispensable a priori condition for the possibility of any social perception.94 ‘What has meaning for us cannot be deduced from a “presuppositionless” investigation of the empirically given, but rather to establish what it is serves as grounds for determining what will be the object of investigation.’95 Only through the act of critically examining the fundamental values conditioning social perception could the social scientist specify the stock of admissible conceptual entities in the system of investigation. Weber’s notion of value-neutrality thus rejected a presuppositionless mode of inquiry or any sort of objectivity involving an ‘escape from perspective’, including one enforced by the use of self-recording machines.96 Concepts could not be ‘reproductions’ (Abbildungen) of ‘objective reality’, but rather ‘cognitive means to the ends of spiritual mastery of the empirically given’ or ‘means to the end of knowledge of contexts under individual points of view’.97 Hence, the historicized, neokantian critical reflection on concept-formation enabled a middle way between ‘mechanical objectivity’ and purely subjective and individual forms of judgement.98 Weber’s approach to these problems also drew upon a notion of the historically conditioned character of concept-formation. While the neo-kantian insistence on the a priori nature of categories assumed the standpoint of the ‘historical individual’, Weber observed that such individuality was a historically contingent perspective that must be reckoned with in any comprehensive methodology.99 The lesson was that the historical stream of events flowed endlessly, ‘giving form to always new and differently colored cultural problems which move human beings’.100 92 Ute Daniel identifies three kinds of value-judgements in Weber’s ‘metaphysics of values’. See Daniel (2000), pp. 190–8. 93 Weber (1904), p. 175. 94 On Weber’s theory of concept formation, see Burger (1976), Daniel (2000), Gremer (1994), pp. 89–141, and Oakes (1988). 95 Weber (1904), p. 175. 96 See Daston (1999), pp. 110–123. 97 Weber (1904), p. 208. 98 On the dichotomy between ‘mechanical objectivity’ and subjective judgement in connection with the Weberian/Nietzschean theme of moral asceticism, see Daston and Galison (1992) and Galison (1998). 99 Many scholars see traces of Weber’s profound engagement with Nietzsche here as in other parts of Weber’s post-1900 work. See Daniel (2000), pp. 188–9; Gremer (1994); Oexle (1996). 100 Weber (1904), p. 184.

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Changing contexts and relations of being meant different points of view and problems, hence different forms of concepts and modes of inquiry. ‘The points of departure of the cultural sciences thereby remain mutable into the unbounded future’, proclaimed Weber. The open-ended future, read as the endlessness (Unendlosigkeit) of historical events, conditioned the character of proper methodology and rendered ‘a systematic social science’, in the sense of ‘a definitive, objectively valid systematic fixing of questions and areas’, as a form of ‘nonsense itself’.101 When it came to organizing the Verein investigation, Weber the profound methodologist sat uneasily beside Weber the man of worldly action. For the latter recognized that management, in factories or governmental administrations, required workable representations: results which could be of practical value to politicians, managers and civil servants. Such representations could often be most workable, not to mention less vulnerable to attack, when they were based on measurement of some sort — that was the promise and appeal of the respective methods of both Kraepelin and Abbe´ . But, as we have seen, Weber’s critical reflections on these studies showed the formalism, reductionism and misleading superficiality of measures of the mechanical dimensions of human labor. But for the Verein survey, the task was a positive rather than a critical one: to make one of the standard instruments of social measurement, the questionnaire (Fragebogen), into a tool for recovering the relations of workers’ lives obscured by this kind of measurement. Questionnaires had served as an indispensable element of Verein-sponsored empirical research from the inception of the organization.102 The information obtained from the questionnaire usually involved opinion and perception, and was typically used to orient researchers to questions that might be answered using other kinds of documents, including account-books, government statistics and company records. Several Verein researchers, most notably Herkner, had pioneered the use of survey questionnaires to reveal subjective, psychological or affective information concerning social actors. Weber, however, found these questionnaires inadequate, since they failed to capture the unconscious or unacknowledged dispositions operating in persons. Very often changes in effect responded directly to alterations in conditions unnoticed by social actors, just as alterations in conditions of work presumably affected performance. Psychological insights thus fell short of the standard sought by social science, and ran the risk of settling for trivialities.103 Hence, the cognitive aim of social science research, Weber contended, was to ‘understand the distinctiveness of the reality of life as we are placed in it and as it surrounds us . . . the interconnectedness and the cultural significance of its particular phenom-

101

Weber (1904), p. 184. For detailed accounts of numerous studies involving questionnaires, see Gorges (1980). 103 Compare Weber’s heated response to a critic who charged that his Protestant Ethic engaged in psychological speculation without an adequate working knowledge of contemporary psychological science: Weber (1909b). 102

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ena in their contemporary form . . . and the grounds of their having historically become thus-and-not-otherwise’.104 Following this line of thought, social measurement would have to capture the distinctive reality of the world of industrial workers, the circumstances defining its particular character. Such a strategy would seem to contradict the usual conception of measurement, which sees it as a means to transcend locality and particularity and to move toward some form of universality. Indeed, in his critique of the psycho-physics laboratory Weber relied on a strategy of exposing the ‘just thisness’ of Kraepelin’s instrumental practice. But for the Verein survey the task was a positive rather than a critical one: to make the standard instrument of social measurement — the questionnaire (Fragebogen) — into a tool for capturing the particularity of local cultures in terms which approximated those of the cultures themselves. Weber thus introduced several general methodological innovations into the survey design. For the first time in the history of Verein research, workers answered the questions themselves in person.105 As a supplement, sometimes a corrective, questionnaire data was to be combined with a systematic examination of factory records and account books. Finally, workers were to be observed directly on the factory floor, and space was provided for a range of impressions and informal observations gathered by the Verein researchers in the factory. Weber also brought an innovative strategy to the design of questions. He drew upon his critical engagement with the popular journalistic sociology of working class life produced by Adolph Levenstein. A Berlin journalist and Social Democrat with strong ties and credibility with proletarian workers, Levenstein conceived the idea of a mass investigation of workers after spending evenings reading poetry and philosophy with men who worked with automated machinery by day. These experiences shaped the fundamental aim of his study, which he described as an attempt to capture the ‘causal relations between technology and psychological life (Seelenleben)’.106 Levenstein’s first attempt consisted of carrying out extensive correspondence with workers on matters of poetry and philosophy, particularly Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The journalist soon desired a more scientific approach, however, and therefore drew up a questionnaire of 26 questions, distributed to approximately 8000 miners, textile workers and machinists, with a 63% rate of return. Weber, whom Levenstein had consulted for this project, admired the ambition to comprehend worker psychology but criticized the dilettantish manner in which it was executed. The problem persisted at both ends of the design, in the manner in which the questions were formed and in the sorting and control of the data. Levenstein’s literary talent, Weber complained, handicapped the work in sev104

Weber (1904), pp. 170–1. On the place of this study in the history of the research of the Verein fu¨ r Sozialpolitik, see Oberschall (1965), p. 8. 106 Levenstein (1912), p. 1. 105

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eral ways. On the one hand, the journalist asked ‘suggestive’ questions which evoked ‘projective’ responses.107 But Levenstein also treated quantitative data as a sensational, mass anecdote, complicating all causal connections by ‘counting everything which the material offers as countable’.108 The cascade of numbers offered titillating but ultimately ephemeral effects — ‘Curiosity and pity’ — but not the sort of analytic insights that a rigorous sorting and processing of the materials would allow.109 Quantification would become analytically useful, for example, when applied to groups of questions with similar results, or as a means of identifying other patterns in the original material. In designing his questionnaire for the Verein survey, Weber sought to overcome the journalistic impressionism and prurience of Levenstein’s approach by emphasizing the actual conditions of the workers and their ‘character’, rather than simply their feelings and perceptions and perceptions (see Figure 4). Weber sought to get behind the workers’ stated feelings to a more capacious understanding of the real circumstances of their lives. He described the survey as a means: to establish the following: on the one hand, what influences the large-scale industrial establishment exerts upon the individual character, the occupational fate and the style of life of its working force, what physical and psychical qualities it helps develop in it, and how these become manifest in the conduct of the daily life of the workers; on the other hand, how the development and the potential future development of large-scale industry are limited by those characteristics of the workers which are a result of their ethnic, social and cultural origin, of their traditions, and standards of life.110

The aim was not merely to comprehend how the workers viewed themselves, nor simply how they appeared to either management or to psychologists, respectively, but to establish a perspective from which the validity of all these perspectives could be adjudicated. Thus, some questions allowed workers the chance to expand upon the matter-of-fact themes queried in other questions. Question 10, for example, asked why the worker had taken up their particular occupation. Question 27 asked open-ended questions about life goals. The aim of these questions was purely exploratory and interpretative: one would not expect real or accurate answers but, Weber explained, ‘one receives valuable answers to rather stupid questions’.111 The questionnaire posed a number of questions derived specifically from the managerial or psycho-physical point of view. Question 13, for example, queried

107 Levenstein’s question 25, for example, asked ‘Do you go into the woods? What comes to mind, lying on the forest floor, surrounded by deep solitude?’ to which he received the following responses: ‘When I lie down in the forest and observe the vehicles passing by on the road and see their splendor and think about myself, I am filled with despair’; and ‘when I go into the forest I think of the life of primitive man, of the freshness of the when no factory chimneys had yet polluted it’, Levenstein, 1912, pp. 370, 374; quoted in Oberschall, 1965, p. 131. 108 Weber (1995c), pp. 392–3. 109 Weber (1995c), p. 398. 110 Weber (1995c), p. 399. 111 Weber (1995c), p. 402.

Fig. 4. Marie Bernays, ‘Fragebogen (Questionnaire)’, from Untersuchungen u¨ ber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswah und Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiter in den verschiedenen zweigen der Grossindustrie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt, 1910), pp. XII–XIII. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

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the worker’s perception of the strenuousness of his or her job, and asked for elaboration. Similarly, many questions asked about the work day — time, pauses and rest-periods, overtime and meals — along with questions about perceptions of the cycles and rhythms of fatigue and modes of leisure and recuperation. Finally, several questions inquired about family life and economic goals, and expectations about the longer course of life. Although these questions were stated with the brevity necessary to hold a worker’s attention, when combined in various groupings they allowed a reasonable picture of workers’ day-to-day regulation of energy as well as the ‘fate of the worker’ in a broader context. The questionnaire would seem to have been brilliantly designed — many later regarded it so. But in the noisy, chaotic world of the factory, social measurement turned out to be as difficult to carry out as laboratory psycho-physics. Between 1909 and 1911 twelve junior researchers took these methods into the field, distributing questionnaires and devising various strategies for obtaining the supplementary data. Social reality hit hard when workers refused to respond to the questionnaire. Few researchers got more than 10 percent of their questionnaires back. Some quit in despair. There were, however, a couple of partial successes. Marie Bernays, a doctoral student at Heidelberg, devised a cunning strategy of going into the factory incognito, posing as a regular employee at a textile factory, the Gladbacher Spinnerei and Weberei A.-G. After several weeks of work, she won the friendship and trust of both the other employees and her employer, August Buschhueter. Before long she revealed her true identity and purpose, and, remarkably, both her employer and fellow workers, agreed to cooperate fully. Most of the workers (almost entirely female) responded to her questionnaire, whose data she compared against the factory records and account books. She managed a remarkably thorough portrait of this particular factory, its production methods and workforce, and achieved some of the kinds of knowledge that Weber had been after. In her analysis, moreover, the genius of the questionnaire became apparent.112 The first part of Bernays’ analysis presented the history of the factory gleaned from records and a detailed portrait of the workforce derived from the questionnaire data. Here came the ‘structural’ elements which made up the worlds of the workers: geographical provenance, family, education and occupational trajectories. Bernays depicted the factory as a stratified class-system, an ‘enlightened absolutism’ centered on the well regarded head of the firm, with an ‘aristocracy’ consisting of skilled workers such as mechanics and a ‘proletariat’ of unskilled workers such as dye-mixers. The groups showed remarkably different patterns of mobility — the skilled workers moved freely and easily between towns and factories, while the unskilled remained fixed in their place. Bernays also attempted, though less successfully, to correlate these and other sociological data — age, marital status, 112

Bernays (1911), pp. 99–123.

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locality of birth, father’s occupation, and so on. On the basis of her own direct observations she was able to show how these factors shaped the social life of the factory, particularly the formation of smaller subgroups based on interest, education and other perceived social affinities. With this social picture in place, Bernays set out to establish ‘connections between the profitability of the workforce and its geographical and occupational provenance, their unique characters and relations, in short, the principal moments of their life-destiny’.113 Significantly, Bernays found that several social factors correlated directly with performance, above all the size of the town of origin. Male workers from villages or the countryside proved consistently most productive, those from middling towns less so, while workers from large cities performed least well. In the second part of her monograph Bernays took on the ‘psycho-physics’ of textile work, reworking the terms of the debate after the manner proposed by Weber. She emphasized that here the social trajectories of individuals had to be described in relation to the particular character of each kind of machine the workers encountered: the confrontation with a specific machine at a specific point often proved decisive in the worker’s fate. Hence, the young sociologist presented each of the principal machines used in the factory in impressive technical detail, along with the worker’s mode of operating them, including the degree of muscular or mental difficulty. She assembled detailed performance curves for workers on each of the machines, which, in the piece-rate system used in the factory, corresponded closely with their wages. In a surprising analytical turn, Bernays inverted the classic psycho-physical approach to the relation of fatigue and performance. Instead of reckoning the impact of fatigue on performance, she examined the effects of performance on fatigue. The results were striking: psychological fatigue was highest among the most qualified, capable and conscientious workers, who found their jobs too easy and therefore monotonous and tiring. These reflections pointed to Bernays’ more general conclusion, ‘that the problem that the broad masses of people today face is no longer the contrasting position of worker and entrepreneur. It has much more to do with the question of whether the person can be free of the domination of the powers which . . . today condition our entire lives through the myriad forms of technology and its immanent laws.’114 4. Conclusion By most accounts the Max Weber-led Verein survey failed in its principal aims. The poor yield of returned questionnaires disappointed everyone, not only the Verein members, but also the many company directors and leaders of workers’ organizations who had supported the initiative. The survey also drew broad criticism in the press, especially from some Social Democratic papers, who ridiculed it as one 113 114

Bernays (1911), p. 251. Bernays (1911), p. xviii.

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of the most senseless accounts ever given of the conditions of workers. Nevertheless, Herkner and other Verein members put a brave face on the results, both in the Verein commission’s internal review and in the general presentation of the survey’s results before the plenary meeting of the Verein in 1911. Herkner emphasized that, although the worker’s lack of participation proved lamentable, Max Weber’s methodological acumen — especially for bringing in the psycho-physics of work and for introducing methods to capture the differentiated social structure of the proletariat — substantially altered the nature of this kind of research. One participant, Adolph von Wenckstern, effusively praised Weber’s ‘attempts at precise measurement of the measurable features of the working classes’ and for having shown that for political economy to become a science, it must forego value-judgements. Weber, for his part, seemed embarrassed by the plaudits, and largely sided with the critics of the study, singling out for success only the work of Bernays, which he felt came close to the objectives of the survey. But Wengenstern’s claim that the study constituted a renunciation of value-judgements roused Weber to speak, indicating that he disagreed with this assessment but that to discuss it further would constitute a digression from the themes of the review. Although a full discussion of the question of value-neutrality was avoided — it was an old shibboleth in the Verein — Weber’s animus suggests its fundamental importance in his design of the questionnaire, and his conception of empirical social science more generally. Weber, as Scaff has shown, regarded modernity not only as the ‘petrification and homogenization of the external conditions of life, but in addition by inescapable conflict among the very contents of different value-spheres, life-orders, and life-power’.115 Therefore, in Weber’s view, there could not be a system of uniform rules of a Kantian type to adjudicate ethical or pragmatic questions. Nor could there be an absolute neutral ground, a kind of objectivity rooted in an ‘escape from perspective’.116 Rather, Weber insisted, ‘ultimately everywhere and always it is really a question not only of alternatives between values, but of an irreconcilable death-struggle like that between “god” and the “devil”. Between these there are no relativations or compromises’.117 Culture remains a sphere of disagreement, of conflicts between value-systems and forms of life. Scientific knowledge, in this case empirical sociology, could not hope to resolve this struggle, because it is itself part of the struggle. Weber’s survey questionnaire marked a provisional attempt to answer the paradoxical demand for a value-neutral instrument within a field of broad value antagonisms. With a precise reckoning of the actually existing characteristics of workers’

115 Scaff (1989), p. 91. Daniel uses the more charged and explicitly Nietzschean term ‘value-jungle’ (Wertedschungel) to describe this condition. See Daniel (2000). 116 Daston (1999). 117 Weber, ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und o¨ konomischen Wissenschaften’ (1917), quoted in Scaff (1989), p. 92.

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lives it fulfilled the requirements necessary for practical implementation in policy questions. But in its attempt to press more into the ‘being’ of workers’ lives, the questionnaire might capture something more fundamental, the sources of regulative value-standards themselves. Acknowledgements—The author would like to thank David Bloor, Michael Gordin, Wolfgang Ku¨ ttler, Antonia Lant, a seminar audience at Green College, University of British Columbia, the special editors of this issue, Ernst Hamm and Alan Richardson, and the anonymous referees for help and encouragement with this essay.

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Appendix A. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Verein Questionnaire and Supplement

Position with the company First and Last Name of the Worker Year of Birth Birthplace Country Gender and Marital Status: M or F, married, single, divorced, widowed Religion Occupation and Place of Birth, of Father , of Mother Vocation of Grandfather

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7. Military Service: have served, not yet eligible, unfit for service, has your father served? 8. Education Where? 9. Apprenticeship: as what and where? How long for? Did you How much? or did you receive pay for your instruction? wages? from when? 10. Why did you take up this occupation? 11. What kind of work do you do in you present position? 12. Do you have other occupational skills than the ones you are presently using? What are these? 13. Is your work especially strenuous? In what way? 14. From what age do people no longer find easy to get a job? 15. Have you held a different job before? Where? For how As what? State precisely the place of work, the long? employer, the jobs, whether self-employed 16. Reasons for Changing Jobs 17. Are you paid by time or piece-rate? Approximate Weekly Earnings Do you prefer time- or piece-rates? 18. Length of Daily Work: from o’clock to o’clock. Breaks Overtime? At what time do you take your main meal? 19. At what point in your daily work schedule do you generally begin to tire? 20. What are your main rest activities? 21. What do like to most when not at work? Supplied by employer Rental 22. Housing: Own house Only a Bed Distance of Home to Work km. Do you ride to Do you own a plot of land or a garden? Your work? cultivate it yourself? own 23. Do you rent out beds? Do you have lodgers? How many? 24. Do you have an additional source of income? What is it? 25. When did you get married? Does your wife earn money? How? What goal to you hope to reach in life? What goal did you set for yourself earlier? 26. Number of Children: Of these, how many are still living? Gender: M F 27. How do you expect to make a living during old age? Supplement: detailed occupational history of the worker, with location, type of work, length of time, pay, reasons for leaving.