43 Weber, the Protestant work ethic, and social closure

Max Weber (1864-1920) is, along with Marx and Durkheim, considered one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, despite the fact that he only wrote one major work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in 1905. Weber, like Marx, was a historian and a fierce critic of capitalism, which he described as a child that had grown into a monster. But he disagreed with Marx on one key point that has particular significance for physiotherapy. Where Marx believed that capitalism was fundamentally an economic phenomenon, Weber believed that economics alone could not explain why society operated the way it did. Weber believed that people’s actions, rather than the social systems that Marx believed in, were what shaped society ^[1].

From Weber’s work, we can glean six important ideas that have implications for the professions. These are that:

1. Society is underpinned by individuals who, through the pursuit of their own personal interests, organise groups with like-minded people, which generate the ideas inherent to the group and legitimise its interests;
2. Groups are always in competition with others for collective social mobility ^[2], often engaging in the social closure ‘of social and economic opportunities to outsiders’ ^[3];
3. Groups achieve ‘social stratification’ in three ways: economic, social, and through power or prestige ^[4][5];
4. A group does not derive its social mobility and market control from any inherent skills, knowledge, expertise, or standards, but from the outcomes of a continuous professional project to secure its social advantage;
5. Conflict is, therefore, an inherent feature of society. For example, society cannot accommodate an unlimited number of social elites, and so the pursuit of professional prestige pitches all professions into competition for scarce resources. With the consolidation of Western healthcare around a small number of powerful orthodox professions, the boundaries around the entire healthcare system, for those in a position of advantage, are as protected as those around the professions themselves;
6. Human history is not progressive. In other words, people were not learning from the past and becoming smarter. Decisions are always contingent and based on the ‘interplay of various social structures and social actions motivated by beliefs, ideas and values and carried out within particular cultural contexts’ ^[6].

Weber believed that people’s actions were just as important as class structures, and that sociologists should study why people do what they do to achieve the ends they desire. In his doctoral thesis, Weber studied the history of trading companies in the Middle Ages, and in it, he found numerous examples of people acting out of personal interest, even though these actions might have made them worse off. Weber studied ‘bonded labourers’ who would endure ‘extreme privations’, and become ‘heavily indebted to usurers’ ^[7], in order to obtain a modicum of independence. This attempt to gain some personal freedom was often disadvantageous to people economically, but they did it anyway.

Weber was particularly interested in the reasons for the sudden entrepreneurial ‘spirit’ that emerged in Europe in the 17th century. He saw that modern capitalism could only have happened with a change in the way religious authorities viewed wealth, and the rapid accumulation and consolidation of vast quantities of money in the hands of a few industrialists and social reformers. Enormous amounts of capital, known as primary accumulation (see Chapter 4), were needed to build the vast network of factories, mills, and mines that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. But the Protestant church had previously seen wealth as a sin. The answer, Weber believed, lay in a revision to Biblical teaching ushered in by Calvinism.

Many Calvinists believed that God had reserved only a limited number of places for people in heaven, and so acts of contrition and repentance were meaningless. Because man (and here I use the term ‘man’ in the sense that it was used at the time, which is to say that ‘man’ was taken to refer to all humankind) could not know God’s will, what one needed were indications in life that one was one of the chosen few. Calvinists allowed that material wealth could be a sign of God’s favour. And so if one worked as hard as possible, and profited from one’s labour, this could now constitute ‘good work’ in God’s eyes. But one’s newfound wealth could not be used for idle luxuries and indulgence because this was a sure sign of man’s fall from grace. All money earned that was not needed for basic necessities, therefore, needed to be turned back into making one’s industry as efficient as possible in the pursuit of even greater profit.

Weber argued this shift provided the entrepreneurial spirit that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, and fuelled empire building and colonisation. But it also created a new culture around work, efficiency, and the rejection of luxury. Work became a duty and a ‘disciplined obligation’ for Calvinists ^[8], whose life became suffused with ‘salvation anxiety’ ^[9]. They believed people should work as hard as possible, and their time should be used to the maximum efficiency. Leisure, relaxation, and indulgence were all discouraged, as were workers’ holidays, labour unions, and any form of external oversight. Calvinism, therefore, provided the perfect rationale — and the emotional and religious justification — for capitalism because ‘Without a population dedicated to worldly work for its own sake, prepared to eschew as sinful any sign of extravagance, capitalism could not have got off the ground (ibid).

Calvinism shifted work from something that one did only out of necessity, to something one did as a moral obligation. Work became something that defined a person, and a lack of ability or willingness to work became a sign of indolence and laziness. Working to ‘make money and then use the money to make more money and to carry on working’ ^[10], became a goal in itself, creating new social systems around the definition of children (too young to work) and elderly (too old); creating the need for social welfare and support for those unfit or unable to work; and generating industries, like healthcare and rehabilitation, designed to keep people in work and foster enthusiasm for industriousness ^[11].

Alice Kwizera identified seven critical dimensions of what Weber called the Protestant Work Ethic: self-reliance, foregoing leisure, hard work, the centrality of work in life, not wasting time, delaying gratification, and work as a form of morality ^[12], to this we might add ‘diligence, efficiency and rational, goal-directed behaviour’ ^[13]. Kenneth Hudson and Andrea Coukos have shown how the protestant work ethic shaped attitudes towards ‘need’ amongst people in society over the last century, ^[14]. Calvinist puritanism, they suggest, has strongly driven arguments against welfare reforms, and towards individual responsibility, the importance of work, and independence; an emphasis on ‘doing one’s duty’.

Weber’s analysis of capitalism was of profound interest to Talcott Parsons, one of the founders of functionalism, who was a student of Weber and translated The Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism into English in 1930 ^[15]. It also provided the impetus for a raft of post-war sociologists to explore alternatives to functionalist and Marxian explanations for the workings of the health professions. The new, or neo-Weberian scholars, began to explore how individuals formed ‘collectively conscious groups’ ^[16], like professional guilds and societies, trades unions and worker’s collectives, to speak for their particular interests and pursue social prestige ^{[17][18][19][20][21]}.

Contrary to Marx’s view that society could be understood as a class struggle, Weber believed that social prestige also played an important role in shaping society. Prestige helped explain why being a doctor or a judge came with economically rewards and high social status, while others of a similar ‘economic’ class (politicians, stock market traders, etc.), had much less prestige and a much lower standing in society. In a similar way, there were some that Marxist scholars might call ‘working class’, who had just as much social prestige as social elites, but received much less remuneration for being so (the new ‘essential workers’ after COVID-19, for instance: nurses, healthcare assistants, police officers, teachers, and bus drivers).

The idea of prestige as a key feature of social stratification was picked up by Terry Johnson, one of the most prominent neo-Weberian scholars ^[22][23][24]. Johnson’s work centred on the professions as a particular struggle for people in the middle-classes. Johnson argued that social prestige, risk and security, hard work, independence, comfortable affluence, and educational achievement, were much more significant concerns than issues like wage slavery and alienation for people in the middle classes.

Neo-Weberians like Johnson realised that at some point in the 20th century, becoming a respected profession had become one of the most assured ways that someone might achieve middle-class respectability, to the point that the ‘professional hierarchy has replaced class as the chief matrix of the new society’ ^[25].

Social stratification, as Weber called it, became less about relatively fixed structural aspects of society, and more about the link between one’s qualifications and expertise, and the opportunities for higher incomes and greater levels of social capital. Magali Larson, spoke about the ‘novel possibility of gaining status through work’ ^[26], that were created in developed economies after WWII. ‘In an open society’ Simon Weil argued, ‘professionalism has the power to confer upon its practitioners some of that same elevated prestige that might elsewhere be obtained only by the accumulation of wealth or through aristocratic birth’ ^[27]. Larson tellingly argued that professionalism amounted to the ability to turn one scarce resource — special knowledge and skills — into another — social and economic rewards ^[28]. But to do this, the professions had to engage in two key Weberian ideas; boundary work and social closure.