Abstract
A link can be made between Weber's work on 'The sociological categories of economic action', a neglected resource for the sociology of organizations, and Karpik's concern with 'logics of action', or 'modes of rationality'. One dominant form of rationality, based on short-term calculation, is substantively irrational in its contribution to manufacturing decline in Western countries. Both authors contribute to a notion of formal rationality in decision-making routines in the enterprise, a rationality that in practice systematically skews and obfuscates the substantive issues of manufacturing strategy. Modern professional managers, themselves the products of developmental trends in contemporary capitalism, assert the priorities of an increasingly refined and operationalized formal rationality. In a democratic industrial development organized labour may enter the stage as the bearers of the antithesis, substantive rationality in the interests of industrial progress. This is the desirable political development in the interests of both economic welfare and economic democratization.
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