Max Weber and Empirical Social Research

Abstract

Weber's earliest involvement in empirical social research included three investigations of agricultural and industrial labor conditions, workers' attitudes and work histories, using both questionnaires and direct observation. Weber used a relatively modern statistical approach in his fourth study, concerning psychological aspects of factory work, and in a fifth episode, a critique of another person's study of workers' attitudes, he advocated a quantitative or typological approach to qualitative data. In all his work Weber was explicitly concerned with quantitative techniques and with the notion that the meaning of social relationships can be expressed only in probabilistic terms. Nevertheless he was ambivalent about the value of quantitative methods and about the role of empirical research in sociology. The sources of this ambivalence include two contemporary issues that Weber never resolved in his own work: the debate as to whether sociology and psychology should be sharply distinguished, and the action-language then current in German social science as a conceptual device, to be used deductively without reference to empirical research.