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Abstract: Max Weber, in one of his most influential books entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, traces the religious roots of pervasive rationality in modern Capitalist society. However, in his other works, Weber further notes that rationality by itself cannot fully explain social actions. Instead, it requires interplay of the rational and non-rational. Some scholars argue that the concept of rationality is itself ambiguous, while others believe that the “ambiguity” originates from the complexity of the interaction of rationality and non-rationality of human actions and that such interaction is never clear-cut. This paper aims to illustrate this complexity by comparing different immigration policy proposals in recent years and how those policy proposals reflect rationality and non-rationality in lawmaking in the United States. I argue that even if non-rational social actions are hard to grasp as Weber suggests, immigration policies should not only consider the rational facet of human actions, but more importantly, it should also look at how immigrants act as human beings and thus be cognizant that the social actions of immigrants are motivated by both rational and non-rational factors.
Keywords: The Rational; Non-Rational; Immigration Policy; Max Weber
Rationalization in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
In Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he discussed the spirit of capitalism as being characterized as the tendency of people imbued with the Protestant ethic to forego spontaneous leisure and enjoyment in order to accrue signs of material wealth that indicate their possible salvation by God. It is manifested by Benjamin Franklin’s speech, as Weber mentioned, that time is money, credit is money, and where money is the nature of profit generation. The spirit is not just a means of making one’s way in this world, but a particular ethic, an “ethos.” With the pursuit of more and more money and the avoidance of spontaneous enjoyment and happiness of life, men in these Capitalist societies are dominated by economic acquisition.
Weber in this book pointed out that the opposite of such rationality is “traditionalism,” wherein working and economic pursuit of materialism is not the ultimate meaning of people’s life. Differing from Karl Marx, who believes that ideologies and spirits of a society (the superstructure) are decided by its economic conditions, Weber thinks that the origin of such Capitalist spirit is more complex than the theories of Marxian superstructure depict and thus cannot be entirely explained by Capitalist economic formations. Weber innovatively traces the root of such spirit back to religion. However, Weber didn’t try to build an absolute cause-and-effect correlation between religion and the spirit of capitalism. Instead, he argues that even though the religious roots fade away, we still see our current utilitarian worldliness, set into motion in our mechanical production age with irresistible force.
The “Ambiguity” of Weber’s Definitions of “Rationality”
Weber’s work is not just about rationality. He conceives of sociology as a comprehensive science of social action that involves both rational and non-rational motivations. The idea of human action is central to Weber’s sociology. For Weber, the combined quality of “action” and “meaning” are the central facts for sociology’s scientific analysis. “By ‘action’ in this definition is meant human behavior when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful… by ‘social action’ is meant an action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a relation to another person’s behavior and in which that relation determines the way in which action proceeds” (Weber & Runciman, 1978). Moreover, Weber believes that actions happen in both rational and non-rational forms. The rational form is logical and means-end oriented, so it can be intellectually understood, while the non-rational social actions are relived in imagination; thus we cannot understand that with complete certainty.
This key concept of Weber’s sociological theory – forms of social actions in relation to rationality, has been explored by much of the academic literature, with one of the central arguments focusing on the meaning of rationality. Rogers Brubaker (1985) thinks that although Weber frequently uses the term “rational” without qualification or explanation even though he has his coherent theoretical perspective, which is grounded in systematic comparative approaches. Brubaker points out that within the book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, there were more than 16 different meanings of “rationality.” “Modern capitalism is defined by the rational (deliberate and systematic) pursuit of profit through the rational (systematic and calculable) organization of formally free labor and through rational (impersonal, purely instrumental) exchange on the market, guided by rational (exact, purely quantitative) accounting procedures and guaranteed by rational (rule-governed, predictable) legal and political systems” (Brubaker, 1985). Also, when Weber describes ascetic Protestantism, “rational” has a different meaning: methodical, purposeful, sober, scrupulous, psychologically efficacious and logically intelligible. Similarly, both Donald Levine (1981) and Wilhelm Hennis (1983) argue that Weber’s concept of rationality was multiply ambiguous. Levine states that Weber himself didn’t use the relevant distinctions in a clear-cut and consistent manner, “He never produces the conceptual exposition of the many possible meanings of the concept of ‘rationalization’, which he promised in introducing the later part of Economy and Society … the foregoing considerations establish beyond doubt that it is untenable to attribute to Weber the belief that rationalization refers to a univocal unlinear historical process” (Levine, 1981). Hennis even goes further and proposes that Weber’s “rationality” could mean anything.
Stephen Kalberg (1980), however, argues that instead of ambiguity, Weber’s multiple meanings of “rationality” and “rationalization” come from its multiple types and how those types relate to one another. It is true that Weber himself is largely responsible for the lack of clarity that surrounds his analyses of rationality. Also, varied translations of rationalismus, rationalitat, and rationalisierung, as well as related key terms in the numerous English editions of Weber’s writing gave rise to the ambiguity. However, Kalberg thinks that those who believe that Weber’s rationality is ambiguous didn’t define this term through recognizing its use in Weber’s various historical-sociological analyses of the paths followed by rationalization processes in different civilizations. Therefore, according to Kalberg, only through identifying different types of rationality, one can comprehensively understand Weber’s concept of rationality.
I agree with Kalberg that we should understand and interpret Weber’s rationality through delineating the typology of rationality and social actions. However, Kalberg didn’t go further to analyze how each type of rationality and rational/non-rational social actions interact with each other. Furthermore, the literature on Weber’s rationality and social actions has rarely applied theoretical analysis to real world examples. I argue that those concepts are crucial because they touch on human nature and the motivations for human actions, which are the central focus of sociology and policy/law making. Therefore, based on Kalberg’s theory of the typology of rationality, the rest of this paper will focus on the interrelations between types of rationality and rational/non-rational social actions and how those theoretical frameworks help us understand immigrants and immigrant communities in order to make better immigration policies.
Typology of Rationality and Social Actions
As a comparative-historical sociologist, Max Weber is more interested in exploring patterns of social actions rather than fragmented human behaviors. Patterns, in Weber’s work, could be at multiple levels of sociocultural processes, from long-terms civilizations to short-term social movements.
What are the types of social actions and rationality? According to Kalberg, the conceptual status of Weber’s four types of rationality is in relations to his four types of social actions – affectual, traditional, value-rational, and means-end rational social actions. It corresponds with Weber’s arguments in The Spirit of Capitalism that rationality (value-rational and means-end rational social actions) is opposed to traditionalism (affectual and traditional social actions.) Within rational social actions, there are practical, theoretical, substantive, and formal rationality. Rationality is often taken granted as a word that refers to pure mental process (Wiley, year). However, this is a common misinterpretation of Weber (Wallace, 1990; Mommsen, year). There’s no rationality that is purely internal in one’s mind and it is always manifested through concrete and visible social actions.
Practical rationality are those worldly, everyday-life experiences in relation to one’s pragmatic interests. People react to their life obstacles and difficulties by coming up with the most expedient solutions instead of proactive changes. Under such rationality, people are passive human beings, accepting whatever the society facilitates or discourages. Pragmatic actions of everyday interest involve precise calculations – how to get from this point to another. Therefore, this type of rationality is a manifestation of means-end rational actions (Figure 1).
Rationality/ Social Actions |
Practical Rationality |
Theoretical Rationality |
Substantive Rationality |
Formal Rationality |
Means-end Rational Social Actions |
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Value Rational Social Actions |
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Figure 1: Theoretical relations between social actions and typology of rationality
Theoretical rationality is constructed through ideologies and abstract concepts rather than actions. This theoretical rationality is often considered as social values. However, as mentioned before, Weber is interested in all kinds of value formations, not just on a societal/nation-bounded scale, but also through religion and its historical ideological forces, such as those shown in his works on the Protestant spirit in Capitalism, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and Hinduism and Buddhism in India. What is creative in Weber’s work is that he identifies the indirect religious factors that form certain societal ideologies. Weber noted that Protestant people today may no longer see hard work and material accumulation as signs of salvation. Yet religious roots as expressed originally in the Protestant ethic still continue to play a crucial residual role in modern Capitalist society. This theoretical, value-based rationality gives momentum to practical rationality and means-end everyday practical social actions. Weber argues that the “metaphysical need” of ideologies and values transcend random events of everyday life and gives everyday life a coherent meaning.
Substantive rationality, unlike theoretical rationality and practical rationality, can be generalized from both means-end and value rational social actions. It directly orders actions into patterns. Substantive rationality are constructed by “perspectives” that direct the way how people perceive the world, how reality is subjectively constructed, and how empirical events are selected, measured and judged. Therefore, it goes across both empirical and practical social actions and more abstract value rational actions. What’s different from theoretical rationality is that substantive rationality is “less abstract.” The existence of theoretical rationality (such as religion) doesn’t necessarily mean that people would follow every doctrine of it. However, substantive rationality is consisted by values, but those values directly guide people’s actions (such as the Capitalistic ideology that “time is money”). Therefore, this type of rationality is relative – it has different meanings in different societies and cultures.
Formal rationality particularly refers to spheres of life and domination under the influence of industrialization that is the domain of economy, legislation, science, and bureaucracy. Similar to practical rationality, formal rationality in those domains reflects the logic of means-end as well. Formal regulations and laws aim to treat everybody “equal” in the sense that it embraces universalism and calculation and rejects arbitrariness. The logic of policy and lawmaking is to control or encourage certain social actions in order to realize its goal of administration and domination. According to Weber, the most “rational” type of domination of this type is bureaucracy because it aims to do nothing more than calculate the most precise and efficient means for the solution to the problems by ordering policy and regulations.
Therefore, the practical and formal types of rationality are based on one’s means-end rational action; substantive rationality is from value-rational action. Even if theoretical rationality, on the other hand, is rooted in abstract mental processes, instead of actions, it follows indirectly from theoretical rational thinking. All the types of rationality do not remain separated as it appears to be theoretically, but rather, in the real world, they are institutionalized as normative regularities within “legitimate orders”, which in Weber’s sense reinforce the degree of rationality.
In addition to rationality, Weber is also concerned about how rational and non-rational social actions play out in the society. Substantial scholarship has been devoted to interpreting Weber’s work with emphasis on his concept of rationality. I argue that Weber didn’t merely talk about the danger of rationalization in the Western world, but more importantly, he was focused on the interaction between rational and non-rational actions. There’s never a clear-cut distinction between these two forms of social actions. For instance, some seemingly rational choices or values might produce non-rational outcomes. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber touched on the interplay between rationality and irrationality: “The unchaining of economic interest, merely as such, has produced only irrational results… were far from having an idea of a rationalistic economic life” (Weber, Parsons & Tawney, 1930). In his article The Nature of Social Action, Weber more explicitly analyzed the complex relation between rational and irrational, “The aim of all interpretation of meaning is, like that of science in general, to achieve certainty. This certainty in our understanding of action may take either a rational form (in which case it may be either logical or mathematical) or the form of empathetically re-living the experience in question (involving the emotions and artistic sensibility)” (Weber & Runciman, 1978).
In Weber’s sense, non-rational actions are not logical and thus we may not be able to find the general patterns of those non-rational actions. It’s scientifically not learnable. Non-rational actions are motivated by complex feelings experienced by the agent that are re-lived in the imagination. Weber analogize rational actions as mathematical equations, “we understand quite unambiguously what’s meant when someone asserts the proposition ‘2*2=4’... or when he completes a logical chain of reasoning… The same is true when someone in his actions derives from ‘empirical facts’” (Weber & Runciman, 1978).
Whether we could understand non-rational social actions scientifically is beyond the scope of this paper. I think, however, it would also be problematic to say that we shouldn’t learn non-rational behaviors because they are motivated by subjective experience and sentiments instead of logic. As mentioned, Weber was aware of the interplay of rationality and non-rationality/irrationality but he didn’t devote much on analyzing this idea with specific and concrete examples. I believe it is very important to point out that Weber’s work is not just about the danger of rationality and the process of rationalization. He is also interested in other sociological questions such as: How does the non-rational and rational interplay in a specific scenario? Why is it important to understand the world from the perspective of rationality and irrationality?
One of the central concerns for policymakers is how to regulate or control human behavior to realize certain social goals, no matter for social justice or interests of certain social groups. The rest of the paper will focus on illustrating the interplay of rationality and non-rationality in immigration policy making and why this rationality/non-rationality perspective of approaching immigration policy is important.
The Rational and Non-Rational in Immigration Policies
Giovanni Peri published an immigration policy proposal in 2012 under the Hamilton Project run by the Brookings Institution, named “Rationalizing U.S. Immigration Policy: Reforms for Simplicity, Fairness, and Economic Growth.” The Hamilton Project aims to offer a strategic vision for future public policy and produces innovative policy proposals on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans. As an economist, Peri’s proposal focuses on creating a market-based reform of the immigration system that’s easier to operate and is designed to generate the largest benefits for the U.S. economy. “The economic consensus is that, taken as a whole, immigrants raise living standards for American workers by boosting demand and increasing productivity, contributing to innovation, and lowering prices” (Peri, 2012).
If we look at this example from the perspective of the typology of rationality, it fits into the category of “formal rationality” – the means-end rationality that happens predominantly in economic, legal, and bureaucratic domains. In this proposal, the “end” stands for “economic growth” and the “mean” is “market-based reform in immigration system.” Even though in the introduction of the proposal, the author mentioned that economic considerations are only one part of the goals of immigration policy, and that family unity, humanitarian relief, fairness, and ethical values are also part of it, more specific suggestions that follow in the proposal do not reflect such humanitarian concern. For example, one of the basic principles of his proposal is to “Establish a path to permanent immigration for employment-based visas, but reward and encourage return to country of origin” (Peri, 2012). Peri thinks that highly educated immigrants are contributing immensely to the U.S. economy so therefore immigration policy should encourage them to be productive in their work and be continuous tax paying members of American society. Meanwhile, Peri suggested putting a part of an immigrant’s wage in an escrow account and if the immigrant becomes a resident, those wages will be forfeited. By doing this, it will give immigrants incentives to leave the United States. I doubt this suggestion reflects humanitarian concerns. It is based on the assumption that immigrants’ decisions on returning to their country of origin are largely based on their economic considerations. Just as Weber believed that the danger of rationalization is not just the tendency of people to get more and more rational, so too he thought equally about the unpredicted and unintended non-rational outcomes of rational decisions. “These formally rational patterns generally fail, however, to characterize the action of these persons in their personal relationships, in their capacities as parents, in their leisure hours, or in their choice of hobbies” (Kalberg, 1980). In the case of immigrants, it’s impossible for people who have been working here for years to have no personal bonds. Besides, other social and cultural factors might play a more important role in their decision-making. If the “rational” immigration policy only concerns about the economic incentives of immigrants, it will be bound to fail in terms of its effectiveness.
More generally, when talking about immigration policies, there are several models that sociologists and policy makers consider: Anglo-conformity assimilation, melting pot, and cultural pluralism. In the United States, the assimilation model is also called the Anglo-conformity model. According to this model, Early European Anglo immigrants established the value and cultural standards in American society. Immigrants of non-Anglo origins were treated as the Other. Therefore in order to blend in, non-Anglo immigrants had to discard their own cultural background and traditions to conform to the mainstream standards. In the 19th century, Anglo-centrism was so widespread that immigrants had to be fully assimilated in order to fit into the society. By the late 19th century and early 20th century, the growing diversity and large influx of immigrants in the U.S. gave rise to the popularity of the “melting pot” model. Instead of conforming to Anglo society, immigrants with diverse backgrounds actually change the definition and contours of the mainstream. The mainstream becomes a mixture like a melting pot. More recently, with the advent of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and independence movements that developed around the world against Western colonialism, advocates of cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) believed that our society was not a melting pot. There was recognition that the majority of the society was still defining and dominating the standards of the society and minorities were not given enough say. To address these inequalities, cultural pluralists advocated encouraging different cultural and ethnic/racial groups to express themselves and participate in the process of democracy and reshape our civil society while having the option to continue identifying with their cultural and ethnic roots.
Many nations attempted to integrate minorities into their society by some form of institutionalized multiculturalism, be it enlightened mild assimilation or cultural pluralism. However, the recent immigration and refugee crisis in Europe, especially in France and Britain, have shown the apparent failure of institutionalizing multiculturalism. The North African population is predominantly secular, even after years of immigration policy struggles since the 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, under the stress of anti-immigrationists and neo-nationalists promoted by Front National (FN), French president Francois Mitterrand shifted from his early mild and immigration-welcome effort (such as allowing extra funding for schools in unprivileged areas) into a “color-blind approach,” considering minorities as not part of any ethnic, racial, and religious group (Laurence and Vaisse, 2006). This later became the overriding approach taken by the French government – a policy of mild assimilation that would emphasize encouraging the adoption of French culture and identity. Later, after the controversy of the “headscarf affair” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and under the administration of the then Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy helped establish the French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) where the state placed a more direct role in managing Muslim affairs in France. However, CFCM has been controversial in terms of the gap between its aim (integration of Muslims in mainstream French society) and reality (the secular recognition of separate status of Muslim communities.) Some scholars argue that CFCM became a tool for French politicians to use religious representation to their political advantage with more “Muslim votes.” In France, “the peripheral France” was coined to describe the isolated immigrant communities who don’t have political engagement and low social integration. Similarly, in Britain efforts to include immigrants and minorities led to councils and formally recognized organizations representing the interests of immigrants based on ethnicity and race. These had the unintended consequence of increasing tensions as people who didn’t feel represented by these organizations felt displaced and unheard (Afshin, 2010).
In Europe, according to Kenan Malik, both assimilationist and cultural pluralist policies of multiculturalism for immigrant integration have failed (Malik, 2015). French politicians and policy-makers suggested that the United Kingdom faced a threat of terrorism at home because the British espoused a cultural pluralist integration policy for immigrants and minorities that had failed to create a common set of values or sense of nationhood. The British countered that assimilationist policies espoused by the French government have failed because they did not allow or encourage immigrants to retain their cultural, religious, and ethnic background. The reality, as Malik has emphasized, is that both models did not seriously take into account the degree and depth of nonrational or irrational racism/Islamophobia in their nation nor had realized that bureaucratization and rationalization of community programs by governments that recognized communities by religion, race, and ethnicity would lead to a solidification of segregated boundaries (tribalization) and exacerbated hardened identities (race and identity as categories) where in the past these were much more fluid and more likely ones of choice (Malik, April, 2015). Malik argued that the unintended consequences of these rationalized government programs for immigrant integration led to the alienation of the very people who were targeted for integration and inclusion (Malik, November 2015).
Malik (April, 2015) concludes with this recommendation:
There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and institutions that has proved so problematic – that links assimilationist policy failures to multicultural ones and that explains why social disengagement is a feature not simply of immigrant communities but of the wider society too. To repair the damage that disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society.
As mentioned previously, there is a high likelihood that “rational” means-end immigration policies could lead to some non-rational and irrational outcomes. And, as we have seen from the examples of France and Britain, there are criticisms of the various forms of multiculturalism as well. Generally, multiculturalism envisions a society where people from different cultural or social backgrounds can work together in a civil society to blend in together without the fear of losing their cultural roots. However, this idealized policy model doesn’t necessarily play well in real life cases. The problem isn’t the multiculturalism itself, but how we institutionalize it. “Multiculturalism policies need to be embedded in an understanding of immigrants as future members of society, rather than as temporary or guest workers. Applied to those who are not considered future citizens, multiculturalism has the potential to exacerbate segregation and exclusion” (Bloemraad, 2007).
Tying Weber’s theory with immigration models, multiculturalism in principle encourages that immigration policy should look at immigrants as real humans instead of pure resources to boost the economy. From a humanitarian perspective, both Immigrants and native-borns are equal and thus both of them are responsible for the future of a nation. From a utilitarian perspective, immigration policies won’t be effective unless we consider every factor that influences an immigrant’s decision making. As I mentioned, apparently immigrants as human beings don’t make decisions on returning to their home country or staying in the receiving country solely based on their economic concerns. Therefore, immigration policy that only focuses on economic incentives of immigrants, which seems to be rational and effective in the sense of its strict means-end logic, will not be effective in real life. As Weber has suggested, values-rational social actions by actors have to be taken into account, and these actions by immigrants are both rational and non-rational regarding their possible participation in a given society.
As a result, in recent years, especially in light of the problems that occurred in Europe, the idea of “new Americans” and their civic engagement have gained more popularity and academic attention than purely economically oriented immigration policy models. New Americans is a term to describe immigrants and their descendants who have come to America since the liberalization of immigration law in the 1960s (Waters and Ueda, 2007). Behind the concept of “new American” is a modified form of the multiculturalism model of immigration policy, which emphasizes the integration and civic participation of immigrants. This idea is led by the White House New Americans Project. For example, under this project, in 2015, a federal strategic action plan on immigration and refugee integration has been published, entitled “Strengthening Communities by Welcoming All Residents.” It proposes that integration of immigrants and refugees cannot be achieved in isolation. It suggests a “welcoming environment are necessary to ensure successful outcomes that benefit local communities as well as our nation … a ‘whole of society’ approach. Within this approach, there is a strong need for the federal government to promote a policy framework that enhances state and local integration” (author, 2015). In contrast with Peri’s economic “rational” model, this integrationist and multiculturalism-oriented policy model tries to take into account immigrants’ rational and non-rational social actions and social values, instead of solely economic incentives. Time will tell whether the approach advocated and pursued by the American federal government emphasizing civic engagement at all levels will succeed where institutional approaches in Britain and France seem to have faltered or failed. To their credit, the American emphasis is on enhancing the opportunity for immigrants to participate fully and equally in civil society.
Conclusion
This paper argues that Weber’s concepts of rationality are tied to his views of social action. They are interlinked. Social actions, and social policies, according to Weber’s perspectives, are both rational and non-rational. In this paper, I have argued that models of immigrant inclusion into American society that emphasize a narrowly defined economic emphasis on rational choice are problematic in that they don’t perceive immigrants as agents of their own actions, nor do such models take into account how others view immigrants themselves. Additionally, we investigated the problematic approaches toward immigrant inclusion in Europe by Britain and by France. While Britain’s model was largely culturally pluralist and France’s was principally assimilationist, both failed to account for the depths of non-rational racism and Islamophobia in these countries nor did they fully realize how their rationalized institutional systems had unintended consequences of segregation and disaffection among some of these immigrants. Now we see in the United States a new model of immigrant inclusion that emphasizes integration at all levels of civic and public engagement, and one which also recognizes and respects cultural pluralism in light of creating a diverse, respectful, and inclusive civil society. This “New Americans” approach is being fashioned and implemented as we speak, and we shall see in future years whether this new approach will be successful in integrating new immigrants into the host society. Regardless of the eventual outcome, what seems to be recognized in the New American model is that immigration policy must include both rational and non-rational forms of social action by all parties in society.
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