Beyond Rational Bureaucracy: Changing Values and Social Integration in Post-Industrial Society'

Rational values and their bureaucratic embodiment as defined by Weber are declining in the United States. The rational production economy freed resources to support new groups with nonrational qualita-tive values. These groups adopted activism as a technique and appeared to threaten the bureaucractic system. Then activism was institutionalized, with elites representing activist movements incorporated into the system. These elites ' qualitative values and outputs were unmeasurable, so that bureaucratic decision-making became a nonrational political process of appeal to outside publics for bargaining power. The institutionalization of activism has stabilized social integration, but new and ephemeral values arise in rapid succession, weakening what is left of the sense of moral direction formerly provided by rational values. Nonrational mass movements may emerge to fill the vacuum. Modern society grew up around an economy devoted to the production and distribution of standardized material goods. This society em-bodied values of rationality: the application of the calculus of efficiency to adapt means to specific, limited, and measurable ends. Rational values were well suited to increase production in a context of limited resources and technology. Many analysts of the modern world have emphasized its rationality. Max Weber (1925) saw rationality in the Protestant Ethic, in modern law, in "disenchantment, " in bureau-cracy, and in other elements of society and culture. Parsons ' (1951) pattern-variables spec-ify dimensions of rationality. His (1961) theory of structural differentiation together with the pattern-variables views society as a sort of machine, with specialized parts chosen and arranged in accordance with rational spec-ifications and dismantled and reassembled from time to time to improve its efficiency. Coleman (1970) has epitomized the modern-ization of life as a change from person-based to role-based social ' organization. A structure built of separate roles rather than of whole persons allows the individual and the system to behave more rationally. Ellul (1964) feels that the emphasis on technical efficiency has come * Revision of the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociologica