Manufacturing Rationality

The Expert Professor: C.R. Young and the Toronto Building Code

“…Engineers enjoyed contrasting ignorance and local politics with the supposed rationality and universality of their science-based technology. This was an ideology which they absorbed in the classroom and laboratory along with their training in strengths of materials (Shenhav 1999). In fact, however, quantification, standardization and precision represent a social programme not merely a technical one.…”

The New Sociology of Economic Behaviour

“…Given the central role of the sub-discipline in the the new sociology of economic behaviour history and purpose of sociology, this degradation and colonization necessarily weakened the discipline as a whole. I will show, finally, that this process is now at an end and that a revitalized sociology of economic behaviour is beginning to mount a new critique which can both put economic rationality in perspective and simultaneously lay bare the role of 'economic sociology' -particularly in the version associated with managerialism -in propagating it (Anthony, 1977;Beder, 2000;Kunda, 1992;Shenhav, 1999). As an elaboration of this argument I will suggest that economic sociology has been complicit in the creation of morality substitutes required to replace the real morality which grows scarce with demoralization.…”

“…This is not to suggest that the Marxist and Durkheimian sociologists who studied economic behaviour in the twentieth century were able to avoid taking the Weberian wrong turning. For the most part they never questioned Weber's pessimism and, indeed, the self-evident supremacy of rationality -and the demotion of morality to a supporting role -were simply taken for granted (Anthony, 1977;Shenhav, 1999). The fact that there had ever been another path, another way of developing the sociology of economic behaviour, had been forgotten.…”

“…9 In fact, this volte face became inevitable when the sociology of economic behaviour took its wrong turning. There was apparently nothing in the disposition of Marxist sociologists that could protect them from the same fate that befell all who took the supremacy of economic rationality for granted (Anthony, 1977;Shenhav, 1999).…”

Sherlock Holmes and the adventure of the rational manager: Organizational reason and its discontents

“…is brings out parallels to management and organization theory where reductionism has long been the dominant stance. Yehouda Shenhav (2000) traced the roots of management as a distinct profession and body of knowledge in engineering journals at the turn of the 20th century, showing the profound in uence of narrowly rationalist mechanical concepts in shaping what came to be known as management knowledge. Gibson Burrell (1997) argued that these in uences are still prevalent in the eld of management theory, cautioning that "linearity kills," i.e.…”