Máquinas petrificadas: Max Weber e a sociologia da técnica

Abstract

What is the role of technology in the thought of Max Weber? From the examination of the categories of technical, technical action and technical rationality, the paper demonstrates that Weber's reflections on technology moves in two dimensions - dealing, in one dimension, with understanding of the specificity of technology as a social phenomenon, and, in the other, more broadly with the role of science and technology in modernity. Based on his reflections in these two dimensions, Weber examined the rationalization of machinery in the context of the emergence of the modern era and, at the same time, described the process of rationalization as a broad cultural process of mechanization of action and dominance of technical rationality on the whole of social life.