(1979). Social Networks and Psychology. Connections, 2 - INSNA

- 74 -through assigning probabilities to each of the possible logical combinations of institutional structures,and then establishing the existence of empirical correlations . Thus, collegial bodies andthe market, as well as bureaucracy tend to occur with legal-rational social action .(c) The aggregation of individuals into inclusive sets of categories of the whole society is based uponthe distribution of individuals with respect to one or a series of cross-cutting variables . This isexemplified in Weber's treatment of "class" and "status" .Weber is most successful methodologically when constructing intermediate structures from one idealtypical social action . Thus, inhis studies of religion, he attempts to demonstrate that the aggregateconsequences of individual social action would be the same whether this action were typified by the analyston the basis of material or ideal interests . As Bendix puts it :One corollary of this starting point was Weber's tendency to treat all concepts ofcollectivities or larger social aggregates as convenient labels for tendencies ofaction . . . . This conceptualization was also a method of analysis, in that Weber wouldinquire into the ideas and affinities associated with the apparently most singlemindedpursuit of gain, and into the economic interests associated with theapparently most otherworldly pursuit of religious salvation . Even then, theapproach was limited to social relationships based on a "coalescence of interests",arising from actions that were construed as a reasoning, emotional, or conventionalpursuit of "ideal and material interests" (1962 : 476-477) .Therefore, "tendencies of action" are the basis for the establishment of correlations among meaning systems ;as, in this case, between "the spirit of capitalism" and "the Protestant ethic ."In contrast, Weber consciously evades the difficulties of constructing organizational forms characteristicof whole societies through the aggregation of individual social actions . The common collective formwithin which the individual pursuit of gain in capitalist society takes place in the market . In its modernhighly developed stage, its central characteristic is the anonymity of the relations within it . Weberdescribes the market in terms reminiscent of the Durkheimian idea of "constraint" :Formally, the market community does not recognize direct coercion on the basis of personalauthority . It produces in its stead a special kind of coercive situation which, as ageneral principle, applies without any discrimination to workers, enterprises, producers,and consumers, viz ., in the impersonal form of the inevitability of adaptation to thepurely economic "laws" of the market . . . The private enterprise system transforms intoobjects of "labor market transactions" even those personal and authoritarian-hierarchicalrelations which actually exist in the capitalistic enterprise. While the authoritarianrelationships are thus drained of all normal sentimental content, authoritarian constraintnot only continues but, at least under certain circumstances, even increases . (1968 : 731)Weber's task here is to derive this anonymous structure from "instrumentally rational social action" . Itis by no means clear that such an involved derivation is possible ; therefore, Weber focuses instead onthe derivation of types of intermediate "organizational structures", based on their "specific way(s) ofdistributing the powers of command" . (1968 : 953) .This point must be emphasized because of Weber's own explicit recognition of the limitations of hismethodology in analyzing large-scale social structure . If society is pictured through aggregation, thenstructures within society are pictured through distributions of variables . In this case, "power" ("theprobability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own willdespite resistance") is an individual attribute whose distribution will reveal the distribution of positionsfrom which differential amounts of coercion can be exercised . Since "power" is a quantitatively distributedattribute of individuals resisted by other individuals, Weber recognizes the difficulty in derivingimpersonal systems of constraint of the market type . He sidesteps the problem by focusing instead on intermediatestructures of direct command, which are by definition personal and immediate :In the following discussion we shall use the term domination exclusively in thatnarrower sense which excludes from its scope those situations in which power hasits source in a formally free interplay of interested parties such as occurs especiallyin the market . In other words, in our terminology domination shall beidentical with authoritarian power of command (1968 : 496) . (Weber's emphasis) .Legal-Rational Social Action, Bureaucracy, and Capitalism : From Individual to Institution to Society .Given this self-imposed limitation of Weber's methodology in the case of power and domination, let usexamine the ideal type of one of his institutions of domination : bureaucracy . Consistent with his methodologicalrules, Weber asserts that "the legitimacy of a system of domination may be treated sociologicallyonly as the probability that to a relevant degree the appropriate attitudes will exist, and the correspondingpractical conduct ensue" (1968 : 214) . It is upon this probability that "a certain minimum of theassured power to issue commands" rests (1968 : 215) .In the case of legal-rational social action, the structure of domination rests on the probablecollective acceptance by a set of actors of specific "ideas" . These are obedience to legal norms, eachof which is part of a body of law which consists of a "consistent system of abstract rules which have