"Bureaucracy" and "Rationality" in Weber's Organization Theory: An Empirical Study

I am aware that there are unclarities and difficulties of considerable importance in these five varieties of alienation (especially, I believe, in the attempted solution of selfestrangement and the idea of meaninglessness). But I have attempted, first, to distinguish the meanings that have been given to alienation, and second, to work toward a more useful conception of each of these meanings. It may seem, at first reading, that the language employed-the language of expectations and rewards-is somewhat strange, if not misguided. But I would urge that the language is more traditional than it may seem. Nathan Glazer certainly is well within that tradition when, in a summary essay on alienation, he speaks of our modern . sense of the splitting asunder of what was once together, the breaking of the seamless mold in which values, behavior, and expectations were once cast into interlocking forms. 28 These same three concepts-reward value, behavior, and expectancy-are key elements in the theory that underlies the present characterization of alienation. Perhaps, on closer inspection, the reader will find only that initial strangeness which is often experienced when we translate what was sentimentally understood into a secular question.