Meanwhile, in the Second Battle of Britain, Qualitative Sociology's Life-or-Death Struggle

Max Weber had his own kind of institutional seize-up of the gears. He called the process "petrification" or Versteinerung. The iron cage is the result. Or that's how sociologist Talcott Parsons translated it. When the Democrats abandoned the New Deal, this is what their party became.



In Weber's variant, it means:
❌ rules become rigid
❌ procedures become ends in themselves
❌ offices become self-protective
❌ adaptability collapses
❌ the living spirit of an institution dies
Rules replace judgment. Procedures replace purpose.
His description is more layered, but it amounts to what most people would easily recognize as bureaucratization. But the phenomenon is more widespread than the popular stereotype of rule-following replacing goal-seeking.
It's called rationalization. This word is best interpreted as what industry did when it adopted the assembly line. What made me cry myself to sleep was William Irwin Thompson's contention that the same thing had happened to systems theory.

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