Library · Tag

Institutions

An annotated collection of 3 books & papers on institutions, spanning 1922 to 1942. Featuring works by Max Weber, Robert K. Merton — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

Bureaucracy

Max Weber, 1922 · Published posthumously (chapter from Economy and Society)

The foundational analysis of bureaucracy as a technology of coordination, not a pejorative. Weber described an ideal type: hierarchical authority, written rules, specialised roles, impersonal procedures — a machine for m…

Science and the Social Order

Robert K. Merton, 1938 · Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, No. 3

Merton's earlier essay — the companion to The Normative Structure of Science — on the relationship between scientific practice and the broader social order that either supports or undermines it. Written in 1938, the essa…

The Normative Structure of Science

Robert K. Merton, 1942 · Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, Vol. 1

Merton's 1942 essay codifies the norms that he argued had made science work: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism — the CUDOS norms that became the founding text of the sociology of science.…