The Ontology of The Questionnaire: Max

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 4, pp.
647684, 2001
2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd
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The Ontology of the Questionnaire: Max

Weber on Measurement and Mass
Investigation
Robert Michael Brain*
Although contemporary sociologists of science have sometimes claimed Max Weber
as a methodological precursor, they have not examined Webers own writings about
science. Between 1908 and 1912 Weber published a series of critical studies of the
extension of scientific authority into public life. The most notable of these concerned
attempts to implement the experimental psychology or psycho-physics laboratory in
factories and other real-world settings. Webers critique centered on the problem of
social measurement. He emphasized the discontinuities between the space of the laboratory and that of the factory, showing how several qualitative and historically conditioned differences between the two settings rendered the transfer of instruments and
methods between them highly problematic. Webers critical arguments prepared the
ground for his greatest foray into empirical sociology, a survey he directed for the
Verein fur Sozialpolitik investigating the conditions and attitudes affecting the lives
and performance of industrial workers. Using a different measuring instrument the
questionnaire Weber tried to implement a concept of social measurement which
implied a different ontology, drawn not from natural sciences but from the historical
sciences. 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Keywords: Max Weber; Social Measurement; Industrial Psychology; Psycho-Physics;
Emil Kraepelin.
One of the few subjects which does not generally spring to mind when contemplating Max Webers scholarly legacy is natural science. This has not prevented sociologists of science from finding important resources in Webers work, however; the
work of the great sociologist often appears to hover about the field like the ghost
of a late grandfather.1 If sociologists of science have drawn resources and methods
* Harvard University, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 235 Science Center, 1 Oxford
Street, Cambridge, MA 021387, U.S.A. (e-mail: brain@fas.harvard.edu)
1
This is especially true, of course, in one of the earliest approaches to the sociology of science, the
famous thesis of Robert Merton, which sought to extend Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism to the character of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. See Merton (1970).
But the spectre of Weber has also frequently haunted the sociology of the Edinburgh Strong Programme
PII: S0039-3681(01)00026-7
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
from Weber, they have done so believing that they were bringing them to a domain
for which Weber had little concern.2 It remains little known that Weber was there
first, examining the sociological character of several early twentieth-century natural
sciences, and in ways which often presage many of the concerns of science studies
at the end of the century.
Between 1907 and 1909, Weber launched a series of critical assaults on various
attempts to extend the laboratory disciplines to social problems, potentially or actually under way in real world settings. He began with a critical examination of
attempts to merge marginal utility theories in economics with psycho-physical studies of consumer behavior.3 After that he turned a harsh pen to the energetics movement spearheaded by the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay.4 This series of critiques culminated in an extensive, yet
understudied, monograph-length examination of the psycho-physics of industrial
work.5 Webers interest in these topics stemmed from his realization that when the
natural sciences extended their dominion to social institutions they not only brought
new rules and protocols, but they imposed a new material and social order. Moreover, Weber recognized, the natural sciences produced their own brand of sociology, inasmuch as they formed a distinctive network of relationships, specific
modes of contact between university laboratories, private enterprise and government, as well as proffering a complete image of human beings in society.
In Webers view, natural science offered an appealing, but misguided, solution
to the political crisis of Wilhelmine Germany.6 The decline of liberal political
culture had left a generally unacknowledged chaos of value-standards competing
in the public sphere.7 In the short-lived heyday of liberal political culture in Germany, classes and interest groups could find a basis for agreement in fundamental
terms of discussion. But the withering of liberal political institutions brought,
Weber opined, a corresponding rejection of the older belief in rationality itself,
which was now replaced by the categories of culture and psychology.8 As Weber
argued in his famous article on the Objectivity of social scientific knowledge, in
the present age the struggle extended to the regulative standards of judgment them-
and its descendants, as well as ethnomethodological studies of science. See Barnes (1974), Shapin
(1988) and Lynch (1993).
2
Law (1994), p. 8.
3
Weber (1908), pp. 3849.
4
Weber (1909a), pp. 57598.
5
Weber (1995a). See also the excellent introduction to the new edition of Webers monograph,
recently published in English translation by Schluchter (2000). For further studies of this and related
texts by Weber see S. Frommer (1994); Hinrichs (1981), pp. 85106; Oberschall (1965), pp. 11136;
and Rabinbach (1990), pp. 189202.
6
Proctor (1991), pp. 13455.
7
In his compelling study of Weber, Lawrence A. Scaff (1989) finds the defining context of Webers
work in the perceived decline of liberal political culture and the rise of a psychologizing tendency
in culture.
8
Woodruff D. Smith agrees with Webers view in his history of the cultural and social sciences in
Germany (see Smith, 1991, and Haas, 1994).
The Ontology of the Questionnaire
649
selves . . . because the problem extends into the domain of general cultural questions.9 Weber contended, moreover, that under such conditions science cannot
claim the high ground on the basis of any kind of natural necessity, since belief
in the value of scientific truth is a product of specific cultures and is not given in
nature.10 Science, in other words, offered a form of life and a value-system like
any other, rather than a source of authority rooted in the truth of nature.
The expansion of scientific authority, Weber recognized, hinged on the projection of the laboratory, its special operations and forms of life, to new domains of
culture. Measurement conferred a natural necessity and an aura of value-neutrality
upon scientific claims, making it an appealing route to avoid the inevitable conflict
which accompanied social decision-making.11 But Weber maintained that measurement, too, was a cultural practice, which often concealed an array of social and
intellectual conditions. When measurement remained within a scientific discipline,
these conditions were usually well known, enabling it to function unproblematically
as a type of intellectual currency. But when measurement was presented as a coherent practice from one discipline to another, it opened the door to problems and
mischief. Close scrutiny of measurement practice within a discipline just how
instruments are designed, set up, calibrated and handled, and how readings are
taken and interpreted not only revealed great differences and discontinuities
across disciplinary boundaries, but also showed severe constraints attaching to any
attempt to introduce these practices beyond the established disciplinary sites.
To illustrate this problem, Weber called attention to the growing number of
attempts that have been made especially but not exclusively in Germany . . . by
an entire array of innovative professional psychologists to find a route from the
measuring techniques of the laboratory to mass investigation.12 One of the most
characteristic examples already exposed by German psychologist could be
found in the criminal identification system of the French anthropologist Alphonse
Bertillon, which used anthropometric measures and a statistical filing system to
make a nearly foolproof technique for distinguishing the identity of individuals
from one another. When numerous French psychologists, including Alfred Binet,
Victor Henri and others, pursued a similarly conceived psychology of individual
differences. German psychologists were quick to observe that this was nothing
other than the Bertillon police-system in psychological garb.13
But that was primarily a French story. Closer to home, in Webers Germany,
experimental psychologists had made similar attempts to extend the psychology
laboratory to social institutions, as reflected especially by the growing concern for
9
Weber (1904), p. 153.

Weber (1904), p. 28.
11
For rich insight into this theme, see Porter (1995).
12
Weber (1995a), pp. 2189. Weber also called attention to the pedagogically interesting attempts
that had been made in France and America.
13
Weber (1995a), p. 219. On the transfer of methods from anthropometry to experimental psychology,
see Carson (1999) and Sokal (1987).
10
650
the problem of the mass-measurement of the effects and conditions of modern

work. The involvement of German experimental psychologists in this issue placed
them on a collision course with Weber and his colleagues in the Verein fu r Sozialpolitik, who claimed the conditions of German work as their special area of expertise. It seemed unavoidable to me, Weber acknowledged to the psychologist Hans
Gruhle, to make the attempt to confront the methodology of experimental psychology with our usual means of research (such as wage-books, effective work
calculations of factories, etc.) in order to show how large the cleft is between
us.14 But Weber, as usual, also had other things on his mind, such as history. His
engagement with the psycho-physical problems of industrial work from 190910
coincided with his participation, in the very same journal, in heated debates with
economic historians over what he meant to say in his famous 1905 work, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Many remarks suggest that Weber
regarded the contemporary scientific project of industrial psycho-physics as a continuation of many of the themes of his genealogy of the infamous iron cage of
modern vocational humanity (Berufsmenschentum), out of its origins in the black
cloak of Protestant moral asceticism.15 In response to his critics Weber emphasized
that the ethical style of life invented by early Protestants had become unmoored
from its spiritual foundations, achieving a remarkable victory in the souls of
human beings.16 In another formulation, Weber asserted that the inner-worldly
accomplishments of Protestant moral asceticism had become objectified in the
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order, most evidently in large-scale
enterprise resting on merely mechanical foundations.17 What had once been a
free and spontaneous, if somber, act of world-making had now become a fate.
reified in and through mechanization. This order is now bound to the technical
and economic presuppositions of mechanical, machinelike production, Weber
wrote, which today determines with irresistible force the life style of all individuals
born into this mechanism, not only those directly engaged in economic enterprise,
and perhaps will determine it until the last ton of fossil coal is burned.18
If the conditions of machine-like production reigned everywhere, it was in the
factory that the crucible of modern asceticism was forged. In the factory, Weber
wrote, with its hierarchic authority structure, its discipline, its chaining of the
workers to the machines (in comparison with the spinning rooms of the past), its
formidable accounting system that reaches down to the simplest hand movement
of the worker, workers became but cogs in a large system.19 Like machine parts,
14
Weber to Hans Gruhle, in Weber (1990), pp. 6745.

Razell (1977).
Weber (1968).
17
Weber (1958a), p. 181.
18
Weber (1958b), p. 18.
19
Weber (1995b), p. 149.
15
16
651
they also became objects of measurement, measured with instruments derived from
the very machines they tended. In practice, the modern psycho-physics laboratory
built upon this already machine-like character of the modern factory, using industrial instruments and concepts to configure human beings and their labor.
Weber effectively recognized what contemporary science studies have often
found, that scientists take hold of the world in a manner very much like the factory,
securing a position as a site of productive equipment that needs to be managed.20
From Webers perspective the laboratory, as the crucible of precision measurement,
thus served as the factorys historical Doppelga nger and unindicted co-conspirator
in the development of the iron cage of vocational humanity. In its application to
industry, even the very term psycho-physics, moreover, reduced the grand Weberian formulation of spirit and capitalism to a pair of banal mechanisms, clumsily
grafted together with the thin connecting wire of the hyphen.21
Against the backdrop of the historically conditioned character of the extra-mural
psycho-physics laboratory, Weber struggled to articulate the hidden conditions
operating at the heart of its apparently seamless practices. But Weber never
intended his critique of laboratory measuring practices as an end in itself. His
purpose was not, as one might suppose, to extinguish scientism and place Diltheyan
hermeneutics or Lebensphilosophie in its stead. He sought rather to furnish, for
himself as well as his colleagues and students, a method of measurement which
captured a different social ontology, specifically one in which the workers attitudes
and states of mind might be discovered both on the workers own terms as well
as within the contingent historical field in which they operated. From this critical
point of departure Weber launched the most ambitious empirical sociological
initiative of his career, a project he deemed a failure, but which has been judged
the most carefully thought through piece of empirical research of the prewar period.22
1. The Survey of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik
Although Max Weber had concerned himself for several years with experimental
psychology, he came to the problem of the extra-mural laboratory through a
somewhat indirect route.23 Beginning in 1907, Weber and his fellow members of
20
See, for example, Galison (1997), Krieger (1992) and Pickering (1995).
The term psycho-physics originated with Gustav Theodor Fechner to describe the exact science
of the functional relations or relations of dependency between body and soul or more generally between
body and mind, or physical and psychological worlds, which are assumed to exist in parallel to one
another. Fechner and his successors developed quantitative and statistical methods for measuring absolute and differential thresholds (or their inverse, sensitivity), as well as computing values in various
sensory continua. On Fechner, see Heidelberger (1993).
22
Oberschall (1965), p. 8.
23
For thoughtful discussions of Wundt, Muensterberg and other proponents of the new experimental
psychology, see Weber (1975), pp. 93208. On Webers engagement with psychology, see Frommer
(1994), pp. 23958.
21
652
the Verein fu r Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), considered proposals

for a collaborative mass investigation of the problems of workers and the conditions
of work in Germany. At the general assembly of the Verein, held between 30
September and 2 October that year, several proposals circulated representing a
range of different conceptions and approaches, with the proposal by Alfred Weber
garnering especial favor. A subcommittee was formed to oversee the design of the
survey, with the economist Karl Buecher appointed to serve as its director. One
year later, after many lively and at times strenuous negotiations, a research plan
and specific survey form gained approval, and 10,000 Marks were allotted to carry
it out under the direction of Heinrich Herkner. Over the course of the year Max
Weber became increasingly involved in the planning of the project, and by the
time of its approval had become its unofficial head. In this capacity he composed
the two most important conceptual documents to emerge, a long memorandum
intended as a guide to the design of the survey entitled Survey of the Selection and
Adaptation (Vocational choice and vocational fate) of the Workforce in Large
Industry (Erhebungen u ber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswahl und
Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Grosindustrie), and a critical review On the Psycho-Physics of Industrial Work.
The new initiative met with strong support from many members of the Verein,
for it reinforced the societys original concern with the workers question
(Arbeiterfrage; sometimes also called simply the social question), the conflicts
between the entrepreneurial and working classes, which served as one of the most
heated and intractable issues of Wilhelmine Germany.24 As Max Weber, Werner
Sombart and Edgar Jaffe reflected in a 1904 editorial, the Verein and its central
organ, the Archiv fu r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, distinguished themselves
by aiming to develop a science of the actually existing that would in turn shape
and inform policy issues. Unlike other social science journals, they observed,
the step which distinguished the Archiv from its predecessors was that it placed the
problems identified under the heading the question of labor in the most general
context, and that it grasped the question of labor in its cultural significance as the
outwardly most clearly visible expression of a much larger complex of phenomena:
the fundamental process of transformation experienced by our economic life and thus
by our cultural existence as a whole through the advance of capitalism.25
Alfred Webers research proposal would further this longstanding concern in a

manner attuned to new developments in the public discussion. It would also counter
bitter charges within the Verein that the organization had drifted away from its
practical concerns into something more like an academic publishing society.26 Contempt for the professorial lectern socialists (Kathedersozialisten) was already rife
24
Boese (1939); Campbell (1989); Lindenlaub (1967); vom Bruch (1985).

Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe , Geleitwort, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik 19 (1904), quoted in Scaff (1989), p. 84.
26
Boese (1939), pp. 11620.
25
653
within entrepreneurial and some government administrative circles, while representatives of a range of rival disciplinary discourses had begun to vie for influence
over policy regarding the labor question.27
Despite their resolute desire to provide practical policy guidance, the Verein had
always sought to bring increased methodological sophistication to social analysis.
German policy had for several decades been driven by an incessant number-gathering by government statisticians, what Ian Hacking has called the avalanche of
numbers.28 Around 1900 the situation began to change, as a variety of different
disciplines and approaches clamored for a say on the pressing problems associated
with the social question. These included biomedical studies of nourishment and
hygiene, alcoholism and industrial accidents; physiologists and psychologists concerned with exact measurement of output, fatigue, muscle movements and the
effects of various factors such as temperature, lighting, noise, diet, rest intervals,
and so on; economists studies of the division of labor, problems of value or marginal utility; studies by engineers and factory managers concerning production and
accounting methods and their relation to the length of the working day and wagelevels; and, finally, the contributions of journalists, often with a literary bent, who
published accounts of the experiences of workers, either directly from the workers
themselves, or by going to work in a factory disguised in some fashion as a member
of the working class.
All of these disciplinary approaches were represented to varying degrees in the
Verein discussions surrounding the conception and design of the survey. Max
Weber took it as part of his task to find a way to triangulate these programmes as
a means of accomplishing several objectives at once. In the first instance, it would
be strategically wise to do so, for it would not only effectively address widely held
concerns, but would define an original, yet politically neutral voice for the Verein.
Moreover, Weber emphasized, the survey should not overstep the limits of the
special competencies of its members, which were limited in several fields, particularly in the natural sciences. This line of argument pleased Buecher and Herkner,
who opposed the interest in biological questions such as heredity and degeneration
promoted by several influential committee members, notably Alfred Weber.29 Max
Weber shared their skepticism, but demanded that on such matters the survey not
remain silent since somewhere and somehow these problems might play a role.30
27
Lexis (190911), pp. 8046. On the strife within the Verein at the time of the survey, see Schluchter
(2000), pp. 616.
28
Hacking (1995). See also Gorges (1980) and Oberschall (1965).
29
Alfred Weber had initially become interested in evolutionary thought as a means of undermining
bourgeois sexual ethics, but his fascination soon began to approach a more encompassing biologism
in social questions. As Wolfgang Schluchter (1995) shows, this intellectual trajectory exacerbated growing strains between Alfred and Max Weber.
30
Max Weber to Alfred Weber, 19 September 1906, in (1990), pp. 6612. Three years later, at a
session on Race and Society convened at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society (1910),
Weber censured the utopian enthusiasm of the racial biologists with a stern appraisal of their value
for sociology: What we expect from the racial biologists and what we no doubt % will one day obtain
from them, is the exact proof of concrete, single relationships, that is, the overwhelming importance
654
Besides the various biological approaches to the workers conditions, Weber

and his colleagues took particular interest in various methods of cost-accounting
developed by engineers, scientists and managers. As the historian Robert Locke
has shown, German cost-accounting stood in the midst of a dramatic revolution in
the first decade of this century.31 Among the many different systems of social
accounting, two proved of particular interest. In a special review of the so-called
energetics movement of the Leipzig physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and his
Belgian ally the industrialist Ernest Solvay, Weber scathingly criticized the assumption that the sciences of energy might furnish a universal system of accounting,
not only for the sciences and industry, but for social and cultural life as well.32 In
contrast to his condemnatory treatment of Ostwald and his allies, Weber regarded
the methods of the physicist and manager Carl Ernst Abbe as important innovations
in understanding the conditions of factory work. Abbe was a physicist who, after
important work in optics, joined the Zeiss optical works, eventually becoming the
head of the firm. Because of his own working-class origins, Abbe took a keen
interest in labor relations, aiming to replace talk of worker against capitalist with
progressive worker and progressive capitalist against backward worker and backward capitalist.33 In the late 1890s he conducted experiments on varied lengths
of the working day and their effects on productivity. In these rigorously designed
trials, piece-rate workers worked some weeks at nine hours per day and some at
eight hours per day. Complete records of their earnings and production figures
were kept, and these were supplemented by measures of the number of kilowatt
hours of electricity used by their electric tools. After carefully breaking down the
data according to age, difficulty of task and other important variables, Abbe found
that workers performed consistently better when they worked an eight-hour day.34
In 1901 Abbe introduced the eight-hour day at the Zeiss optical works, the first
industrial manager to do so in Germany.
Beyond the relatively straightforward finding in favor of the shorter working
day, Abbe tried to interpret his data to discover why productivity increased with
more rest time. Comparing workers output with power consumption he found that
during the shorter days workers used their machines more intensively, that is, they
worked harder. Abbe argued that this had nothing to do with improved spirits, nor
of concrete hereditary factors. That proof, gentlemen, is lacking up to now . . .. See Ploetz (1911),
p. 156.
31
Robert Locke (1984) provides a fascinating account of the many ways in which industrial costaccounting permeated the universities, and vice versa. Under the heading Americanization this would
become one of the themes of Webers famous essay Science as a Vocation (Weber, 1946).
32
Webers harsh criticism probably derived from a perception of a brewing rivalry between the Verein
fu r Sozialpolitik and the Institut Solvay in Belgium, which at about the same time launched a survey
entitled Recherches sur le travail humain dans lindustrie. The Solvay surveys goals resembled those
of the Verein, but it proceeded with methods and assumptions akin to those attacked by Weber in
Weber (1909a) and Weber (1995a). See Webers letter to Gustav Schmoller, 1 December 1909, in
Weber (1994), pp. 3223.
33
Ernst Abbe , quoted in Wittig (1989), p. 115.
34
Abbe (1906).
655
with feelings about the boss or any other spiritual or psychological condition that
might befall the worker. Instead, he contended, it had everything to do with the
physiological and psychophysiological conditions of fatigue, for which there were
natural thresholds. Abbe cast his analysis in the psycho-physical equation V=E,
where V was the amount of energy spent (Kra fteverbrauch, also Ermu dung) and
E was the amount of energy replaced (Kra fte-Ersatz, also Erholung), which was
a matter of the workers individual metabolism.35
Weber admired the rigor of these studies, as well as the humane conclusions
that were drawn from them. But he found it troubling that they denied the validity
of any talk of the meaning of factory work for specific workers, and for the cultural
problems of factory work more generally. These were, after all, some of the principal concerns for conducting a Verein survey, and especially for selecting Herkner
and Buecher to steer it, since each had published different kinds of work around
these questions. Herkner had published a highly regarded study on the conditions of
workers.36 In 1896 Buecher published an extraordinarily popular piece of economic
anthropology entitled Work and Rhythm (Arbeit und Rhythmus), one of the most
diverting reads ever produced by the dismal science, which contained an extensive
polemic against the conventional notion that factory work must inevitably result
in monotony, automatism and fatigue for the worker.37
Buechers treatise intervened in a Europe-wide debate about whether clock-timed
factory work forced an irremediable constraint on the hours and modes of industrial
labor.38 While numerous physiologists sought to define the biological limits to
productivity under such conditions through machine studies, Buecher suggested a
more imaginative and radical approach to the problem, contending that the human
experience of time was less rigid and objective than machine-based measures.39
The economist drew upon studies of his Leipzig colleague Wilhelm Wundt showing
that the intuition of time derives from patterns of association, which in the end are
nothing more than rhythm.40 For Buecher this was a monumental finding, for it
35
Abbe developed complex equations to solve for each workers metabolism and the particular task
they performed, which also drew upon physiological research. See Abbe (1906), pp. 2489.
36
Herkner (1894).
37
Buecher (1899).
38
See Herkners summary of the debate in Herkner (190911), p. 1201. On the European debate see
Cross (1988); and Cross (1989), pp. 103128; see also Rabinbach (1990), pp. 20638.
39
The indispensable study of European fatigue research and the science of work more generally is
Rabinbach (1990).
40
On the Leipzig circles which connected Wundt and Buecher, see Smith (1991), pp. 20418.
Wundts account of the intuition of time, upon which Buecher based his argument, ran roughly as
follows. The intuition of time arises from a succession of varied representations, each of which remains
disposable in consciousness, when a new representation enters. Each representation leaves a trace, a
certain effect, which persists with the new representations that enter. It is not, then, the real reproduction
of representations which gives rise to time, but the representation of their possible reproduction. Wundt
gave the example of acoustic impression the swinging of a pendulum at regular intervals. The first
beat has its place in consciousness; its image persists until the second follows. This reproduces the first
immediately. By virtue of a general law of association, identical or analogous states of consciousness
excite each other. But at the same time the second beat encounters the image that has persisted during
the interval. The new beat and the image are referred to the first perception, which gives to the repeated
656
enabled him to recast assumptions about the time-frames of industrial labor. By

the much discussed intensification of work, Buecher observed, it was assumed
that it is the changing relationship of the amount of work to the time of work,
considering work thus as a qualitatively fixed item, of the same magnitude at all
times, that lends itself to measurement and quantification and which people sooner
or later draw together as a unity of time.41 Once one began to rethink the constancy
of time in relation to productive work, it began to become possible to conceive of
different temporalities, different rhythms of the organization of productive life.
Buecher illustrated the possible variety of productive rhythms with a vast ethnological survey of non-industrial, natural peoples (Naturvo lker). Through careful
analysis of the role of song, chant or dance in work practices, the economist demonstrated that pre-industrial peoples typically imparted a highly developed rhythmical
patterning (rhythmische Gestaltung) to their labor. These rhythms, moreover, integrated work with the rest of life, with cycles of eating and sleeping, with religious
activities, and with different forms of sociability. European observers, Buecher
contended, often misperceived these rhythms as signs of laziness or lack of civilization, failing to see their value as a disciplining element of great significance that
enabled peoples to maintain optimal levels of productive energy and to suffuse
work with a sense of joy and harmony. Buecher argued that his findings had enormous policy implications, for they implied that if workers would be allowed to
regulate their own working rhythms, gains in productivity and social harmony
would result.
For Weber the insights of Buecher and Herkner provided a resource to triangulate
the discourses of Social Darwinian biologism and managerial accounting. But it
would require methodological innovation at a level never before attempted by a
Verein survey, since the position the sociologists would seek to occupy had already
been staked out by another opportunistic discipline: experimental psychology or
psycho-physics. Hence, any viable approach to the conditions of workers in large
industry would have to begin with a thorough critical review of the strengths and
failings of the psycho-physics of industrial work.
Webers reading of the various approaches to the sociology of work left him
convinced that accurate and innovative empirical sociology demanded direct
experience of the real conditions of industrial work. To supplement his theoretical
preparations, therefore, the sociologist put himself through a rigorous Praktikum,
rolling up his sleeves and going directly into a factory, where he reviewed factory
records and directly observed the conditions of industrial life.
impression its original intensity, while the image remains in a state of memory. Consequently, the
present perception is immediately distinguished from its image. In this simple fact, Wundt maintained,
are contained a elements of the idea of time: At the instant of the third impression, the notion of time
exists entire, all at once, since the three elements are given simultaneously. See Wundt (1893), pp. 83
93. See also the explanations offered by his student Meumann (1892, 1894). Several Wundt followers
took up the problem of work and rhythm in laboratory studies: See Smith (1900) and Awramoff (1903).
41
Buecher (1899), p. 2. On the German debate over the intensification of work, see Groh (1978).
657
Weber gained access to factory life through the generosity of relatives in Oerlinghausen, where in September of 1908 (and again several months later) he gained
full access to the account books and production registers of the newly incorporated
family textile firm the Leinenweberei Carl Weber & Co. Weber initially planned
his visit to Oerlinghausen solely for recuperation in the regions gentle climate
amid the gracious hospitality of his cousin Alwine (Wina) Mueller. But the author
of the Protestant Ethic ended up spending long weeks plunged deeply in the
account books and production registers of the weaving mill, as his wife Marianne
Weber reported.42 The account books seemed to have proved salutary, lifting Weber
out of the lugubrious mood brought on by his recent polemics with critics of The
Protestant Ethic. His wife noted that the laborious calculations fare well in his
hands, he is happy.43 Besides examining the accounts and production statistics,
Weber consulted firm records to learn all that he could about the individual biographies and characteristics of the workers in question. He also plied the shop
foreman for information about individual workers, but he did not interview the
workers directly. Weber used both his concrete findings and his general insights
gained there to inform his critique of the industrial psycho-physics and to shape
the design of the Verein survey.
2. The Psycho-Physics of Industrial Work
In taking up the problem of the psycho-physics of industrial work, Weber
acknowledged that the experimental psychologists had staked out a strong logical
claim for their focus on work performance and its effects on the psycho-physical
mechanism of the worker. Indeed, he admitted, all of the concerns that social scientists held dear came to bear directly on the workers performance:
Every process of the division of labor and specialization in the modern large
enterprise but in particular the breaking down of the components of work
(Arbeitszerlegung) within the modern large enterprise, every alteration of working
tools or machines, every alteration of work-time and work-pauses, every introduction
or alteration of the wage-system, which aims to optimize the specific qualitative or
quantitative work performances, each of these processes means in each case an
alteration of the expectations placed on the workers psycho-physical apparatus.44
Moreover, Weber added, it should be possible, in principle, through physiology,

experimental psychology, and perhaps even anthropology, to gain insights into the
assumptions and the effects of alterations in technical and economic conditions of
industrial work.45 Physiological studies of work, as Anson Rabinbach has shown,
multiplied in European factories and workplaces around 1900, supported by a mar-
42
Marianne Weber, quoted in Oberschall (1965), p. 115.

Marianne Weber, quoted in Oberschall (1965), p. 115.
44
Weber (1995a), p. 163.
45
Weber (1995a), pp. 1634.
43
658
riage of (Lamarckian) social Darwinian assumptions about functional adaptation

and the expansive worldview derived from the sciences of energy.46 The sciences
of energy had, of course, been developed in and through the factory and the concerns for the efficiencies of working machines.47 But Weber, following Adolf Gerson, maintained that the expanded vision of energetics as universal economic measure overstepped its legitimate but delimited role by hewing to the fallacious premise
that the primary goal of industry was economy of energy (Kraftersparnis), when
it was economy of costs (Kostenersparnis) that drove industrial decisions.48 While
the physiological sciences could yield valuable data about work performance under
specific conditions, Weber suspected that these remained of limited value for the
cost-driven interests of industry.
Although Webers survey of industrial psycho-physics took in a broad crosssection of the international literature, he elected to focus on Emil Kraepelin and
his followers, the German researchers most unstintingly dedicated to developing
an experimental psychology as in accord with the assumptions of the sciences of
energy.49 Kraepelin, a former colleague of Weber at the University of Heidelberg,
remains best known today for his work in other areas, particularly psychiatric nosography, where his pioneering differential description of Dementia praecox, and the
system of psychiatric classification built upon this distinction, have been revived as
the basis of the international psychiatric nosology.50 But at the turn of the century
Kraepelin enjoyed a widespread reputation for his attempts to apply his particular
brand of psychiatry to a range of social problems, including crime, alcoholism,
venereal disease and the problems of malingering workers.51 In Kraepelins view,
all of these problems shared a common etiology in a weak or senescent will, a
condition that could be investigated with the tools derived from the nascent discipline of experimental psychology. After completing his medical education, Kraepe-
46
Rabinbach (1990), pp. 20637; Sarasin and Tanner (1998).

On the general spread of the sciences of work and energy see Smith (1998). On the broad effects
of these sciences on culture and the arts, see Asendorf (1989).
48
Weber (1909a) pp. 5835; Gerson (1902). The energetic culture-theory attacked by Weber
included not only Ostwalds general Weltanschauung but the attempt of Ernest Solvay and his colleagues
to develop a universal currency of labor-value based on physiological and psycho-physiological measures.
49
In approaching this literature Weber consulted the psychologists Hugo Muensterberg and Hans
Gruhle, as well as the psychiatrist Willy Hellpach. During the course of his investigation he also made
the acquaintance of Karl Jaspers, then a young intern in psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg.
For Webers engagement with psychopathology see two articles by Frommer and Frommer (1990a,b).
A few years later, Gruhle published a similar critical study of the ergographic methods of Kraepelin,
his Doktorvater (Gruhle, 1912).
50
On Kraepelins place in the history of psychiatry see Ackerknecht (1968) and Blasius (1995). On
the resurgence of Kraepelinian diagnostic categories see Blashfield (1984). Matthias M. Weber and Eric
J. Engstrom offer an important reappraisal of Kraepelins diagnostic method, showing how Kraepelins
method for determining natural categories of mental illness (he called it breaking nature at the joints
involved a special method of social measurement based on diagnostic cards (Za hlkarten), a variant
of a long standing tradition of statistical record-keeping in German psychiatric institutions. See Weber
and Engstrom (1997).
51
Engstrom (1992), pp. 11132.
47
659
lin trained in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, the leading figure of the
new psychology in Germany.52 Soon Kraepelin imported elements of the Wundtian
laboratory armoury into the psychiatric clinic psychological instruments and a
determination to explain psychiatric and psychological phenomena in strictly causal
and analytical terms and, wherever possible, supported by precision measurement.
This made possible a mechanics of mental illness (Mechanik der
Geisteskrankheiten), which broke down the observable clinical phenomena into
basic psycho-physiological causes and effects.
Kraepelin did not confine himself to severe mental illness, however; his everyday
practice of psychiatry brought him into constant contact with the ordinary nervous
and mental suffering caused by the harsh conditions of modern life. In these cases
the instruments of Wundtian experimental psychology promised even more, since
such nervous disturbances typically had little or nothing to do with hereditary or
deep organic causes. Kraepelin maintained that a great many of the lesser neuroses
derived from the changing and severe circumstances of modern life. Disruption,
stress and the myriad forms of industrial fatigue created by overwork, sensory
overload and the wear and tear of shaking, vibrating machinery not only overtaxed
the elasticity of bodily functions, but also took a huge toll on the mental constitution
of many people.53 The mental pathologies often showed up in disguise, through
alcoholism and drug abuse, while in other cases they took more straightforward
psychological forms. The prevailing Wilhelmine discourse framed these problems
in social Darwinian terms, casting the growth of mechanization and the intensification of work as ineluctable effects of competitive industrial evolution. Such
trying conditions forced the need for adaptation (Anpassung) and selection
(Auslesen), not only among workers, but among the entrepreneurs, and even nations
themselves. Kraepelins psycho-pathology accepted these terms, perhaps with a
measure of doctorly compassion. The purpose of the laboratory would be to identify
the functional demands made by modern life, and to specify modalities and conditions of adjustment.54 Every individual possesses his own psychological disposition, Kraepelin asserted, and each processes experiences mentally and emotionally, putting them into actions, often enough under substantial inner distress.55
52
Kraepelin (1983), p. 22. On the role of Wundt and his students in the rise of German psychology,
see Ash (1980). The general literature on Wundt is large. To enter the on-going debate see Bringmann
and Tweeny (1980), Woodward and Ash (1982) and Danziger (1990). For an excellent recent addition
to the many challenges to the claim of Wundt as a founder of experimental psychology, see Hatfield (1997).
53
On the German discussion surrounding technology and frayed nerves, see also Fischer-Homberger
(1975), Radkau (1994) and Asendorf (1989) pp. 7984.
54
Wundt himself eschewed all practical applications of his program, seeking instead to legitimate
psychology as an autonomous academic discipline. Kraepelin was one of several Wundt students who
sought to extend experimental psychology to extra-academic problems. For differing perspectives on
the movement toward applied psychology, see Danziger (1990), Dorsch (1963) and Jaeger and Staeble (1980).
55
Kraepelin (1902), p. 459.
660
Kraepelin maintained that this processing occurred at a more basal level than that of
conscious experience; sensitive instruments and carefully planned experimentation,
therefore, could elucidate it in a precise way.
Kraepelin reported that he first conceived the problem of measuring mental work
in conversations with the British scientist Francis Galton, whose own attempts to
measure the productive capacities of British civil servants had failed by his own
admission because of methodological shortcomings.56 Kraepelin resolved to
improve upon Galtons methodology by adopting mechanical psychological instruments from the Wundtian armoury. He found just the instrument he was looking
for in the ergograph, a self-recording dynamometric apparatus newly invented by
the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso.
The Mosso ergograph brought to fruition several decades of efforts to measure
mental actions in the language of mechanics. Mosso himself came to the instrument
after several failed attempts to measure mental activity through changes in cerebral
pulse rates.57 During the 1880s several physiologists began to experiment with
techniques for measuring functions of mind and brain by using traditional spring
dynamometers or self-registering variants to record the effects of mental stimuli
upon physiological functions such as respiration, arterial pulse and muscular
strength. As Mosso noted in his book on ergographic studies, these instruments
proved highly inadequate to the task.58 The spring dynamometers could not give
a continuous (temporal) indication, and thus remained incapable of recording muscular action as mechanical work. But even with the self-registering dynamometers,
which furnished a continuous, graphic indication, it soon became apparent just how
many muscles become involved in a movement such as making a fist, which created
problems for any attempt to isolate purely mental phenomena. Mosso answered
these problems with an apparatus which used a holster to constrain the hand and
forearm, allowing only the middle finger to move without restriction. This finger
lifted a small weight up and down repeatedly, leaving a direct trace of its motion
on an x-y coordinate grid (see Figure 1). The ergographic recording thus recorded
not only the number of times the weight was lifted (Hubzahl) but also the force
of each repetition, exhibited in the height of each particular trace (Hubho he) (see
Figure 2). By limiting the whole of bodily activity to one tiny degree of freedom,
and thus eliminating the interference of other bodily organs and functions, the
invisible labor of the mind recorded itself in a measure of mechanical equivalence.59
Kraepelin echoed Mossos assertion that the ergograph trace revealed the inti-
56
Mosso (1881).
Mosso (1892).
59
Mosso compared the mechanical equivalence of mental work with the classic physical principle
of the mechanical equivalent of heat developed by Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer. See Mosso (1892),
pp. 559.
57
58
661
Fig. 1.
Mosso Ergograph, from Die Ermu dung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1892), p. 90. Courtesy
of the Harvard College Library.
Fig. 2.
Ergograph Curve, from Angelo Mosso, Die Ermu dung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1892),
p. 90. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.
mate and most characteristic feature of our individuality the manner in which
we fatigue.60 What Kraepelin termed the personal fatigue-rate (perso nliche
Ermu dbarkeit) thus became another personal equation like the reaction-time, usually measured with the Hipp chronoscope the experimental value upon which
60
Kraepelin (1903), p. 7. For a more critical assessment of ergograph studies by a Wundt student,
see Mu ller (1901). On the place of ergographic studies within the broader history of fatigue studies,
see Rabinbach (1990), pp. 13345.
662
Wundt had built an entire experimental program.61 The ergograph marked a personal equation of a very special kind, however; for it measured the individuality
of persons in terms of work or energy, the primary concept of modern physics and
the currency of industrial engineering. Mosso conceived of the ergograph in these
terms, defining the principle of the conservation of energy as the Ariadnes thread
leading modern science out of the kingdom of ignorance.62 Moreover, he emphasized the practical importance of the graphic method as a means of measuring work,
beginning with the dynamometers used by engineers and their modifications by
physiologists such as Helmholtz, who adapted these techniques to measure the
work of the contracting frog muscle.63
By the 1870s the graphic method enjoyed ubiquitous use in the study of physiological function, remaking the laboratory in the image of the factory.64 Already in
1878 Mossos mentor and colleague Etienne-Jules Marey, the French physiologist
and ardent advocate of the graphic method, implored his fellow scientists to extend
this graphic inscription of work wherever mechanical forces are in play.65 Mossos
ergograph achieved just this, bringing precision measurement to one of the most
pressing areas of application in the late-nineteenth century economy, that of the
rapidly expanding number of white-collar employees, the managers, administrators
and clerical workers who worked in large-scale enterprise, government and other
sectors.66 With such a reliable instrument it might be possible to integrate mental
work into the cost-accounting of production systems, about which books of political economy had precious little to say.67
Kraepelin similarly emphasized the continuity between the measure of industrial
ber
power and mental work in his 1893 programmatic article On Mental Work (U
geistige Arbeit). Today if a ship makes its trial voyage or the plan of a new
electrical lighting system is drawn up, the psychiatrist wrote,
we share the satisfaction of men of culture to read in the newspaper how many indicated horsepower the new engine is capable of generating, or how great will be the
numerical intensity of light and how high the consumption of energy will run. Rarely,
and only within specific margins does the calculation err. With solid work the machine
maintains precisely what its maker promised, and he is even in possession of enough
experience to say in what measure the work-performance will vary, when new parts
will be needed, and how high the demand for raw materials will be. But it is only
in this last instance that these technical products of ours are of the same nature as
that which Descartes and La Mettrie glimpsed in human beings. We know rather
precisely how much nourishment this or that organism needs, but we have little concept of how much it produces, or what its productive capacity might be.68
61
On the personal equation, see Schaffer (1988) and Canales (in press).
Mosso (1892), p. 60.
63
Brain and Wise (1999); Holmes and Olesko (1995).
64
Borell (1987); Mendelsohn (1992); Rabinbach (1990), pp. 84120; Sarasin and Tanner (1998).
65
Marey (1878), pp. xiixiii.
66
Kocka (1969) and Locke (1984).
67
Mosso (1892), p. 172.
68
62
663
In much the same way, he continued,

we need to compare the mental performance-capacity, (Leistungfa higkeit) of different
people with one another. We speak of their greater or lesser labor-power
(Arbeitskraft), and we gauge this roughly by the number and size of the tasks, which
the single person has solved over the course of a lesser or greater span of time.
Indeed, in both everyday life and particularly in state administration the practical need
has for a long time led to find a way to judge the mental endowment of a specific
person . . . Just as we test a ship in its trial voyage, so must we also test those people
who would take up responsibility.69
An effective gauge of mental labor would enable more responsible apportioning

of employment, fitting suitable people to specific jobs and defining tasks to yield
maximum efficiency of mental effort.
Kraepelins experiments with mental work pursued just this desideratum. In an
early paper, coauthored with his Russian student Alexis Oseretzkowsky, the Heidelberg professor examined the variations in mental work performance under a range
of conditions: with alterations in the length, frequency and timing of pauses; with
changes in the rhythmic character of the tasks themselves; with modifications of
the experimental apparatus, especially modifications of the weight lifted by the
moving finger; comparing bodily and mental fatigue; assessing the influence of
alcohol, tea and coffee; and finally, examining variations in performance at different times of day.70 These exhaustive investigations of parameters underscored the
larger programmatic point: the ergograph curve captured the phenomenon of mental
work as labor power. Experiment after experiment showed, for example, that when
the will remained engaged the subject could continue despite muscle exhaustion.
Hence, little doubt could remain that the essential cause for the failure of muscle
performance in ergograph trials lay not in the fatigue of muscles, but rather must
be sought in the [fatigue] of the central organ.71
The isolation of the will as a measurable motive force in mental labor opened
the door for Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin to test Karl Buechers claims about
rhythm and the regulation of productive energies. Buecher, of course, had built the
entire argument of Work and Rhythm on the Wundtian claim that physiological
rhythms were conditioned by the mind, that physiological effects measured in
pulse-curves or breathing-rates were altered by the effects of listening to sounds.
Putting Buechers hypothesis to the test, Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin showed that
in specific tasks myriad effects could be boiled down to a precisely measurable
rhythm. It mattered little, for example, whether the rhythm was established by
jubilant march music, by a metronome, or by electric impulse high intensity
performances peaked at a metronome speed of 120.72 On the heels of this finding,
69
Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901).
71
Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901), p. 599.
72
Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin (1901), pp. 6004.
70
664
Kraepelin turned his attention to the timing, frequency and duration of breaks from
work and their effects on productivity, seeking what he deemed the method of
optimal pauses.
After a few years, Kraepelin began to revise his program. He became concerned
that his ergograph curves captured only an aggregate measure of several processes
occurring at more or less the same time. Doubt set in when he began to wonder
whether the different conditions of mental fatigue could be so easily disaggregated,
whether many or all of them were not usually in play simultaneously to one degree
or another. In other words, what he had taken to be a gauge of performance capacity
in fact represented a composite of any number of component processes
(Theilvorga nge) such as practice-capacity, practice-determination, stimulationcapacity, recovery-capacity, sleep-determination, resistance-capacity, and so on,
each of which should be isolable and measurable in terms of its own effects on
the subjects basic physiological substratum. Kraepelin took great pains to caution
against granting these particular factors too much sovereignty. Noting new developments in the theory of aphasia, the man often called the Bismarck of German
psychiatry struggled to ground the empire of psychiatry in a unified concept of
the psyche, and decried the increasing number of theories which advanced a splitting off (Zersplitterung) of the soul into an unlimited number of self-sufficient
powers.73 In these views, he added, psychological acts are represented as the
result of majority resolutions of the lower house of perceptions and of the upper
house of memory-images.74 Kraepelin, who in 1918 defended the German monarchy to the bitter end, stood resolute in his intention to defend a unified theory
of mind. In specific terms this meant that the experimental program should seek
to isolate the various components of the work-curve, to elucidate their causes, and
to specify their modes of correlation and interaction within a unified framework.
In a showcase article in a Festschrift for Wundt, Kraepelin printed a new diagram
illustrating just how these components interacted (see Figure 3).
Weber launched his attack on just this very composite nature of the Kraepelin
work-curve. The trouble began with Kraepelins own recognition that the ordinary,
single ergograph curve remained inconsistent and seemed to conceal as much as
it revealed.
If one measures the work-performances (Arbeitsleistungen) of a person working in a
specific way in a continuous manner in the smallest intervals of time, either directly
through a machine set-up in the laboratory or by determining the products [of work]
. . . and one records the results in a coordinate-system as a performance-curve, then
this line a very irregular one, not only at first glance, but also after rather intensive
study its course can be difficult that there is only a certain measure of an increase
73

Kraepelin 46. To compare Kraepelins views of aphasia with his psychiatric contemporaries in
Germany and France, see Hagner (1997) and Harrington (1987). For a longer view of the development
of multiplicity of personality, see Hacking (1982).
74
665
Fig. 3. Emil Kraepelin, Work Curve, from Philosophische Studien 20 (1902), table II.
Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.
666
that appears at the beginning of the work-period, a certain amount . . . of fall toward
the end.75
Weber suspected that Kraepelins attempt to break the general work-curve into its
component parts set his esteemed colleague on a path leading not to greater precision in his measurements, as Kraepelin assumed, but to incoherence in the conception of just what was being measured. If the inconsistencies of the general workcurve obscured a more complex picture of smaller physiological interactions taking
place in a span of work, the same charge might equally be made that each of the
basal component parts similarly masked their own intrinsic complexities.
The work-curve thus fell foul of the first principle of measurement: a measuring
instrument must have the same quality as the object being measured: a measure
of length must be extended, a measure of weight must be heavy, and so on. The
identity of the graphic measure of mechanical work derived from the notion that
physical work was always accompanied by movement, and that movement could
be rendered in terms of time and space. But, Weber contended, mental work did
not have any real directly correlating movement, and was thus qualitatively different from the graph which proposed to record it. The discovery of the composite
nature of the work-curve amounted to little more than an attempt to save the
phenomena of the work-curve model, the components playing a role comparable
to epicycles in Ptolemaic astronomy. All of this suggested that the model was ill
conceived from the start, that the reality of mental labor could not be reduced to
a mechanical concept for the simple reason that it extends more to the whole of
life and is surrounded by a much wider periphery of mediated relationships.
Weber drove home his charge of the reductionism of the Kraepelin model of
mental labor with a painstaking analysis of its key components. The most important
of these consisted of the dichotomy of fatigue (Ermu dung) and recovery
(Erholung). Weber noted the differences among physiologists over the nature of
fatigue, whether it resulted from an accumulation of chemical substances toxins
of some soft in the body or from the depletion of indispensable, nutritive, substances. Either way, the work-curve simply recorded the effect, and it probably
made no difference on the measure. A thornier distinction surrounded the difference
between the subjective feeling of tiredness (Mu digkeit) and the measurable
phenomena of fatigue. This distinction mattered because it impinged on the mood
a given worker brought to the workplace and the possible myriad causes which
informed it. Kraepelin maintained that tiredness and fatigue should be counted
as distinct phenomena. Under ordinary conditions feelings of tiredness had no effect
on the work-performance recorded in ergograph curve, although in ongoing situations they could interactively affect how other component processes, such as will,
condition performance.
Such a distinction, Weber protested, opened a window onto some of the concep75
Weber (1995a), pp. 1689.
667
tual problems of industrial psycho-physics. While it may be possible to measure

mental fatigue in this way as a homogeneous event resulting from fatiguing work,
any attempt to determine the fatigue-rate of an individual person would not be a
unitary quality measurable in the course of single work-curves.76 Measuring mental work and determining the workers personal equation remained altogether different matters.
Another basic component of the Kraepelin work-curve was practice or rep bung). For Kraepelin this meant an increase in the ease, rapidity, securetition (U
ity, and regularity of a specific performance with the purpose of a more sparing
and successful exploitation of the stock of energy (Kra ftevorrats) and the energy
capacity of a given psycho-physical apparatus.77 In practice, Kraepelin observed,
this meant that the individual had acquired an ability to bring forth the typical
reaction without an articulated act of will. The work-curve of the practised
worker was set into motion earlier, rose more moderately, and began to sink earlier.
But it did so more slowly, while maintaining a generally higher and more even
level throughout its course than that of the beginner.78
Again and again Weber returned to the fundamental problem of the work-curve.
He pointed out that although Kraepelin interpreted most of the components of his
work-curve in physiological terms, some were attributed to purely psychological
causes, which posed all sorts of problems about the causal relationship between
the two sides of the psycho-physical equation. Notwithstanding these inconsistencies, Weber acknowledged, Kraepelin upheld the basic analogy with mechanical
measurement by privileging the physiological explanation of the components.
Hence, Weber concluded, Kraepelin, will always tend more or less, to view the
somatic processes as the Real, the psychical as the contingent mode of appearance. When this occurs, a number of these components of the work-curves with
which Kraepelin works, plunge into an awkward position.79 The problem, apart
from all details, Weber contended, always came down to the same question: how
does the indubitable effect of these, to a great extent purely psychological factors,
combine with this strictly physiologically operating theory of fatigue and practice?80 All of the complications of Kraepelins theory, Weber concluded, went
into shoring up this fundamental problem with the work-curve. This was hardly
surprising, since the very notion of applied psycho-physics aimed to provide an
improved form of management and therefore adopted the presuppositions and language of industrial management.
Weber could now deliver his knockout punch, which exposed the extreme difficulty of extending the material circumstances of the psychological experiment to
76
Weber (1995a), p. 176.

78
79
Weber (1995a), p. 226.
80
Weber (1995a), p. 226.
77
668
the real-world setting of the workplace. Once the hidden conditions of these apparently seamless measuring practices had been exhibited, it became clear that factory
conditions of industrial work contained an array of built-in conditions which are
align to the laboratory.81 Several of these came immediately to attention: housing
conditions, as well as dietary and drinking habits of the workers; the workers
financial needs and interests in the work; the wage-system and how it was perceived
by individual workers; the material conditions of work, including not only machinery but the relative ease or difficulty in working with the different kinds of materials
on the job.
Alien conditions made for misleading conceptual categories. When we trade in
the stock of categories that experimental psychology has produced, both the general
ones as well as those specifically for the analysis of industrial labor, Weber wrote,
it must be asked whether the possibility exists that these can yield observations in
the everyday work done outside the laboratory.82 Weber contended that conceptual
categories of social science come into being in a distinctive material and social
context. Experimental psychology derived its concepts from the denuded conditions
of the laboratory, where human nature could be reduced to simplified mechanical
relations. But outside the laboratory walls in the real-world setting of work these
reductive categories proved entirely untenable under the weight of vastly more
complex conditions.
In contrast, Weber wondered whether the psycho-physical laboratory might be
supplanted by a more anthropological approach, whether observations of everyday work as it occurs outside the laboratory might be made, which could offer
material that was qualitatively similar for use in exact treatment, as with the laboratory exercises.83 Many of the psychological factors taken up by psycho-physics
might be better explained as purely social phenomena, as matters of ethnic, cultural, vocational, or social provenance.84
One telling indication of the lack of social content was the elision of the workers
own perspective on their performance. It stands to reason, Weber pointed out, that
workers would regulate their exertion according to the wage system, working
harder when there was more money to be made, especially in piece work. But
there might also be customary practices which the workers brought to the factory
from elsewhere, such as agrarian modes of folk calculation. Here Weber harked
back to his early work on the East Elbian peasantry, where he challenged mechanistic economic formulations (including Marxist ones) by demonstrating the contingency of conditions the periodicities of seasons, weather, family life and kinship,
the religious calender, etc. which shaped rural economic life. Buechers Work
and Rhythm also showed that agrarian Europeans often still relied upon the
81
Weber
Weber
83
Weber
84
Weber
82
(1995a),
(1995a),
(1995a),
(1995a),
p.
p.
p.
p.
230.
230.
230.
244.
669
pre-modern customs to shape economic activity and give meaning to everyday life.
Hence, German workers who brought still-vivid memories of rural forms of life
might be operating with a different sense of time, a different sense of daily rhythm.
Those who appeared to be pacing or malingering at work might in fact be
operating by a different, yet still productive, method of regulating their energies.
If this were so, the whole project of disciplining them, measuring them, would
amount to a colossal misunderstanding, a failure on the part of the managers or
physiologists to recognize the nature of the problem.85
Similarly, Weber contended that other inherited traditional values and sensibilities sometimes decisively shaped workers performance. In Oerlinghausen, for
example, there had been a number of female workers from a Pietist background
who consistently showed high levels of output. Not surprisingly, this fascinated
Weber, leading him to attribute their performance to the shunning of dance halls
and other such pleasures condemned by Pietism, the consequences of the
asceticism of Protestantism and of the inner orientation toward the God-willed
worldly occupation sustained through it.86 These workers were, moreover, individualistic especially in their resistance to social relations with other workers and
the pressures to join unions, in a manner which Weber thought derived from the
past. That they belong, he continued, as residues of the past, into the wider
currents which I have attempted to analyze elsewhere [in the Protestant Ethic],
and that they are still to some extent characteristic of the same forces which were
operative in the early epoch of capitalism, seems credible to me.87
These examples suggested that a vast historical world lay outside the purview
of the laboratory apparatus. This was the world inhabited by the workers the
complex of historical forces, contingencies and constraints that Weber elsewhere
called the social and economic conditions of existence (Daseinsbedingungen)
which remained largely invisible to these instruments and the experts who used
them. The task for the Verein survey thus emerged with a newfound degree of
clarity. If the psycho-physics laboratory failed because it imposed artificial conditions on the real-life circumstances of the workers, the alternative approach to
social measurement would have to be to gain access to the workers in their natural
habitat, capturing as many of their self-perceived degrees of freedom as possible,
and seeking to explain in sociological terms as many of Kraepelins psycho-physical components as they could.
85
Here Weber envisions the conflict of the factory floor usually characterized as one between
Capital and Labor as overlapping socially to some degree with the other great theme which preoccupied him, namely, the conflict between the industrial western part of Germany and the agrarian eastern
part. On Webers reflections on his national political problem, see Scaff (1989), pp. 512.
86
Weber (1995a), p. 279.
87
Weber (1995a), p. 280.
670
3. The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Webers critical reflections on the psycho-physics of industrial work revealed
his fundamental orientation toward detailed discursive analysis of the kind
developed by the German historical economists.88 Although Weber is often thought
of today as a sociologist, we must remember that he came to social science via a
distinctive reading of historical economics, which he regarded above all as a
science of being, a method of analyzing the social and economic conditions of
existence that figure the quality of human beings.89 The moral and practical
imperative of the human sciences, Weber pronounced, the question that leads us
through thought beyond the grave of our own generation, is not how human beings
of the future will feel, but how they will be.90 Although he did not use the term
here, one could describe Webers characterization of the problem of social science
as a problem of ontology, the philosophical term for the science of being. For
Weber the cultural sciences posed problems of ontology in at least two ways. Their
primary task involved investigating the elusive notion of the nature and relations
of being in society, a kind of first philosophy of the social world. From this
followed the secondary task of critically stipulating the kinds of entities, specifically abstract entities and concepts, that are to be admitted to the inquiry.
It might seem puzzling, even logically questionable, for Weber to invoke the
question of the being of peoples lives in the future tense (how they will be).
From the standpoint of Weber and his many colleagues who practised a variety of
historical social science, who routinely claimed to investigate the relations of being
in past societies, it made at least as much sense to speak of ontology in the future
as it did in the past. The more vexing objection would be ethical or political, asking
how the social-scientist could speak of the problem of being in the future without
violating the criteria of value-neutrality specified by Weber in his methodological
writings? The historians risk of writing from a politically interested perspective
remained less when considering the past than in the case of social investigations
which projected a future condition of their own society. This objection cuts to the
heart of what Weber meant by the possibility of value-neutrality in the cultural
sciences, a theme that has been plagued with misunderstanding.91 Weber advocated
a form of value-neutrality or objectivity in which agendas, interests and subjective
judgements of the social scientist should not mix with the results of research or
88
Webers most extensive writing about German historical political economy can be found in Weber
(1975). On Webers engagement with the historical schools of economics, see Hennis (1987), Ringer
(1997) and Wagner and Zipprian (1985). On German historical economics, see Tribe (1988) and Winkel (1977).
89
Weber (1980), p. 437.
90
Weber (1980), p. 437. On this theme see Scaff (1989), p. 30 Hennis (1987), pp. 11766; and
Hennis (1996).
91
During the last decade numerous Weber scholars have turned to the question anew, seeking to
replace sloganeering caricatures with analysis of Webers subtle argumentation. See especially Daniel
(2000), Gremer (1994), Hennis (1987), Oexle (1996), Proctor (1991), and several essays in Wagner
and Zipprian (1994).
671
the education of students. But this notion of value-neutrality did not entail the
pursuit of a cultural science devoid of value-judgements. Weber held that to be
impossible, on the grounds that concept formation (Begriffsbilding) in the cultural
sciences proceeds from a stock of a priori value-judgements, beginning with the
very notion of culture itself.92 The concept of culture, Weber observed, is a
value-concept. For us, he continued, empirical reality is culture because and
as far as we set it in connection with ideas of value it encompasses those portions
of reality which are meaningful to us, and only these.93
Webers reasoning here followed the premises of neo-kantians such as Heinrich
Rickert in maintaining that value-judgements served as an indispensable a priori
condition for the possibility of any social perception.94 What has meaning for us
cannot be deduced from a presuppositionless investigation of the empirically
given, but rather to establish what it is serves as grounds for determining what
will be the object of investigation.95 Only through the act of critically examining
the fundamental values conditioning social perception could the social scientist
specify the stock of admissible conceptual entities in the system of investigation.
Webers notion of value-neutrality thus rejected a presuppositionless mode of
inquiry or any sort of objectivity involving an escape from perspective, including
one enforced by the use of self-recording machines.96 Concepts could not be reproductions (Abbildungen) of objective reality, but rather cognitive means to the
ends of spiritual mastery of the empirically given or means to the end of knowledge of contexts under individual points of view.97 Hence, the historicized, neokantian critical reflection on concept-formation enabled a middle way between
mechanical objectivity and purely subjective and individual forms of judgement.98
Webers approach to these problems also drew upon a notion of the historically
conditioned character of concept-formation. While the neo-kantian insistence on
the a priori nature of categories assumed the standpoint of the historical individual, Weber observed that such individuality was a historically contingent perspective that must be reckoned with in any comprehensive methodology.99 The lesson
was that the historical stream of events flowed endlessly, giving form to always
new and differently colored cultural problems which move human beings.100
92
Ute Daniel identifies three kinds of value-judgements in Webers metaphysics of values. See
Daniel (2000), pp. 1908.
93
Weber (1904), p. 175.
94
On Webers theory of concept formation, see Burger (1976), Daniel (2000), Gremer (1994), pp.
89141, and Oakes (1988).
95
Weber (1904), p. 175.
96
See Daston (1999), pp. 110123.
97
Weber (1904), p. 208.
98
On the dichotomy between mechanical objectivity and subjective judgement in connection with
the Weberian/Nietzschean theme of moral asceticism, see Daston and Galison (1992) and Galison
(1998).
99
Many scholars see traces of Webers profound engagement with Nietzsche here as in other parts
of Webers post-1900 work. See Daniel (2000), pp. 1889; Gremer (1994); Oexle (1996).
100
Weber (1904), p. 184.
672
Changing contexts and relations of being meant different points of view and problems, hence different forms of concepts and modes of inquiry. The points of departure of the cultural sciences thereby remain mutable into the unbounded future,
proclaimed Weber. The open-ended future, read as the endlessness (Unendlosigkeit)
of historical events, conditioned the character of proper methodology and rendered
a systematic social science, in the sense of a definitive, objectively valid systematic fixing of questions and areas, as a form of nonsense itself.101
When it came to organizing the Verein investigation, Weber the profound methodologist sat uneasily beside Weber the man of worldly action. For the latter recognized that management, in factories or governmental administrations, required
workable representations: results which could be of practical value to politicians,
managers and civil servants. Such representations could often be most workable,
not to mention less vulnerable to attack, when they were based on measurement
of some sort that was the promise and appeal of the respective methods of both
Kraepelin and Abbe . But, as we have seen, Webers critical reflections on these
studies showed the formalism, reductionism and misleading superficiality of measures of the mechanical dimensions of human labor. But for the Verein survey, the
task was a positive rather than a critical one: to make one of the standard instruments of social measurement, the questionnaire (Fragebogen), into a tool for
recovering the relations of workers lives obscured by this kind of measurement.
Questionnaires had served as an indispensable element of Verein-sponsored
empirical research from the inception of the organization.102 The information
obtained from the questionnaire usually involved opinion and perception, and was
typically used to orient researchers to questions that might be answered using other
kinds of documents, including account-books, government statistics and company
records. Several Verein researchers, most notably Herkner, had pioneered the use
of survey questionnaires to reveal subjective, psychological or affective information
concerning social actors. Weber, however, found these questionnaires inadequate,
since they failed to capture the unconscious or unacknowledged dispositions
operating in persons. Very often changes in effect responded directly to alterations
in conditions unnoticed by social actors, just as alterations in conditions of work
presumably affected performance. Psychological insights thus fell short of the standard sought by social science, and ran the risk of settling for trivialities.103 Hence,
the cognitive aim of social science research, Weber contended, was to understand
the distinctiveness of the reality of life as we are placed in it and as it surrounds
us . . . the interconnectedness and the cultural significance of its particular phenom-
101
Weber (1904), p. 184.

For detailed accounts of numerous studies involving questionnaires, see Gorges (1980).
103
Compare Webers heated response to a critic who charged that his Protestant Ethic engaged in
psychological speculation without an adequate working knowledge of contemporary psychological
science: Weber (1909b).
102
673
ena in their contemporary form . . . and the grounds of their having historically
become thus-and-not-otherwise.104
Following this line of thought, social measurement would have to capture the
distinctive reality of the world of industrial workers, the circumstances defining its
particular character. Such a strategy would seem to contradict the usual conception
of measurement, which sees it as a means to transcend locality and particularity
and to move toward some form of universality. Indeed, in his critique of the
psycho-physics laboratory Weber relied on a strategy of exposing the just thisness
of Kraepelins instrumental practice. But for the Verein survey the task was a
positive rather than a critical one: to make the standard instrument of social
measurement the questionnaire (Fragebogen) into a tool for capturing the
particularity of local cultures in terms which approximated those of the cultures
themselves.
Weber thus introduced several general methodological innovations into the survey design. For the first time in the history of Verein research, workers answered
the questions themselves in person.105 As a supplement, sometimes a corrective,
questionnaire data was to be combined with a systematic examination of factory
records and account books. Finally, workers were to be observed directly on the
factory floor, and space was provided for a range of impressions and informal
observations gathered by the Verein researchers in the factory.
Weber also brought an innovative strategy to the design of questions. He drew
upon his critical engagement with the popular journalistic sociology of working
class life produced by Adolph Levenstein. A Berlin journalist and Social Democrat
with strong ties and credibility with proletarian workers, Levenstein conceived the
idea of a mass investigation of workers after spending evenings reading poetry
and philosophy with men who worked with automated machinery by day. These
experiences shaped the fundamental aim of his study, which he described as an
attempt to capture the causal relations between technology and psychological life
(Seelenleben).106 Levensteins first attempt consisted of carrying out extensive correspondence with workers on matters of poetry and philosophy, particularly Nietzsches Thus Spake Zarathustra. The journalist soon desired a more scientific
approach, however, and therefore drew up a questionnaire of 26 questions, distributed to approximately 8000 miners, textile workers and machinists, with a 63%
rate of return. Weber, whom Levenstein had consulted for this project, admired the
ambition to comprehend worker psychology but criticized the dilettantish manner in
which it was executed. The problem persisted at both ends of the design, in the
manner in which the questions were formed and in the sorting and control of the
data. Levensteins literary talent, Weber complained, handicapped the work in sev104
Weber (1904), pp. 1701.

On the place of this study in the history of the research of the Verein fu r Sozialpolitik, see Oberschall (1965), p. 8.
106
Levenstein (1912), p. 1.
105
674
eral ways. On the one hand, the journalist asked suggestive questions which
evoked projective responses.107 But Levenstein also treated quantitative data as
a sensational, mass anecdote, complicating all causal connections by counting
everything which the material offers as countable.108 The cascade of numbers
offered titillating but ultimately ephemeral effects Curiosity and pity but
not the sort of analytic insights that a rigorous sorting and processing of the
materials would allow.109 Quantification would become analytically useful, for
example, when applied to groups of questions with similar results, or as a means
of identifying other patterns in the original material.
In designing his questionnaire for the Verein survey, Weber sought to overcome
the journalistic impressionism and prurience of Levensteins approach by emphasizing the actual conditions of the workers and their character, rather than simply
their feelings and perceptions and perceptions (see Figure 4). Weber sought to get
behind the workers stated feelings to a more capacious understanding of the real
circumstances of their lives. He described the survey as a means:
to establish the following: on the one hand, what influences the large-scale industrial
establishment exerts upon the individual character, the occupational fate and the style
of life of its working force, what physical and psychical qualities it helps develop in
it, and how these become manifest in the conduct of the daily life of the workers;
on the other hand, how the development and the potential future development of
large-scale industry are limited by those characteristics of the workers which are a
result of their ethnic, social and cultural origin, of their traditions, and standards
of life.110
The aim was not merely to comprehend how the workers viewed themselves,
nor simply how they appeared to either management or to psychologists, respectively, but to establish a perspective from which the validity of all these perspectives
could be adjudicated. Thus, some questions allowed workers the chance to expand
upon the matter-of-fact themes queried in other questions. Question 10, for
example, asked why the worker had taken up their particular occupation. Question
27 asked open-ended questions about life goals. The aim of these questions was
purely exploratory and interpretative: one would not expect real or accurate answers
but, Weber explained, one receives valuable answers to rather stupid questions.111
The questionnaire posed a number of questions derived specifically from the
managerial or psycho-physical point of view. Question 13, for example, queried
107
Levensteins question 25, for example, asked Do you go into the woods? What comes to mind,
lying on the forest floor, surrounded by deep solitude? to which he received the following responses:
When I lie down in the forest and observe the vehicles passing by on the road and see their splendor
and think about myself, I am filled with despair; and when I go into the forest I think of the life of
primitive man, of the freshness of the when no factory chimneys had yet polluted it, Levenstein, 1912,
pp. 370, 374; quoted in Oberschall, 1965, p. 131.
108
Weber (1995c), pp. 3923.
109
Weber (1995c), p. 398.
110
Weber (1995c), p. 399.
111
Weber (1995c), p. 402.
Fig. 4. Marie Bernays, Fragebogen (Questionnaire), from Untersuchungen u ber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswah und Berufsschicksal) der
Arbeiter in den verschiedenen zweigen der Grossindustrie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt, 1910), pp. XIIXIII. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

675
676
the workers perception of the strenuousness of his or her job, and asked for elaboration. Similarly, many questions asked about the work day time, pauses and
rest-periods, overtime and meals along with questions about perceptions of the
cycles and rhythms of fatigue and modes of leisure and recuperation. Finally, several questions inquired about family life and economic goals, and expectations
about the longer course of life. Although these questions were stated with the
brevity necessary to hold a workers attention, when combined in various groupings
they allowed a reasonable picture of workers day-to-day regulation of energy as
well as the fate of the worker in a broader context.
The questionnaire would seem to have been brilliantly designed many later
regarded it so. But in the noisy, chaotic world of the factory, social measurement
turned out to be as difficult to carry out as laboratory psycho-physics. Between
1909 and 1911 twelve junior researchers took these methods into the field, distributing questionnaires and devising various strategies for obtaining the supplementary
data. Social reality hit hard when workers refused to respond to the questionnaire.
Few researchers got more than 10 percent of their questionnaires back. Some quit
in despair.
There were, however, a couple of partial successes. Marie Bernays, a doctoral
student at Heidelberg, devised a cunning strategy of going into the factory incognito, posing as a regular employee at a textile factory, the Gladbacher Spinnerei
and Weberei A.-G. After several weeks of work, she won the friendship and trust
of both the other employees and her employer, August Buschhueter. Before long
she revealed her true identity and purpose, and, remarkably, both her employer
and fellow workers, agreed to cooperate fully. Most of the workers (almost entirely
female) responded to her questionnaire, whose data she compared against the factory records and account books. She managed a remarkably thorough portrait of
this particular factory, its production methods and workforce, and achieved some
of the kinds of knowledge that Weber had been after. In her analysis, moreover,
the genius of the questionnaire became apparent.112
The first part of Bernays analysis presented the history of the factory gleaned
from records and a detailed portrait of the workforce derived from the questionnaire
data. Here came the structural elements which made up the worlds of the workers:
geographical provenance, family, education and occupational trajectories. Bernays
depicted the factory as a stratified class-system, an enlightened absolutism centered on the well regarded head of the firm, with an aristocracy consisting of
skilled workers such as mechanics and a proletariat of unskilled workers such as
dye-mixers. The groups showed remarkably different patterns of mobility the
skilled workers moved freely and easily between towns and factories, while the
unskilled remained fixed in their place. Bernays also attempted, though less successfully, to correlate these and other sociological data age, marital status,
112
Bernays (1911), pp. 99123.
677
locality of birth, fathers occupation, and so on. On the basis of her own direct
observations she was able to show how these factors shaped the social life of the
factory, particularly the formation of smaller subgroups based on interest, education
and other perceived social affinities.
With this social picture in place, Bernays set out to establish connections
between the profitability of the workforce and its geographical and occupational
provenance, their unique characters and relations, in short, the principal moments
of their life-destiny.113 Significantly, Bernays found that several social factors correlated directly with performance, above all the size of the town of origin. Male
workers from villages or the countryside proved consistently most productive, those
from middling towns less so, while workers from large cities performed least well.
In the second part of her monograph Bernays took on the psycho-physics of
textile work, reworking the terms of the debate after the manner proposed by
Weber. She emphasized that here the social trajectories of individuals had to be
described in relation to the particular character of each kind of machine the workers
encountered: the confrontation with a specific machine at a specific point often
proved decisive in the workers fate. Hence, the young sociologist presented each
of the principal machines used in the factory in impressive technical detail, along
with the workers mode of operating them, including the degree of muscular or
mental difficulty. She assembled detailed performance curves for workers on each
of the machines, which, in the piece-rate system used in the factory, corresponded
closely with their wages. In a surprising analytical turn, Bernays inverted the classic
psycho-physical approach to the relation of fatigue and performance. Instead of
reckoning the impact of fatigue on performance, she examined the effects of performance on fatigue. The results were striking: psychological fatigue was highest
among the most qualified, capable and conscientious workers, who found their jobs
too easy and therefore monotonous and tiring. These reflections pointed to Bernays
more general conclusion, that the problem that the broad masses of people today
face is no longer the contrasting position of worker and entrepreneur. It has much
more to do with the question of whether the person can be free of the domination
of the powers which . . . today condition our entire lives through the myriad forms
of technology and its immanent laws.114
4. Conclusion
By most accounts the Max Weber-led Verein survey failed in its principal aims.
The poor yield of returned questionnaires disappointed everyone, not only the Verein members, but also the many company directors and leaders of workers organizations who had supported the initiative. The survey also drew broad criticism in
the press, especially from some Social Democratic papers, who ridiculed it as one
113
114
Bernays (1911), p. 251.

Bernays (1911), p. xviii.
678
of the most senseless accounts ever given of the conditions of workers. Nevertheless, Herkner and other Verein members put a brave face on the results, both in
the Verein commissions internal review and in the general presentation of the
surveys results before the plenary meeting of the Verein in 1911. Herkner emphasized that, although the workers lack of participation proved lamentable, Max Webers methodological acumen especially for bringing in the psycho-physics of
work and for introducing methods to capture the differentiated social structure of
the proletariat substantially altered the nature of this kind of research. One
participant, Adolph von Wenckstern, effusively praised Webers attempts at precise measurement of the measurable features of the working classes and for having
shown that for political economy to become a science, it must forego value-judgements.
Weber, for his part, seemed embarrassed by the plaudits, and largely sided with
the critics of the study, singling out for success only the work of Bernays, which
he felt came close to the objectives of the survey. But Wengensterns claim that
the study constituted a renunciation of value-judgements roused Weber to speak,
indicating that he disagreed with this assessment but that to discuss it further would
constitute a digression from the themes of the review. Although a full discussion
of the question of value-neutrality was avoided it was an old shibboleth in the
Verein Webers animus suggests its fundamental importance in his design of
the questionnaire, and his conception of empirical social science more generally.
Weber, as Scaff has shown, regarded modernity not only as the petrification
and homogenization of the external conditions of life, but in addition by inescapable conflict among the very contents of different value-spheres, life-orders, and
life-power.115 Therefore, in Webers view, there could not be a system of uniform
rules of a Kantian type to adjudicate ethical or pragmatic questions. Nor could
there be an absolute neutral ground, a kind of objectivity rooted in an escape from
perspective.116 Rather, Weber insisted, ultimately everywhere and always it is
really a question not only of alternatives between values, but of an irreconcilable
death-struggle like that between god and the devil. Between these there are
no relativations or compromises.117 Culture remains a sphere of disagreement, of
conflicts between value-systems and forms of life. Scientific knowledge, in this
case empirical sociology, could not hope to resolve this struggle, because it is itself
part of the struggle.
Webers survey questionnaire marked a provisional attempt to answer the paradoxical demand for a value-neutral instrument within a field of broad value antagonisms. With a precise reckoning of the actually existing characteristics of workers
115
Scaff (1989), p. 91. Daniel uses the more charged and explicitly Nietzschean term value-jungle
(Wertedschungel) to describe this condition. See Daniel (2000).
116
Daston (1999).
117
Weber, Der Sinn der Wertfreiheit der soziologischen und o konomischen Wissenschaften
(1917), quoted in Scaff (1989), p. 92.
679
lives it fulfilled the requirements necessary for practical implementation in policy

questions. But in its attempt to press more into the being of workers lives, the
questionnaire might capture something more fundamental, the sources of regulative
value-standards themselves.
AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank David Bloor, Michael Gordin, Wolfgang Ku ttler,
Antonia Lant, a seminar audience at Green College, University of British Columbia, the special editors
of this issue, Ernst Hamm and Alan Richardson, and the anonymous referees for help and encouragement
with this essay.
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Appendix A.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The Verein Questionnaire and Supplement
Position with the company

First and Last Name of the Worker
Year of Birth
Birthplace
Country
Gender and Marital Status: M or F, married, single, divorced, widowed
Religion
Occupation and Place of Birth, of Father
, of Mother
Vocation of Grandfather
684
7. Military Service: have served, not yet eligible, unfit for service, has your
father served?
8. Education
Where?
9. Apprenticeship: as what and where?
How long for?
Did you
How much?
or did you receive
pay for your instruction?
wages?
from when?
10. Why did you take up this occupation?
11. What kind of work do you do in you present position?
12. Do you have other occupational skills than the ones you are presently
using?
What are these?
13. Is your work especially strenuous?
In what way?
14. From what age do people no longer find easy to get a job?
15. Have you held a different job before?
Where?
For how
As what?
State precisely the place of work, the
long?
employer, the jobs, whether self-employed
16. Reasons for Changing Jobs
17. Are you paid by time or piece-rate?
Approximate Weekly
Earnings
Do you prefer time- or piece-rates?
18. Length of Daily Work: from
oclock to
oclock. Breaks
Overtime?
At what time do you take your main meal?
19. At what point in your daily work schedule do you generally begin to
tire?
20. What are your main rest activities?
21. What do like to most when not at work?
Supplied by employer
Rental
22. Housing: Own house
Only a Bed
Distance of Home to Work
km. Do you ride to
Do you own a plot of land or a garden?
Your
work?
cultivate it yourself?
own
23. Do you rent out beds?
Do you have lodgers?
How
many?
24. Do you have an additional source of income?
What is it?
25. When did you get married?
Does your wife earn money?
How?
What goal to you hope to reach in life?
What goal did
you set for yourself earlier?
26. Number of Children:
Of these, how many are still living?
Gender: M
F
27. How do you expect to make a living during old age?
Supplement: detailed occupational history of the worker, with location, type of
work, length of time, pay, reasons for leaving.

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 4, pp.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire: Max

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Weber (1904), p. 153.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

the problem of the mass-measurement of the effects and conditions of modern

Weber to Hans Gruhle, in Weber (1990), pp. 6745.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

the Verein fu r Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), considered proposals

Alfred Webers research proposal would further this longstanding concern in a

Boese (1939); Campbell (1989); Lindenlaub (1967); vom Bruch (1985).

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Besides the various biological approaches to the workers conditions, Weber

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

enabled him to recast assumptions about the time-frames of industrial labor. By

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Moreover, Weber added, it should be possible, in principle, through physiology,

Marianne Weber, quoted in Oberschall (1965), p. 115.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

riage of (Lamarckian) social Darwinian assumptions about functional adaptation

Rabinbach (1990), pp. 20637; Sarasin and Tanner (1998).

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

In much the same way, he continued,

An effective gauge of mental labor would enable more responsible apportioning

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Kraepelin (1895), p. 45.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Weber (1995a), pp. 1689.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

tual problems of industrial psycho-physics. While it may be possible to measure

Weber (1995a), p. 176.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

3. The Ontology of the Questionnaire

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Weber (1904), p. 184.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Weber (1904), pp. 1701.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Bernays (1911), pp. 99123.

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Bernays (1911), p. 251.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

lives it fulfilled the requirements necessary for practical implementation in policy

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Cross, G. (1988) Worktime in International Discontinuity 18861940 in Worktime and

The Ontology of the Questionnaire

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

der Wissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus, in Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen