A series on how the great sociological thinkers from the past can help us understand the struggle of today’s students as they explore and discern their vocations.
Colleagues and I have recently been interviewing students to learn more about how they think about vocation. One question has generated especially striking responses: “If money was not an issue, what would you do the first year after college?” Explicitly asking students to do the unthinkable—to set aside their overwhelming concern about money—opens whole new worlds of possibility. One student I spoke with said that she would want to be a teacher if money was not a concern; she would love to work with young kids, but has eliminated that possibility because she knows that early childhood education does not pay well. Even though students do not always have the most accurate sense of how a major in the liberal arts can be a foundation for financial success, they know that (at least from a financial standpoint) they are at college so that they can get a “good job.” This focus on money is entirely rational; but where do feelings, values, a sense of purpose, and the greater good fit?
One of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, was deeply concerned about what he called the “iron cage” of rationality restricting human freedom. What does this term mean? In the iron cage, rational rules—particularly those prioritizing financial concerns—overcome other ways of thinking and being in the world. Furthermore, in the iron cage of rationality, humans are controlled by non-human technologies, rather than being sustained by their own free will or creativity.
Let’s break this down further. For Weber, there are four “ideal types” of social action: 1) traditional, 2) affective, 3) value-rational, and 4) goal-rational. To illustrate these types, let’s situate each of them in relation to vocation and career:
- Traditional action would look like taking over a family business or entering the same trade as your father (and his father before him).
- Affective action would mean being guided primarily by your feelings, such as choosing a career based on a transformative emotional experience.
- Value-rational action would mean starting with values, such as those derived from religious faith, and choosing a career based on those values; if you valued fairness or justice or hospitality, you would target careers that allow you to live out those values.
- Goal-rational action is choosing a particular result you want to achieve and then acting to bring about that result as efficiently as possible. In practice, what this often looks like is students have the goal of making enough money to support themselves and their families, and they make career choices in service of that goal.
Weber identified that in the emerging capitalist world order, goal-rational action was replacing other kinds of action. This type of action was evident in the interview with my student when she rejected being guided by the emotional exhilaration she experiences when working with kids or the value she places on nurturing others; instead, she favored cold calculations about what jobs will provide enough money to live on.
Weber recognized that pressures to engage in goal-rational action in capitalism would lead to more uniformity in society. In a world characterized by this kind of rationalization, decisions are based on rules, and organizations make rules based on what will maximize revenue and minimize costs. Science and technology are deployed to ensure compliance to these expectations. Eventually, there emerges “one right way” to do things. Ultimately, humans are replaced with non-human technology wherever possible to maximize efficiency. And where they are not directly replaced by machines, people are trained to conform to mechanistic expectations designed to make their performance more standardized (e.g. performance metrics or best practices). Recent examples that illustrate how the iron cage makes us more uniform abound: many people have experienced significant pressure to adopt LLMs at work, and recent research finds that people are actually starting to talk more like ChatGPT.
If making as much money as possible is the accepted basis for students’ career choices, it makes a lot of sense that 50% of Harvard graduates in 2024 went into finance, consulting, and tech, up from just 5% in the 1970s. So many talented, ambitious young people are attracted to lucrative fields that many would argue are generating significant harm to individuals and society as a whole. Fewer graduates from elite schools go into fields like academia, the arts, healthcare, and public service than in the past. What is the cost to all of us that so many bright young people are making the rational decision to prioritize finances over values?
Sociologist George Ritzer argues that rationalization in society can be taken so far that it ultimately leads to irrational outcomes. He calls this phenomenon the “irrationality of rationality,” where an intensive focus on efficiency, predictability, and control leads to inefficiency, unpredictability, and loss of control. A key example of this is climate change. Decisions about how to produce and distribute resources are made to maximize economic growth, and the result has been to destabilize the environment that we depend on to survive. Professionals in higher education need to think carefully about how we can cultivate citizens who will contribute to building a better world in a context where the structures shaping decision-making are also contributing to social and environmental ills.
So are we all collectively doomed to act based on rational calculations oriented toward the goal of making money “until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt?” Maybe. Even nonprofit organizations are subject to the logic of the market. But there are other possibilities. We could instead make decisions based on tradition, feelings, or values. It is our job as teachers, advisors, coaches, and mentors to illuminate these other possibilities for students. We need to ask them the all-important question: if money were not an issue, what would you want to do, and why?
Recent research about Gen Z indicates many are already thinking about these questions. In part because the cost of living has skyrocketed while wages have remained stagnant, some young people are de-prioritizing paid work in favor of a better work–life balance. While the iron cage of rationality is still very much shaping life choices, its power may be ironically limited when the potential rewards of participating in the system increasingly do not even allow people to meet their basic needs, much less pursue aspirations like starting a family or living a middle-class lifestyle.
While the iron cage of rationality is still very much shaping life choices, its power may be ironically limited when the potential rewards of participating in the system increasingly do not even allow people to meet their basic needs, much less aspirations like starting a family or living a middle-class lifestyle.
Breakdowns in social systems are very difficult to live through, but they also create opportunities for people to imagine alternatives. Max Weber was generally pessimistic. Unlike Karl Marx, he was unable to see a way out of the iron cage. But perhaps we can look to examples like youth in New York City who started a Luddite club or an Australian woman who has decided to live without money as trailblazers charting new paths forward. Instead of doomscrolling through upsetting content that advertisers have algorithmically optimized to monopolize our attention, we could return to reading books that help us imagine a different future. We can also connect with other people for the purpose of building a better world together.
The future is not set in stone. While the iron cage of rationality is powerful, the truth is we are not literally locked in a cage. We do have choices, and as educators we can expand our understanding of what is possible and share our emerging insights with our students.
Michelle Oyakawa is an assistant professor of sociology at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. She is co-author of Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty First Century America with Hahrie Han and Liz McKenna and Smart Suits, Tattered Boots: Black Ministers Mobilizing the Black Church in the Twenty First Century with Korie Edwards. For more posts by Michelle, click here.