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Credited as founders of modern sociology, Karl Marx and Max Weber share similar views on the manner in which bureaucratic systems achieve their own goals despite the detrimental consequences on individual agency. However, Weber views culture as human motivation and conflict as both perpetual and inescapable, whereas Marx views culture as a means of domination, arguing inequality, or class conflict, ends with Communism. Weber analyzes the effect of religious ideology on capitalist pursuits and the resulting economy, while Marx frames capitalism as a historical inevitability in which technology and trade make necessary. Thus, the two theorists assign vastly different roles to material and cultural factors that account for the emergence of modern western capitalism.
In his famous essay, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber demonstrates how the Calvinist work ethic led to the development of capitalism. His study of the Reformation reveals how Europe’s economic centers shifted away from Catholic countries France, Spain and Italy, and into Protestant countries Germany, England, Scotland and the Netherlands. Weber notes that nations with developed capitalist economies had more citizens who identified as Protestant. In nations with citizens identifying with a wide variety of religions, business leaders most often identified as Protestant. As a result, Weber credits Roman Catholicism, Buddhism and Confucianism as detrimental to the development of a capitalist economy.
Declaring Protestantism the reason capitalism emerged in the Occident and not in China, Weber goes on to detail Calvinist theology’s emphasis on work and “the development of the concept of the calling” (Weber 505) that encourages followers to choose...

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...advocacy networks, eliminates the threat of force by empowering nations, both rich and poor, via civic power.
Wapner calls for an expansion of empowering civic power, as modeled by transnational environment activist organizations that work through social, economic, and cultural networks to create policy change and efficiently educate large amounts of people. Politicizing global civil society, these networks practice world civic politics and work outside interstate politics to promote widespread change. He calls on globalization to popularize the practice of world civic politics and for nongovernmental organizations to expand their significance in global relations. Giddens however promotes the shifting away from large corporations and advocates for the relocation of their power into new institutions that can properly address concerns that arise from globalization.

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