Action

Action is always social that is, to be conceived as a specific type of action some meaning must be attached to whatever the datum representing the action might be. The definition of social action is at the core of Max Weber's sociology, which in turn was one of the foundations for organization theory.

Max Weber's early 20th-century definition of sociology has been enormously influential. Sociology is conceived as a science that attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. What are noteworthy in this definition are the following: understanding is always interpretive an adequate explanation for a science is one that provides a causal explanation of the causes and effects of any given action. Weber goes on to define action in terms of all human behavior, insofar as the acting individual attaches subjective meaning to it. He includes in the concept of action both overt or purely inward or subjective meaning.

Moreover, action may not require that anything be done—it may well be that the most decisive action in a specific situation is that persons do nothing when they might have done something. That is, refraining from action is itself still an action insofar as it is meaningful. For instance, Mr. Rochester's failure to tell Jane Eyre that he was already married was a social action with devastating consequences in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Outside the realms of fiction, where things that do not happen are often of considerable significance—such as the dog that did not bark in the night in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, Silver Blaze—they may be equally as important—think of the things that were not done by the senior executives at Enron or the failure of the U.N. weapons inspectors to find the weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq prior to the most recent invasion of Iraq by the United States. The meaning of their absence was not interpreted in U.S. government circles as a nonaction but as a definite action with a definite meaning: Their nonappearance was due to cunning by Saddam and lack of diligence by the weapons inspectors. Thus, action is social also insofar as in its subjective meaning it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course: The inaction in finding the weapons of mass destruction was thus subjectively meaningful.