Routinization and Rationalization

The term “routinization” and the alternative designation “rationalization” are used by social scientists to refer to the systematic removal from modern social and economic life of the unpredictable, unique, uncharted, unknown, or serendipitous. This process, often associated specifically with the rise and spread of capitalism, has been a defining goal of the Western intellectual, scientific, and technological elites since Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo, and Newton established their competing versions of “scientific method” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are plenty of data indicating that ordinary people, even in the “advanced” countries, still remain firmly attached to premodern notions, like the existence of gods, angels, and an afterlife, beliefs that would have puzzled even the earliest modern scientists. But for the cultural leaders, those who created industrialization, internationalization, and a sense of what secular cosmopolitanism can mean if fully developed, it has become an article of faith that deleting factors extraneous to the success of desired processes is essential in guaranteeing forward motion, however defined.