Within the framework of this sociological model, which establishes functional relationships between the level of the organization of the productive forces, the institutional structure of society, and personality formations, the concepts of 'rationalization' and 'instrumental reason' are used to describe the organizational principles of social formation as well as the value orientations of the personality, and the meaning structures of the culture.

By 'social rationalization' Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse mean the following phenomena: the apparatus of administrative and political domination extends into all spheres of social life. This extension of domination is accomplished through the ever more efficient and predictable organizational techniques developed by institutions like the factory, the army, the bureaucracy, the schools, and the culture industry. The efficiency and predictability of these new organizational techniques are made possible by the application of science and technology, not only to the domination of external nature, but to the control of interpersonal relations and the manipulation of internal nature as well. This scientifically and technologically informed control apparatus functions by fragmenting processes of work and production into simple homogeneous units; this fragmentation is accompanied by social atomization within and outside the organizational unit. Within organizations, the co-operation of individuals is subject to the rules and regulations of the apparatus; outside the organizational unit, the destruction of the economic, educational, and psychological function of the family delivers the individual into the hands of the impersonal forces of mass society. The individual must now adapt him/herself to the apparatus in order to be able to survive at all.

Already the fact that the categories of 'rationalization' and 'instrumental reason' are extended equivocally to refer to societal processes, dynamics of personality formation, and cultural meaning structures indicates that Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer collapse the two processes of rationalization, the societal and the cultural, which Max Weber had sought to differentiate. ³¹ This conflation on their part leads to a major problem: while accepting Weber's diagnosis of the dynamics of societal rationalization in the West, they criticize this process from the standpoint of a non-instrumental paradigm of reason. Yet this non-instrumental reason can no longer be anchored immanently inactuality, and assumes an increasingly Utopian character. With this step, a fundamental change in the very concept of 'critique' takes place.

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