Ideal Types continued

While it seems perfectly normal to have Restaurant as an ideal type, it seems less convincing to have a restaurant visit as an ideal type; yet this is what the script was.

So we first note that there is a difference between ideal types and scripts in the sense that ideal types are much more structural. Ideal types are concerned about the fact that restaurants have kitchens and waiting areas and menus and specials of the day and a parking lot and fire exits. For the scripts, the emphasis is on the event types that can take place in that setting. The focus is less on how to build a restaurant and more on how to behave within one.

The second aspect is that ideal types are themselves structurally developmental. Sometime in the modern era, probably increasingly so after WW2, restaurants acquired cold storage rooms to house the meats and other perishables between acquisition and preparation. The ideal type can accommodate that shift readily; there are temporal constraints on the presence of the cold room until pretty much all restaurants have them (and use them to great effect, e.g. Ratatouille).

It is not clear that scripts as encodings of expected behavior accommodate as quickly. Perhaps temporally recent changes that affect the behavior more are required to show script changes; for example, the elimination of smoking rooms or requests to silence cell phones during dinner.

Perhaps there is then a general tendency as to classify the ideal type as part and parcel of structural history (Strukturgeschichte), the background on which the events take place (some of which may very well be guided by scripts).