How does the tyrant rule? In a word, badly. September 15, 2012 By Daniel Little in CAT_policy, CAT_power Tags: race Leave a comment July 22, 2012 By Daniel Little in CAT_power Tags: inequality, race Leave a comment source: Lane Kenworthy, Consider the Evidence  blog (link) source: Pew Report, Pursuing the American Dream (link)

So the inequalities we confront in the United States are indeed “durable” and multigenerational.  But how do economic and social inequalities come about?

This is a large part of the agenda of Durable Inequalities. Here Tilly looks at social and economic inequalities from a historical point of view. He is concerned with “categorical inequalities” — that is, inequalities across groups of people defined by relatively rigid social discriminators. “Durable inequality depends heavily on the institutionalization of categorical pairs” (8). Relevant social categories include gender, race, immigrant status, or rural-urban origins.  Tilly begins his book with an astounding statistic about durable inequalities in nineteenth-century England: “poor boys of fourteen averaged only 4 feet 3 inches tall, while aristocrats and gentry of the same age averaged about 5 feet 1 inch” (1).

The central intellectual task of the book is to account for how social categories often result in categorical inequalities.  Not all categorical distinctions among people result in economic or political disparities across the resulting groups — for example, “good sense of humor/bad sense of humor” doesn’t appear to result in income disparities across the humorous and the humorless.  But the male-female wage gap, the black-white wealth gap, and the white-latino education gap all are examples of inequalities that follow from, and are presumably caused by, the categorical status possessed by the two groups.

Categorical inequalities are particularly important because they appear to be wholly indefensible.  The fact that “skilled/unskilled” workers have differential incomes is not surprising on grounds of productivity and value-added work; but the fact that equally well educated women and men have differential incomes is indeed surprising.

June 9, 2012 By Daniel Little in CAT_power Tags: power Leave a comment

Sociologists have been thinking about organizations in a careful, empirical way for decades. Here is a volume edited by Mayer Zald that results from a 1969 conference at Vanderbilt on the topic of “Power in Organizations” (Power in Organizations ).  The cross-section of sociologists represented here provides a good snapshot of the ways that organizations were conceptualized in the late 1960s.  There are contributions by quite a few interesting sociologists, including Peter Blau, Richard Peterson, Charles Perrow, and Mayer Zald.

Perrow’s contribution, “Departmental Power and Perspectives in Industrial Firms,”  is particularly interesting.  Here is how Perrow frames his research problem:

It is my impression that for all the discussion and research regarding power in organizations, the preoccupation with interpersonal power has led us to neglect one of the most obvious aspects of this subject: in complex organizations, tasks are divided up between a few major departments or subunits, and all of these subunits are not likely to be equally powerful. In industrial firms … there are fairly clear divisions between the basic units of sales, production, research and development (or engineering), and finance and accounting. Equality of these groups is hardly insured by the fact that there is at least one person, the president, who stands above all these functional groups, and by the fact that each department is stratified into roughly equal levels of authority…. The question of which group dominates in industrial firms, then, will be the subject of this paper. (59-60)

Perrow’s approach to the problem is empirical. His study depends on interviews with dozens of ranking employees in twelve manufacturing companies with at least 1000 employees, with 2633 individuals interviewed in total.

The study focuses on three primary groups and one “residual” group that could be identified in all the firms: sales and marketing, production and manufacturing, and research and development. The residual group is “staff services”, including finance, personnel, legal, and the executive group.  The research question was to determine which group or unit had the most “power” within the firm.  The interview template asks a series of questions about how the interviewee estimates the power and discretion possessed by various groups within the firm.

Perrow notes that the concept of “power” conceals a range of complexities:

Do we mean actual or potential power, power derives from internal workings of the firm or the market place, power based upon the force of personalities or the logic of group functions, power today or power in the next quarter, and so on? (63)

There is a strong pattern to the results for the fundamental question, which unit has the most power? Perrow finds that “sales” is judged to have the most internal power in 10 out of 12 firms; production is generally second; “finance” is commonly third; and R&D is almost always last.

Perrow’s next question is “why” — why should sales be the most powerful unit within manufacturing firms? His answer turns on facts about the market economy.  The sales operation of a company is the interface between potential consumers and the product created by the firm.

As a result of this strategic position, sales is in a position either to exploit present company capabilities or force a change in these capabilities. The consequences for the other groups are manifold, but sales — with few sunk costs (capital investment) and little interdependence with other functions that would require major changes in its own structure and operating procedures — is capable of more flexibility. (65)

Perrow finds this result surprising for one category of firm — those where design and production are “non-routine”, or where the product is not yet commoditized. These are what we would today refer to as high-tech firms.

If respondents described their tasks as fairly nonroutine — indicating frequent problems requiring analysis and uncertainty about the outcomes of their efforts — then there would be little edge for sales. (66)

So Perrow expected that R&D — the unit assigned to develop new products and solve problems — would have greater power in an environment of technological uncertainty.  But the importance of R&D within such a firm does not cash out in terms of internal power, in Perrow’s findings based on these twelve firms.  And this fact, in Perrow’s assessment, comes down to a tactical advantage possessed by sales within the firm:

Neither of these [prior] analyses sufficiently takes into account the ability of those who once gain power to manipulate the source of uncertainty, at least over a span of, say, ten or fifteen years. The maintenance people in Crozier’s study augmented their power by removing information from the files that might make their performance more predictable and less uncertain, and by keeping information secret from machine operators and other engineers. Similarly, I think that sales, or production, or R&D can use their power to maintain either a fiction of uncertainty, or to steer the organization into areas where the uncertainty will be in their hands. (67)

So Perrow highlights an important source of power within an organization: the power to shape or hoard information.

The impression we get from reading Perrow’s essay today is that Perrow’s conceptual framework moves back and forth between the business environment within which a firm exists and the tactical intelligence of actors within the firm.  The business environment gives an advantage to one group of actors — those involved in sales; and the tactical actions selected by actors within that unit to maintain their advantage accounts for the persistence of the power of that unit.

What the analysis doesn’t pay any attention to is the internal organization of the firm (beyond the functional division into the four units Perrow highlights).  The analysis doesn’t make any effort to map out the internal working relationships between functional units, or the ways in which performance of actors within units is supervised, or the ways in which communications occur internally, or the ways in which individuals are recruited into roles, or the ways in which decisions are made.  The article does distinguish between levels of managers — upper, middle, and lower — but doesn’t provide an “organizational” account of how these levels fit together.  This is partly, of course, a function of the question that Perrow posed for research: what is the perceived level of power associated with the major functional units in the decision-making of the firm? But perhaps it reflects as well the development of the field.  In his later writings Perrow is much more attentive to the “micro-organizations” and systemic interconnections that exist within large organizations such as FEMA or the NRC.

It is also interesting to highlight the time period in which this conference occurred: at the high-water mark of popular mobilization against the Vietnam War and segregation.  The contrast between organizational power and popular protest was a stark one.  And some of the organizations that are considered in the volume — universities and medical schools, for example — were at the center of this contrast. Here is Kohli’s summary assessment in 1991:

October 15, 2010 By Daniel Little in CAT_power Tags: power 5 Comments Steven Lukes’s Power: A Radical View was a very important contribution when it appeared in 1974. Lukes emphasized several important points that became landmarks in subsequent discussions of the social reality of power: that power is a multi-dimensional social factor, that power and democracy are paradoxically related, and that there are very important non-coercive sources of power in modern society. In the second edition in 2005 he left the 1974 essay unchanged, but added a substantive introduction and two new chapters: “Power, Freedom and Reason” and “Three-Dimensional Power”.  Also new in the second edition is substantially more attention to several other writers on the social context of power, including James Scott and Michel Foucault.

Lukes offers a generic definition of power along these lines:

I have defined the concept of power by saying that A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests. (37)

But this definition is too generic, and Lukes attempts to provide a more satisfactory interpretation by constructing a “three-dimensional” account of power.

What are the “dimensions” of power to which Lukes refers? He begins his account with the treatment of power provided by the pluralist tradition of American democratic theory, including especially Robert Dahl in 1957 in “The Concept of Power” (link). This is the one-dimensional view: power is a behavioral attribute that applies to individuals to the extent that they are able to modify the behavior of other individuals within a decision-making process. The person with the power in a situation is the person who prevails in the decision-making process (18).

Thus I conclude that this first, one-dimensional, view of power involves a focus on behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as expressing policy preferences, revealed by political participation. (19)

The second dimension that Lukes discusses was brought forward in rebuttal to this pluralist theory; critics pointed out that it is possible to influence decisions by shaping the agenda, not merely by weighing in on existing decision points. Lukes quotes from Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz in their 1962 “Two Faces of Power” (link): “‘to the extent that a person or group — consciously or unconsciously — creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of policy conflicts, that person or group has power'” (20). So shaping the agenda is an important source of power that is overlooked in the pluralist model, the one-dimensional view.

The three-dimensional theory of power turns to a different problem — the fact that people sometimes act willingly in ways that appear contrary to their most basic interests. So the third dimension is the set of ways in which the powerful transform the powerless in such a way that the latter behave as the former wish — without coercion or forcible constraint — for example, by creating a pervasive system of ideology or false consciousness. Both pluralists and their critics overlook an important point, in Lukes’s view:

And again:

What one may have here is a latent conflict, which consists in a contradiction between the interests of those exercising power and the real interests of those they exclude. These latter may not express or even be conscious of their interests, but … the identification of those interests ultimately always rests on empirically supportable and refutable hypotheses. (28-29)

When Lukes returns to the three-dimensional theory in the final essay in the second edition, he shifts the language slightly to refer to “power as domination.” Domination can occur through explicit coercive means, but it can also occur through unconscious mechanisms.  This allows Lukes to address the theories of people like James Scott (Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts ) and Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction In hindsight, it seems a little dubious to refer to these as “dimensions” of power, rather than aspects or forms of power. To call them “dimensions” somehow suggests that overall power is a vector of quantities in three or more orthogonal dimensions, each of which can vary independently. The features that Lukes identifies as “dimensions” seem more like tools in a toolkit or strategies in a repertoire: exercise control by doing X or Y or Z. So the language of dimensions seems inappropriate in this context.

But here is a more basic concern that is visible with the advantage of hindsight: there is very little in Lukes’s treatment that sheds light on the social mechanisms of power. What are the social features that enable one individual or group to wield influence in any of these ways? Through what sorts of institutional and individual facts are individuals enabled to exercise power over others? Lukes doesn’t address this question; and yet it seems to be the heart of the matter. We would like to have a way of analyzing social relations that allows us to discern how it is that some groups gain the material and social resources necessary to prevail. Marxism offers one such theory — power derives from class position; but this answer doesn’t really satisfy in the contemporary social world. (Lukes devotes a few paragraphs to the debate between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband on the right way of understanding the exercise of power within a capitalist society; 54-58.) But generally, it seems fair to say that Lukes comes closer to offering a semantic analysis of the use of the term “power” rather than offering a sociological analysis of the causal and structural reality of power.

September 17, 2010 By Daniel Little in CAT_power Tags: race 6 Comments The attitudes of racism include a bundle of emotions and beliefs: a belief in the inherent superiority or inferiority of one race relative to another; feelings of hostility, suspicion, or antipathy towards members of a different racial group; a set of stereotypes about the characteristics of the other group; and a readiness to discriminate against members of other groups when one is in a position to assign benefits, opportunities, or hardships.  There is such a thing as an “ideology” of race: a set of beliefs about people and the world that validates the assumptions of superiority and inferiority and the situation of privilege of the dominant group.  It is possible to use survey methodology, focus groups, and individual interviews to probe attitudes of a population, and perhaps it is possible to “map” the variations in racial thinking throughout a society.  So we might have some confidence in the possibility of developing an aggregate measure of “degree of racist attitudes” in a given society, and with effort we could monitor the direction of change of this measure over time.  This might give us a basis for concluding that “racial attitudes are improving (or worsening) during a specific period.” The third factor mentioned above is institutions: to what extent are the basic institutions in a given society “racialized”?  That is, to what extent do the basic institutions automatically and systematically treat members of different races differently?  The practices of real estate “steering” and mortgage redlining are clear examples of a racialized system for assigning home seekers to neighborhoods; and employment practices that disadvantage members of some racial groups are just as critical in the area of employment and wellbeing.  For example, facts about residential segregation and the availability of transportation make it extremely difficult for African-American applicants to pursue job openings in the suburbs. So this is a system that discriminates against one group in favor of another — even though the employer’s personal attitudes may not be the cause of the discrimination.  Here too it is plausible to imagine that we might arrive at some quantifiable judgments about the degree of discrimination and equality of basic institutions at a given time; and this would permit us to make comparisons over time as well.

The fundamental test of a non-racist society is this: there should be no difference in the availability of opportunities across racial groups, and — given a reasonable assumption about the fundamental equality of human beings — there should be no gap in outcomes across racial groups when it comes to factors like health, education, income, or wealth.  In other words, a non-racist society is one whose basic institutions do not discriminate, consciously or unconsciously, across individuals from different racial groups.

There is of course the crucial question of the social dynamics of racist attitudes and behavior.  Are there social or psychological factors that make the appearance of racist attitudes more likely?  Are there features of human nature that lead naturally to a social psychology of “in-group, out-group” discrimination?  Or is racism a purely contingent accident that results from some important historical events in the past — the slave economy, for example?  What are the factors in contemporary American social life that are either conducive or inhibiting to the formation of racist attitudes and behaviors in individuals?

February 27, 2010 By Daniel Little in CAT_power Tags: corruption, democracy, power 1 Comment The January Supreme Court decision affirming the status of corporations as persons, and therefore entitled to unfettered rights of free speech, is the most extreme expression of the power of business, corporations, and money. As distinguished law professor Ronald Dworkin argues in the New York Review of Books (link), this decision dramatically increases the ability of corporations to influence elections and decisions in their favor — vastly disproportionately to citizens’ organizations. And, as Dworkin points out, corporations don’t need to exercise this right frequently in order to have enormous impact on candidates and issues. The mere threat of a well-financed media campaign against key representatives will suffice to sway their behavior.

There are too many examples of pernicious influence of business interests on public policy. Take a useful policy that many states and cities have tested, pretrial release programs. It appears that the public interest has been defeated by … the bail bondsmen. NPR ran a story on the pretrial release program in Broward, Florida (link). The program was successful, with a high appearance rate for court appearances and annual savings of $20 million for the county. But this program cost the bail bondsmen business. They hired a lobbyist, and in the dead of night the county commission scaled back the program. Here is how the “industry” describes the issue (link).  It is a pretty shocking story:

According to campaign records, Book [the lobbyist] … and the rest of Broward’s bondsmen spread almost $23,000 across the council in the year before the bill was passed. Fifteen bondsmen cut checks worth more than $5,000 to commissioner and now-county Mayor Ken Keechl just five days before the vote.

Keechl and several other commissioners declined NPR’s repeated requests for an interview. At the meeting last January, they said they were concerned that Broward’s pretrial program cost more than other counties’ programs, and they vigorously denied that campaign contributions played any role.

Book had his work cut out for him. Broward’s own county attorney wrote a memo warning commissioners that cutting back pretrial could be unconstitutional. But Book worked behind the scenes.

He met with commissioners, and according to county records, he had unusual access. That’s because at the same time he was hired by the bondsmen to lobby commissioners, he was also hired by the commissioners to be their lobbyist. (transcript from NPR report)

It would be deeply interesting if we had a sort “influence compass” that would allow us to measure the net deviation created by the private interests of companies and industries for a number of policy areas. How far from the due north of the public’s interest are we when it comes to —

Of course the metaphor of “north” doesn’t really work here, since there is no purely objective definition of the public good in any of these areas. That is the purpose of open democratic debate about policy issues — what are the facts, what do we want to achieve, and what are the most effective ways of achieving our ends? But when private interests can influence decision makers to adopt X because it is good for the profits of industry Y — in spite of the clear public interest in doing Z — then we have anti-democratic distortion of the process.

Where are the democratic checks on this exercise of power? A first line of defense is the set of regulations most governments and agencies have concerning conflict of interest and lobbying. These institutions obviously don’t work; no one who pays attention would seriously think that agencies and governments are uninfluenced by gifts, contributions, promises of future benefits, and the blandishments of lobbyists. And these influences range from slight deviations to gross corruption.  Moreover, influence doesn’t need to be corrupt in order to be anti-democratic.  If an energy company gets a privileged opportunity to make the case for “clean coal” behind closed doors, this may represent a legitimate set of partial arguments.  The problem is that experts representing the public are not given the same opportunity.

(Here is a recent post on C. Wright Mills’ analysis of power elites and the influence accorded to corporations in the United States.)

January 8, 2010 By Daniel Little in CAT_China, CAT_power Tags: labor rights 1 Comment , is a detailed and factual examination of some of these conditions. She documents the fact that the most vulnerable groups of workers — in the range of tens of millions! — are the internal migrants of China, who have left their home regions in search of jobs. Very significantly, Professor Chan bases some of her fact-finding on the slowly emerging field of local investigative journalism in China.
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