Power is seen as a win-lose kind of relationship. Having power involves taking it from someone else, and then, using it to dominate and prevent others from gaining it. In politics, those who control resources and decision making have power over those without. New forms of leadership and decision-making must be explicitly defined, taught, and rewarded in order to promote more democratic forms of power.
Practitioners and academics have searched for more collaborative ways of exercising and using power. Minimizing the role of foundation grants as an influence on these organizations also ignores the importance of discretionary money in the functioning of any organization. All environmental groups are counted as part of this new pluralism, but the key groups as far as policy formulation are funded by large foundations and are part of the moderate-conservative wing of the policy-planning network Domhoff, , Chapter 4; Robinson, True enough, liberal and left environmentalists have sensitized public opinion on environmental issues, created watchdog groups whose reports receive attention in the mass media, and developed new ideas and technologies for controlling pollution that have been grudgingly accepted by the corporate community.
But since they have not been able to pass any legislation that is opposed by the Business Roundtable, the most important policy group in the corporate community. The environmental movement as a whole, and the liberal wing in particular, is more marginal in a power sense than its public reputation would suggest.
The consumer movement that developed out of the movements of the s was able to pass many new consumer protection laws between and Vogel, However, there is less evidence of interest-group power in this story than meets the eye, because the relevant business groups either agreed with the legislation or forced modifications to make it acceptable. Although the U. Chamber of Commerce registered its usual ideological protestations, there was little or no business opposition to any of the consumer protection legislation of the s, which means that the corporate community was not defeated on these issues by any rival interest groups Domhoff, , chapter The important exception is the automobile industry's objections to the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, a successful effort to force them to make safer cars Luger, The profound weakness of the consumer movement was exposed as long ago as when its mild proposal for an Agency for Consumer Advocacy was strongly opposed the by the Business Roundtable and other corporate policy-planning groups through the Consumers Issues Working Group.
Despite support from President Jimmy Carter, the bill was rejected by the conservative voting bloc in the House. The consumer movement also failed on every other piece of legislation it put forward in that time period. More generally, its authors conclude that business is the dominant force in the interest-group community despite the increase in non-business interest groups in the s. In fact, contrary to the claims by neo-pluralists, the only significant defeat for a united corporate community since the s is the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in , which was strongly opposed by corporate leaders as both a possible precedent for enlarging government regulation and as a potential stronghold for unions.
Even here, the ensuing history of this new agency is instructive in terms of corporate power through lobbying and legislative in-fighting: By the s, as detailed studies show, the corporation community had turned the agency into a "political prisoner" through delays in providing information, legislative amendments limiting its power, legal victories that further reduce its power, and budget cuts that make inspections fewer and more superficial.
As if to make this case even more difficult for pluralists, these changes occurred despite strong public sentiment in favor of enforcing workplace safety laws Noble, ; Szasz, Nor are correlations between public opinion and legislative outcomes necessarily evidence for the pluralist view. Such a claim overlooks the fact that the corporate community spends enormous sums of money to influence public opinion through an opinion-shaping network that ranges from public relations departments in large corporations to big companies that specialize in public relations to numerous nonprofit organizations that focus on influencing public opinion on just one specific issue, such as foreign policy or beliefs about the economy or trade unions Domhoff, It also ignores the fact that the public's liberal preferences on a wide range of economic programs -- government employment of the unemployed, government-supported health insurance, a higher minimum wage -- never have been fulfilled.
Because the federal government in Washington and the military were relatively unimportant in American history until World War II and after, most analysts of power in the United States have started with the premise that the private groups or social classes of "civil society" dominate the state. Thus, their main focus has been on the relative power of various interest groups or social classes.
Most of these "society-centric" analysts have been pluralists. That means the control of the state by private interests was not to be deplored because many different groups were involved. The few dissenting analysts within the academic community -- Floyd Hunter, C. Wright Mills, Marxists, and non-Marxist class-domination theorists like me -- contested the general pluralist vision only in the sense of saying that power was in the hands of the few: an institutional elite for Mills, the rich capitalists for the plain Marxists, a combination of the two for Hunter and me.
That is, the dissidents were as society-centric as the pluralists and put no special emphasis on the state. Contrary to that general starting point, state autonomy theorists assert that predominant power is located in government, not in the general citizenry or a dominant social class.
Following European usage, advocates of this theory, who now sometimes call themselves historical institutionalists, employ the phrase "the state" rather than "government" to emphasize the government's independence from the rest of society. This state independence, usually called "autonomy," is said to be due to several intertwined factors: 1 its monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the country; 2 its unique role in defending the country from foreign rivals and 3 its regulatory and taxing powers.
Thanks to these powers, government officials can enter into coalitions with groups in society, whether business, labor, or political parties, if they share the same goals as the state. State autonomy theorists also believe that independent experts can be powerful because they have information that is valuable to state officials.
For the state autonomy theorists, then, the state can and does act in its own interests, which are stability and expansion. In a capitalist world, the state's leaders do their best to keep capitalism healthy because that is in their own interests in terms of state revenues and a happy civilian population, not because they are first and foremost concerned with capitalism and capitalists. State autonomy theorists pride themselves for allegedly establishing for the first time how "the logics of state-building and the international states system are not reducible to an economic or class logic" Orloff, , p.
Actually, this idea was news to very few theorists. It is basic to the Four Networks theory, for example. State autonomy theorists do not insist that the state is everywhere and always strong and independent. It can be captured or dominated in some instances.
At the most abstract level, they therefore assert that the state is "potentially autonomous" Skocpol, , p. The problem here is that they claim they came up with the idea all by themselves, completely ignoring the fact that Mills, who is never cited by them, made this important point long ago Mills, , pp.
They thus created a straw man to make themselves seemingly unique and innovative. Even with the idea of potential autonomy available as a way to concede that there is corporate dominance in the United States, they insist on giving the American state considerable autonomy.
However, there are many reasons why this potential does not manifest itself in the United States. State autonomy is only possible when a state is unified and relatively impermeable to the employees and representatives of private organizations.
But the American government is neither. For historical reasons -- see the discussion of American history in the document on Four Networks theory -- it is a fragmented government completely open to outside agents, and therefore vulnerable to domination through the electoral process and through appointments from the corporate community and policy-planning network.
The movement by members of the corporate leadership group between the private sector and government blurs the line between the corporate community and the state, which does not fit with the idea of state autonomy. Moreover, the historic lack of large planning staffs in most executive departments made it possible for a private policy-planning network to flourish. Then, too, the division of American government into national, state, and local levels helps to explain why growth coalitions can be so powerful in most cities.
At the empirical level, state autonomy theorists use a growing budget and an increasing number of employees as indicators of the power of an agency or department within government.
More generally, the alleged continued expansion of the federal government is sometimes said to be good evidence for the power of state officials. But the state autonomy theorists are wrong for three reasons when they use increases in federal budgets and number of agency employees as power indicators. First, the size of a government does not necessarily say anything about how it is controlled.
The government could grow and still be controlled by the corporate community. For that reason, there is no substitute for historical studies using one or more indicators of power. Second, the growth of government from the s through the s was at the state and local levels, which does not fit with the image of an independently powerful federal government that aggrandizes more resources to itself.
Third, as the most detailed and sophisticated study of federal government budgets reveals, budgets actually declined in size from to by 8.
That decline continued from , when federal spending was The percentage started up again in the first four years of the 21st century, in good part due to the massive increases in defense spending that began even before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also due to increased costs for Medicare and subsidies for agribusinesses. But no one would claim that the Bush Administration is evidence for state autonomy theory.
Information on trends in the number of federal government employees also contradict the expectations of state autonomy theory. The number of federal civilian and military employees declined in the s, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the nation's total population.
Furthermore, most government employees are related to the military and its functioning. The main finding that emerges from a comparison of the departments in the executive branch is that the Department of Defense dwarfs all others, employing over half of all federal employees when military personnel are included. When only civilian employees are counted, that department is still three to seven times bigger than its nearest rivals.
And if the Veterans Administration is counted as part of the military, as it should be, then the civilian part of the government is an even smaller part of the overall picture. The claim by state autonomy theorists that experts have an independent role in developing new public policies in the United States is refuted by the fact that these experts are part of the corporation- and foundation-financed policy-planning network. State autonomy theorists are right that experts provide many of the new policy ideas, but they do not see that the most important experts are selected and sponsored by one or more of the organizations within the policy network, and that their ideas are discussed and criticized by corporate leaders before appearing in reports and proposals.
When state autonomy theorists turn their attention to political parties and group differences over specific policy issues, they become similar to the pluralists. I have critiqued this book at great length , showing how state autonomy theory, when applied to the United States, morphs into pluralism, all the while ignoring the class conflicts that are staring it in the face.
The American state is most assuredly very powerful. The question is, who controls that state? Is it elected officials, appointed officials, and career employees as the state autonomy theorists claim or the corporate community that finances the elected officials and supplies many of the appointees as class-dominance theorists claim , or the American public through political parties, elections, interest groups, lobbying, and the force of public opinion as pluralists claim?
Present-day elite theory intersects with the Four Networks theory on some points, but disagrees on others. The starting point for present-day elite theorists is that all modern societies are dominated by the leaders called elites of large bureaucratically structured organizations, whether those organizations are corporate, nonprofit, or governmental.
And elite theorists, like other power theorists, emphasize that average citizens sometimes have the ability to set limits on the actions of elites, especially when the elites are in conflict among themselves. But elite theory puts far less emphasis on classes or class conflict than is necessary to fully understand power in the United States.
It therefore does not fully appreciate the degree to which corporate-based owners and managers dominate other institutionally based elites in the United States. For example, most elected officials within the political elite are dependent upon wealthy families and corporate leaders for their initial financial support, and military leaders are appointed by the civilians who win control of the executive branch. Nor does elite theory emphasize the class bias that is built into the policy-planning network and other non-profit organizations in the United States, which makes the leaders and experts within those organizations secondary to the leaders in the corporate community.
The lack of attention to class conflict leads elite theory to underestimate the differences between corporate-dominated organizations and organizations based in the working class, especially unions. The capitalists and the working class are interdependent, as elite theory stresses, which does set outer limits on what they can do to each other. Moreover, the leaders of unions do work with the leaders of corporate-oriented organizations once their unions are established, as elite theory emphasizes.
However, many of the union leaders' objectives remain class-based. There is major conflict between them and the corporate leaders, who see unions as deadly enemies and do everything they can to eradicate them. Moreover, the union leaders have been defeated again and again by the corporate community since the late s, making them a secondary elite at best.
Unlike many European countries, where union leaders have more power because the capitalists were constrained by aristocratic and state elites in their efforts to eliminate unions, there are no restraints on corporate attacks on unions in the United States Mann, ; Voss, Thus, there are differences between the United States and most European countries that make elite theory more applicable to those countries than to the United States. More generally, it is the combination of insights from organizational and class theories that explains the strength of the American corporate community.
This is where the Four Networks theory has greater applicability because of its synthesis of the theories giving rise to organizational and class concepts. Capitalism creates an ownership class that has immense economic resources and the potential for political power.
It also generates ongoing class conflict over wages, profits, work rules, taxes, and government regulation. In response, corporate owners in the United States have been able to create a wide range of organizations that give them institutional resources through which they incorporate and legitimate their class resources, making it possible for them to contain class conflict. It is the interaction of class and organizational imperatives at the top of all American organizations, including government institutions, that leads to class domination in the United States.
Like the Four Networks theory, Marxism is a comprehensive theory of Western history as well as the starting point for a theory of power in the United States. In that regard, the two theories are more general than pluralism, state autonomy theory, and elite theory.
Marxism was created by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels At the least, it has five aspects, each of which has generated a huge literature. It contains:. The focus of this section will be on the theory of class domination and the politics of replacing capitalism with socialism for two reasons. First, the dialectical theory of history, with its insistence on certain inevitable outcomes, is no longer considered credible in the light of events in the 20th century, even by most Marxists.
Second, many of the claims about the internal workings of capitalism, such as the labor theory of value and the falling rate of profit, have fallen by the wayside. The emphasis on the lengths to which capitalists must and will go to make profits, and on class conflict, remain highly relevant, but they can be included within the sociological theory of class domination that is discussed here.
Shorn to its barest essentials, the theory states that history begins when the creative aspects of human beings act upon nature to serve human needs. This starting point highlights the Marxist emphasis on the productive and progressive nature of human beings. The creation of tools and machinery "forces of production" leads to more goods being produced than can be individually consumed, and hence to the potential for conflict over how to distribute the surplus.
As the forces of production develop, there is an increasing division of labor as well as increasing conflict over the ownership and control of the machinery "relations of production".
As people divide into owners and non-owners, there is both greater overall productivity and increasing exploitation of the non-owners who are at different stages of history in the roles of slaves, serfs, peasants, and most recently "workers". This is what Marx means when he says that history is a history of class struggle. Kavita Naranasamy. Nidhila Akhil. Tahmina Eila. Xen Bsjsjshsh. Anima Jose Olakkengil , -- at Undergraduate.
Nisa khan. Tamara Bouchard. Ghulam Abbas , Attended G. C University. Ashraful Islam. Shabeesh Pangode. Aravind K R. Gilbert Vargees. Show More. Views Total views. Actions Shares. No notes for slide. Blau's Social Exchange Theory 1.
People act rationally, and often employ exchange in pursuit of rational ends. For example, among members of a political organization, they may exchange support to build solidarity, or, lovers may do things for each other to gain commitment in the relationship. It is in the social relations men establish that their interests find expression and their desires become realized.
Blau Exchange and Power in Social Life, They occur on a continuum from concrete to symbolic. Here, associating with others serves as a means to a further end. Thus, a good meal is really in the company, not the flavours consider eating a great meal alone. Social rewards to one person tend to entail a cost to another person. This does not mean that society is a zero sum game that every person must loose in equal proportion to someone else's gain , but it does imply that people do not share social profits equally.
The social sanctions evident in the face of such action demonstrate that reciprocity is expected. People are anxious to help others and to reciprocate the help they receive.
Underneath this altruism, however, is an egoism - a selfishness!! Blau suggested three types: o Investment: time and effort devoted to developing skills which will be used to reward others. The more services supplied in return for receipt of some valued service, the more power held by those providing valued services. This makes complete sense to teenage boys. The more alternative sources for reward possessed, the less those providing reward can extract compliance.
The more those receivers can apply force and coercion, the less those providing can extract compliance. She continues to provide valued service to unappreciative family members because she has no other place to market her services.
The more receivers can do without, the less providers can extract compliance. Conflict is inevitable, as each person's selfish interests cannot simultaneously be met. He uses indifference curves, supply and demand curves.
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