Ordering Lives

Family, Work and Welfare

Gordon Hughes, Ross Fergusson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415329729
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134330010
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Taking as its focus three familiar and profoundly influential social institutions, the family, work and welfare, this accessible and exciting text looks at their role in maintaining social order and promoting social change in Britain from the 1950's to the beginning of the twenty first century. It shows how everyday life within these institutions is marked by the exercise of power and resistance and it charts the ways in which wider social change has affected these processes.

Ordering Lives: Family, Work and Welfare engages with some of the most pressing issues affecting our society in a lively yet academically rigorous manner. At the same time, it offers students of the social sciences a crucial first introduction to the way that theory is used in social science explanations of social relations and institutional arrangements.

This is a key introductory text for all students beginning study in sociology, social policy or general social sciences. Does it any longer make sense to talk about a "welfare state" in today's UK?

Chapter 1
Power: its institutional guises (and disguises)

John Allen

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Food for thought

2.1 Experts in the field

3 Power at work

3.1 If coercion is not the answer …

3.2 … is it domination?

4 Power and institutional life

4.1 Two theories of power: Weber and Foucault

5 Authority from above …

5.1 The powers of bureaucracy

5.2 Front-line authority

6 … or governing the self?

6.1 The powers of provocation

6.2 Hit-or-miss domination

7 The power of theory

8 Conclusion: ordered lives

References

Further reading

1 Introduction

The main purpose of this chapter is to explore what power is and how it works so that, throughout the book, we are in a position to examine what holds together the changing institutions of the family, work, and social welfare to which many of us are attached. In particular, a major concern is to show how power in its various guises serves to integrate and stabilize these key areas of social life, although often in less certain ways than many would have us believe. That such institutions are always in the process of being ordered in one way or another, rather than simply fixed for all time, is something that you should bear in mind as you consider the nature of institutional power.

By institutional power what we have in mind are the relatively routine arrangements of power involved in, say, the bringing up of children within a family, the management of an office within a large company, or indeed the exercise of judgement by government officials over what is fit and proper to eat, or over who is deserving of welfare and who is not. As can be gleaned from these few instances, the issue of power is not one restricted to the likes of benevolent dictators, American Presidents or military commanders; it is something that affects us all simply because we are part and parcel of this ordered set of relationships that we call ‘society’. To that end, in all kinds of ways we may find ourselves immersed in the many arrangements of institutional power, whether we recognize them or not.

Perhaps it is useful at the outset to state that institutional power and the quest for order is, for most of us, experienced as something quite ordinary: it is often, for example, the kind of thing that you only really know about when you are on the receiving end of it. When as a child you may have complied with or rebelled against the discipline laid down by a parental figure or a teacher, or later in life found yourself following, perhaps against your will, the instructions given by a bureaucratic manager, a doctor, or some other notable authority, the encounter, broadly speaking, may be described as a brush with power. In particular, you may have found yourself doing something which you did not really set out or want to do. The experience of imposition, of not being entirely in control of your own actions, is a familiar, indeed ordinary, consequence of finding yourself on the receiving end of an act of power. In such circumstances, it may seem relatively clear as to who has the power and who does not, even if the chain of command starts elsewhere in some far-off government ministry or in the distant headquarters of a foreign multinational.

It is no less ordinary, however, to experience institutional power in far more anonymous ways, where it is altogether unclear that anyone is directing or controlling things.

Activity 1.1

This sense of power is not so unfamiliar as it might at first appear. It is a rather different brush with power from that of the authority figure: less direct, more impersonal and rather difficult to discern who is behind it. Take a minute or two to consider or recall any circumstances where you may have felt on the receiving end of some kind of pressure to act or to order your life in a certain way, at work perhaps, or in a public place, yet found it hard to say why exactly.

FIGURE 1.1 Closed-circuit television cameras: an anonymous brush with power?

Perhaps the obvious examples here are those of closed-circuit television cameras placed discreetly in public locations such as shopping malls or the computerized personal data banks held by governments, both of which, in different ways, give the impression that your behaviour is subject to some form of scrutiny and possibly reproach. Surveillance, none the less, is a known form of control, even if you cannot pinpoint precisely the location of that power. The same, however, cannot be said about the power associated with the likes of advertising and fashion. Here we may experience power through a particular imagery which is suggestive of what it is to be this or that kind of person. No prohibitions are ever laid down for us as to how we should be, yet some people – knowingly or without much thought being given – seem to mould themselves along the lines of current fashion, for example in relation to a particular ‘healthy’ lifestyle or a certain ‘desirable’ type of body.

This type of issue should strike a familiar chord in relation to the topic of social identity (see Woodward, 2004). No one, after all, tells you to be who you are, yet there is a sense in which people may condition themselves, perhaps discipline themselves even, to appear ‘normal’ – whatever that may mean. With this kind of example, however, we are in danger of running ahead of ourselves before we have had an opportunity to tease out the obvious from the less obvious experiences of power and order in society.

What we can draw from the above, however, is an elementary definition of power:

A relationship of power is evident when someone acts in a way which they would otherwise not have done – regardless of whether or not they chose to.

Let’s be clear about what is meant by elementary here. This is an elementary definition of power because it represents the starting point, not the end point, of the analysis. Much of this chapter will be spent exploring the ways in which different attempts to order our lives are put together – cultural, political and economic – with an eye to constructing a more elaborate view of power. In the next two sections I develop a specific example (which connects with Hinchliffe and Woodward, 2004) – the debate around ‘safe’ food at a time when genetic engineering promises the earth – to draw out the various modes of institutional power in play: the role of persuasion, the reliance on those in authority, the practice of domination, and so forth. Following that, in Sections 4–6, I spell out in detail two contrasting theories of power to show how it is possible to think of power as, either something which is held directly over others, or as something which passes indirectly through the hands of the powerful no less than through the hands of the powerless. Where power in the latter view seeks to establish order by working on peoples’ actions and beliefs, in the former it is exercised over them. Finally, in Section 7, I look briefly at the role of theory in constructing explanations of events.

For the moment, however, we remain with the highly charged issue of genetically-modified (GM) foods and the vast implications that it appears to carry for what we eat and how we live. As you work your way through the issue, keep in mind the elementary definition of power as we shall return to it in Section 3 in relation to the foods that we consume.

2 Food for Thought

We are what we eat, or so we once thought. The concern voiced over the application of genetic engineering to foods has taken an odd twist in recent years. Since the late 1990s, self-styled ‘eco-warriors’ have appeared on the UK agricultural scene destroying dozens of genetically-modified crop trials at test sites up and down the country. Dressed in protective clothing, reputedly often masked, groups of activists under the cover of darkness apparently stormed the target fields and bagged what they saw as the offending crops. Some groups gave themselves suitable sounding names, such as the ‘Wardens of Wiltshire’, the ‘Lincolnshire Loppers’, the ‘Kenilworth Croppers’, or more imaginatively, the ‘Super Heroes Against Genetix’. Among the main crops targeted for destruction were fields of genetically-modified soya, sugar beet, wheat and oil seed rape, with the faceless biotechnology multinationals held up as the villains of the piece for their rash and irresponsible behaviour in pushing forward the boundaries of genetic manipulation at such a reckless pace.

FIGURE 1.2 Direct protest against genetically-modified crops: the rolling action of GenetiX Snowball campaigners

Direct protest, however, against the appearance of what many activists regarded as ‘Frankenstein foods’ was about to move out of the fields into the supermarkets. Demonstrations outside of supermarkets which stocked genetically-altered products – many processed foods in fact – had people turning up to protest dressed as vegetables crossed with chickens to forcefully make the point about genetic distortion. On other occasions, protcstcrs stacked their supermarket trolleys to the rim with assorted foods and then demanded of the checkout staff that they be told how much genetically-modified material the products contained.

Nor did the matter stop there. Organic farmers, perhaps rather predictably, were up in arms for fear of cross-pollination between the ‘mutant’ crops and their own ‘pure’ product. Iceland, the domestic frozen food retailer with a sizeable chunk of the UK food market, came out firmly against genetically-modified foods and banned all GM material from its own-brand products. In the wake of public outcry over the spectre of tampered foodstuffs, other supermarkets were equally quick to review their product lines. Even the House of Commons all-party catering committee took the decisive step to bar all genetically-altered foods from the Commons restaurants, despite the fact that the Labour government of the day was sharply divided over the issue. And to top it all, Prince Charles threw his hat into the ring by expressing grave concern over genetic modifications and declaring that some realms are best left to God, and to God alone.

What are we to make of all this in terms of the power relationships involved? First things first: before we move on to consider the different groups, organizations, and authorities involved, as well as their varied interests, what was all the fuss about?

There have been a number of concerns expressed about the introduction of genetically-modified materials into the food chain. At one level, concern reflects the well-founded anxiety surrounding the foods that we eat. The danger to health that such foods may represent, the uncertainties attached to any form of genetic experimentation, are sufficient in themselves to warrant concern over the possible risks involved. Opinion is divided, of course, as to the extent of the risks involved, but such worries are compounded by the fact that it seems far from easy to detect the presence of GM material in many finished products. This may change over time, but so long as, for example, the majority of processed foods available in the UK – those such as biscuits, bread, chocolate and cakes – contain soya, and much of that soya comes from the USA where the identification of the GM component is not considered an issue, then such concerns are likely to remain. If consumers have no choice over what they eat, nor full knowledge of the potential risks, the anxiety – following panics like that of the BSE scare – is real enough one would have thought (Hinchliffe, 2004).

It is at the broader environmental level, however, that the risks attached to genetically-engineered crops have stimulated the most animated responses. The fear, quite simply, is that the widespread use of crops which carry artificially-introduced genes could seriously upset the ecological balance. Once new genes escape into the wild they cannot be rounded up and led back. They represent an unknown quantity, with, so the environmental opposition claims, potentially devastating consequences for all forms of wildlife. In the long term, for example, crops endowed with insect-killing genes may harm beneficial insects or upset the habita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Power: its institutional guises (and disguises)
• CHAPTER 2 Family: from tradition to diversity?
• CHAPTER 3 Work: from certainty to flexibility?
• CHAPTER 4 Welfare: from security to responsibility?
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Index