Power, Politics, and Society

An Introduction to Political Sociology

Betty A Dobratz, Lisa K Waldner, Timothy Buzzell, Betty Dobratz, Lisa Waldner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138553491
• eBook ISBN: 9781351372961
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Power, Politics and Society: An Introduction to Political Sociology discusses how sociologists have organized the study of politics into conceptual frameworks, and how each of these frameworks foster a sociological perspective on power and politics in society. This includes discussing how these frameworks can be applied to understanding current issues and other "real life" aspects of politics.

This second edition incorporates new material on cultural divides in American politics, emerging roles for the state, the ongoing effects of the Great Recession and recovery, the 2016 election, social media, and the various policies introduced during the Trump administration and how they affect people's lives.

CHAPTER
1

Power

Power is everywhere, in every social interaction between individuals, groups, and global actors, and is a critical element of study in many things encompassed by sociology. Have you ever thought about that? Where does power affect your life chances and choices, or your everyday life? C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who taught us the insights gained from the Sociological Imagination (1959), set out to develop among all of us a self-awareness that was inherently about biography, power, and politics in a historical context.

The sociological imagination, as taught in introductory sociology, connects us to essentially political themes: personal troubles, public issues, and the interplay between biography and social history. The troubles we hear about, for example, public education, unemployment, providing mental health services to war veterans, and terrorism all have a personal dimension, a human face, and very real biographies.

What Mills wants us to understand is that these personal troubles are often really public issues that are the result of larger, social, and global forces. These forces are even more apparent at this point in social history, as technology and globalization push societies in new and different ways, structuring interactions in patterns never seen before. Mills was influenced by his own historical influences in 1959, but nonetheless, was offering timeless lessons for political sociology about the nature of power, and the role of biography and the public. Mills believed that the sociological perspective brought great “promise” to the study of politics and power, valuable to building insights into the study of power, politics, and society, ultimately distinguishing political sociology from other disciplines of study.

While Mills was captivated by the role of science—namely social science—much of his work focused on how sociologists could most successfully explore the relationships between society and politics. This textbook is a summary of the very diverse scientific and humanistic understandings that make up political sociology today, and in many ways, celebrate Mill’s ingenious perspective on the connections between society, politics, and power.

This text begins with a definition of power, bringing focus to how political sociologists define a very abstract concept about social life. The insights that come about through the use of two analytical tools commonly used in the study of power—theoretical metaphors and paradox—help us to better understand how power works all around us. The strengths of theory and research behind a rich history of exploration are found in the three foundational theoretical frameworks in political sociology—pluralist, elite-managerial, and social-class perspective. These classical frameworks set the groundwork for a number of new explorations in political sociology, guided no doubt by the sociological imagination, in the study of power and politics. Political sociology has been instrumental in pinpointing how power works in a variety of social contexts through history. We start with this basic idea: power is a fundamental social process and is in all things social. As Mills observed—and we hope that you agree—the study of power is inherent in the “intellectual craftsmanship,” which is known as political sociology. It invites students of sociology and politics to the “sociological imagination our most needed quality of mind” (Mills 1959: 13).

METAPHORS AND PARADOX: SOCIOLOGICAL TOOLS IN THE STUDY OF POWER

Students studying power, politics, and society will find that insights developed thus far come from applications of the sociological imagination. These insights are typically conveyed through the use of metaphors and paradoxes. These are useful tools in sociological thinking.

Metaphors are analytical devices commonly used to depict ideas or concepts, especially when we as sociologists are “trying to make sense of mysteries” (Rigney 2001: 3). Rigney finds that sociologists frequently use metaphors, such as models or pictures, to illuminate what are otherwise abstract ideas about social life. Models or pictures are useful in describing how social forces like power influence interactions. For example, recall that functionalists typically describe societies as social systems. A metaphor for a social system might be a car. The car (society) is made up of certain components like the transmission, engine, or electronics (subsystems) that all operate together to make the car (society) move forward. Each subsystem, in turn, has its various parts that are required in order for the whole (car, or society) to move forward. If we think of a society as made up of various components all working together, we create a metaphor for describing the nature of social dynamics.

Metaphors have been constructed to explain in detail the nature of power in society. According to Hindess (1996), power has historically been described as a type of capacity for either action or obligation. He argues that action and obligation are central to the role power plays in political processes. The metaphor he uses to understand power as capacity comes from the science of physics. When a series of physical events are put into motion in nature, such as a bowling ball being hurled down the hallway of a college dorm, there will be a number of reactions from this initial force (e.g. the ball hits the resident assistant’s door at the end of the hallway and breaks the door, a roommate stumbles into the hallway and his toe is run over by the rolling ball causing great pain, etc.). Using this metaphor, we are prompted to ask what started the ball rolling. The capacity to force a bowling ball through a hallway represents an ability, skill, or wherewithal to set up a series of actions. It also suggests that someone had an interest or desire to roll the ball down the hallway, and command of the resources to get a bowling ball, pick it up, and use it as a way to act on these interests. The metaphor here describes power as capacity to achieve some outcome or act on a particular interest.

Capacity for action is distinct from capacity for obligation and duty. Hindess argues that here is where we find the essence of politics and power moving from the individual to the societal level. Obligation is hidden at a different layer of social interaction, and power is not always action on interests or desires, but rather, power is acquiescence or duty. In democratic societies, social order is achieved through duty to the law. Law is created by the sovereign or in many cases by a legislature or parliament that, in principle, represents the citizenry and their interests. When citizens follow the speed limit, or pay their taxes, or immunize their children before school begins each fall, they may grumble, but for the most part, they oblige the state through compliance. A useful metaphor for describing this second distinction is that of the parent. The state is a parent—it creates, monitors, and enforces rules, including punishing violators to keep things in order. The power of the state or parent derives from the fact that we come to understand the state as legitimate authority; we give it power by agreeing to obey. This dimension of power is perhaps more subtle but nonetheless effective in describing the concept of legitimate power in shaping social patterns.

Another analytical tool used in sociology is paradox (Crow 2005). For political sociology in particular, we find that life in a democratic society is sometimes characterized by contradiction or patterns of power that are contrary to expectations, public opinion, or values about democratic life. Political sociologists grapple with a number of paradoxes about the distribution of power in order to bring attention to important research questions. This analytical tool, much like metaphor, is about explaining contradictions. Consider, for example, a paradox in American political values: are all Americans politically equal as suggested by the Constitution of the United States, or the Declaration of Independence? Voting is a form of power in a democratic system. But are all votes truly equal? Only within the last century have women become more equal as a result of being granted the right to vote in 1920. Women did not have this power in the political system prior to the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Or consider the argument made by some that the Iowa caucuses give Iowans more influence in the process of selecting a presidential candidate than citizens in states who vote later in the presidential nominating process. Much of this argument rests on the belief that the winner in Iowa gets more media attention, and thus can ride a bandwagon effect (the media call it a “bump” from winning early nomination primaries), resulting in more positive polls and campaign donations. Paradoxically, this means all votes are not equal in the sociological sense, suggesting that early-voting states may have more influence than later-voting states. Identifying paradoxes in social systems, social outcomes, and social interactions is an important analytical goal of political sociology.

What insights are gained from the exploration of metaphors, paradoxes, and the application of the sociological imagination to the study of power and politics? By focusing on the disagreements, mysteries, and contradictions about power in social life, we develop keen insights into the nature of politics in society. Moreover, political sociology makes use of sociological tools to map out its focus for research. Or, as Lewis Coser (1966) concluded, these tools when used in sociological analysis help to build

that branch of sociology which is concerned with the social causes and consequences of given power distributions within or between societies, and with the social and political conflicts that lead to changes in the allocation of power.

(1)

Many of our perspectives in political sociology are constructed around two elements: power and order/conflict. This definition of political sociology reflects the “state” of sociology in the late 1950s and 1960s. Since then, the field has examined what Coser described as the foundational questions related to (1) attention to the state and institutions, (2) organization of power, (3) competition and order among groups, and (4) development of political associations. The sociological approach stands in contrast to the work of political science, which typically focuses on the nature of the state and its various manifestations. Political sociology casts its analytical net more broadly to capture the nature of the many power-based relationships between social structures, culture, and individuals. And, as we will learn, political sociology today builds on these foundational questions in many ways.

POWER: THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT IN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

If we begin with the idea that politics is “the generalized process by which the struggle over power in society is resolved” (Braungart 1981: 2), at the outset, we can understand that power is at the heart of the work of political sociologists. The goal is to explain the connections between social interactions, social structures, and social processes altered by struggle and resolution. We must define what we mean by power. Defining power is not as straightforward as one might think. Certainly, we all have experienced power in some way, perhaps the influence of a friend who cajoles and pushes us to go to a political meeting, or the force of a mugger who confronts us, taking an iPod at gunpoint. Power is encountered every day and everywhere. Let’s take a look at several definitions, identifying as we go the differences that reflect debates on how power is conceptualized.

The works of Karl Marx and Max Weber are foundational to much of the work in political sociology. Marx, writing in the mid- to late 1800s, famously analyzed the ways in which power in society was historically restructured based on economic forces and the relationships between individuals and what he would describe as upper classes. Much of his analysis of power was based on his observations of how the Industrial Revolution was beginning to change social order throughout Europe. Marx established that economic structures like corporations, owners of financial capital such as banks and financial institutions, and more immediately, the boss represent societal sources of power. The use of wages to influence worker performance or attendance is a significant creation of capitalist society. According to Marx, the relationship between worker, wage, and class interests was the source of alienating individuals not only from pursuing non-work-related self-interests, but also from each other, and from their own labor and the product of their labor. For Marx, power has an economic context rooted in the relationships between and among social classes.

Weber picks up this theme and offers one of the first formal political sociological analyses of power. Max Weber, who also wrote on the massive historical and social changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution, expands the study of power in his work in the early 1900s. Unlike Marx, Weber located power in a variety of social spaces including both economic and noneconomic contexts. For Weber, power was rooted in formalized social systems such as organizations or bureaucracies, as well as in social institutions such as religion and law. Weber differed from Marx in that he argued that power was not simply just about economic relationships, but also a function of social interests, patterns of social organization, and culture. These early approaches to the study of power offer one of the first debates in political sociology about the nature of the society–politics relationship.

Weber developed many of the early formal statements about power and politics, defining power as “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (1947: 152). Since Weber’s study of power in the early 1900s, social scientists have focused on what is meant by the distribution of power in society, as well as identifying what kinds of resources make some individuals and groups powerful or powerless. Others have extended the notion that politics is inherent in most if not all aspects of social action and expression in human interactions.

VANCOUVER, CANADA—OCTOBER 23: Hundreds of people marched the streets to protest against corporate greed, as part of global Occupy movement, in Vancouver, Canada, October 23, 2011

Credit: Sergei Bachlakov / Shutterstock.com

Metaphors of Power Arrangements

Political sociologists have revealed the forms and nuances of the abstract notion of power by creating typologies of power. These various typologies highlight the nature of power in situations or the characteristics of power, as they play a role in the construction of capacity, exchange of resources, and distribution of power in society. These various typologies and conceptualizations of power share the notion that society shapes and is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Text Boxes
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Power
• Chapter 2 Role of the State
• Chapter 3 Politics, Culture, and Social Processes
• Chapter 4 The Politics of Everyday Life: Political Economy
• Chapter 5 The Politics of Everyday Life: Social Institutions and Social Relations
• Chapter 6 Political Participation
• Chapter 7 Elections and Voting
• Chapter 8 Social Movements
• Chapter 9 Violence and Terrorism
• Chapter 10 Globalization
• Index