SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Peace Movement, Industrial Unionism, Contrive
Piven: Can Power from Below Change the World
• Suggest that globalization actually increases the potential for this kind of popular power
• Protest movements have played a large role in American history
• In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, American elites restless under British rule
struck up an alliance with “the people out-of-doors” or the mobs of the era.
o the price of the alliance was elite indulgence of radical democratic ideas about the
people’s rights to self governance.
• the disruptive threat of the mob and their radical democratic convictions were imprinted on the
provisions of the new state constitutions, and the new federal constitution that spoke to popular
rights and representation
• The mob was powerful during the revolutionary period because state power was weakened by the
deepening conflict between colonial elites,
• State power was also weakened by the vast distance that separated the colonies from the
governing apparatus and military forces of the mother country, and by the fragmentation of
colonial governing authorities
• The boldness and single-mindedness of the abolitionists in pursuing the goal of immediate
emancipation shattered the sectional compromises that had made national union possible in 1789.
• Movement activists were embedded in the churches of a largely Protestant country.
• the mass strikes of the labor movement of the 1930s—strikes that won the basic framework of an
industrial relations system that, at least for a time, brought many working people into what is
called the middle class
• other movements included the black freedom movement, Vietnam anti war movement, anti
poverty movements
• the protestors never simply won. Their demands have been inevitably mod- ulated and honed to
mesh with ongoing insti- tutional arrangements and the powerful interests with stakes in those
institutions. Moreover, once these protests subsided, even the limited achieve- ments have been
whittled back
• but the reforms won by protest movements left their mark
• When movements are discussed, they are often called disruptive, which seems to mean noisy,
maybe disorderly, and even violent. Of course, protest movements do make noise as they try to
communicate their demands, with slogans, ban- ners, antics, rallies, and marches
o Boosts morale
• As for violence, while it was sometimes used defensively, American protests have gen- erally
shunned violence and the strategic risks it generated.
• Instead of protests being considered disruptive, the author refers to it as independent power
o because the word suggests the sociological basis of disruptive force
• inter- dependent power is significant in other institu- tional arenas, most obviously in the
economy, but also, for example, in the family, the church, and the local community
• patterns of domination—sometimes referred to as “social control”—that prevail in other arenas
very likely have consequences for the power contests we recognize as politics
• The potential for the exercise of power from below must, I believe, command the atten- tion of
sociologists.
An expanded theory of power
• I treat power as the ability of an actor to sway the actions of another actor or actors, even against
resistance.
• Sometimes this is called the zero-sum assumption: what one actor achieves is at the expense of
other actor
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• power as domination, and a property of social interaction
• The question that preoccupies theorists who accept this view is who has power, and why?
• And the answer to this question is generally understood to depend on power resources, or the
bases on which one actor is able to bend the will of others.
• Weber avoided the question, arguing that the resources for power could not be generalized, but
depended on specific circumstances.
o this position denies the possibility of analyzing the patterned distribution of power in
social life, it has not been satisfactory to many analysts
• conflict theorists have proliferated lists of the things and attributes that give an actor the ability to
sway other actors. Power is now seen as something that rests on personal skills, technical
expertise, money or the control of opportunities to make money, prestige or access to prestige,
numbers of people, or the capacity to mobilize numbers of people.
• Mill suggests that an important additional point that the “truly powerful” are those “who occupy
the command posts” of major institutions, since such institutions are the bases for great
concentrations of resources.
• one kind of resource can be used to gain another, as resources are “transferred, assembled,
reallocated, exchanged” and invested
• power resources are the attributes or things that one actor can use to coerce or induce another
actor.
• I will refer to this view simply as the power resources perspective.
• Typically, however, the kinds of goods and traits singled out by analysts as key resources are not
widely distributed, rather they are concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy. It follows that
power is also concentrated at the top.
• The reasoning is straightforward: Wealth, prestige, and the instruments of physical coercion are
all reliable bases for dominating others.
• Since these traits and goods are, everyone agrees, distributed by social rank, it follows that people
with higher social rank inevitably have more power, and people with lower social rank have less.
• since the resources that are the basis for the effective exercise of power are stratified, so is power
stratified, and those who have more accumulate still more.
• Sometimes people without things or status or wealth do succeed in forcing institutional changes
that reflect, if often only dimly, the needs and aspirations of people lower in the social order.
Interdependent power
• rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group
life.
• Social life is cooperative life, and in principle, all people who make contributions to these
systems of cooperation have potential power over others who depend on them.
• This kind of interdependent power is not concentrated at the top but is potentially widespread
• Even people with none of the assets or attributes we usually associate with power do things on
which others depend
o Eg. Tend to babies, mine coal, etc.
• Stable networks of cooperation inevitably come to be governed by the rules and ideas we call
institutions.
• And institutions also become sites of contention and the exercise of interdependent power.
• Institutions are Janus-faced: they help to shape the identities and purposes of people, and they
socialize people to conform with the institutional rules on which daily life depends
• people continue to pursue other ends than those promoted by the regimens of institutional life,
whether because they are prompt- ed by facets of human desire that escape socialization, or
because they are exposed to diverse institutional environments that cultivate other ends
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Piven: can power from below change the world: suggest that globalization actually increases the potential for this kind of popular power, protest movements have played a large role in american history. Their demands have been inevitably mod- ulated and honed to mesh with ongoing insti- tutional arrangements and the powerful interests with stakes in those institutions. Tend to babies, mine coal, etc: stable networks of cooperation inevitably come to be governed by the rules and ideas we call institutions, and institutions also become sites of contention and the exercise of interdependent power. Both sides of all these relations have the potential for exercising interdependent power, and at least in principle, the ability to exert power over others by withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from social cooperation. In fact, interdependent power is implicit in much of what we usually think about power from below.
