Alternative social systems and individual wellbeing

Communism ...

or Capitalism?

A joke from Poland in the 1970s: "In capitalism it is a question of man's exploitation by man. In communism it is the reverse."

A modern social system is an environment where millions of people find opportunities, develop their talents, express their beliefs, and earn their livings within the context of a set of economic and political institutions. Specific institutions of property, power, ideology, education, and healthcare create an environment within which citizens of all circumstances pursue their life interests. Individuals exercise their freedoms through the institutions within which they live, and those institutions also determine the quality and depth of social resources available to the individual that determine the degree to which he or she is able to develop talents and skills and gain access to opportunities. Institutions create constraints on freedom of choice that range from the nearly invisible to the intensely coercive. Institutions create inequalities of opportunity and outcome for different groups of citizens; rural people may have more limited access to higher education, immigrant and minority communities may experience discrimination in health and employment; and so on. Further, social systems differ in the balance they achieve between "soft" constraints (market, education, regional differences) and "hard" constraints (police, regulations governing behavior, extra-legal uses of violence).

To describe a set of institutions and a population of individual actors as a system has a number of implications, some of which are unjustified. The idea of "system" suggests a kind of functional interconnection across its components, with needs in one subsystem eliciting adjustments in the activities of other subsystems to satisfy those needs. This mental model is misleading, however. Better is the ontology of "assemblage" discussed frequently here (link, link, link). This is the idea that a complex social thing is the unintended and largely undesigned accumulation of multiple independent components. One set of processes leads to the development of the logistics infrastructure of a society; another set of processes leads to the development of the institutions of government; and yet other path-dependent and contingent processes contribute to the system of labor education, management, and discipline that exists in a society. These various institutional ensembles are overlaid with each other; sometimes there are painful inconsistencies among them that are resolved by entrepreneurs or officials; and the result is a heterogeneous and largely unplanned agglomeration of social arrangements and practices that add up to "the social system". 

A central premise of some classics of social theory, including Marx, is that the institutions through which social interactions take place form large and relatively stable configurations that fall into fairly distinct groups -- feudalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, social democracy, authoritarianism. And different configurations of institutions do better or worse in terms of the degree to which they allow their members to satisfy their needs and live satisfying lives. The ontology associated with the theory of assemblage, however, is anti-essentialist in a very important sense: it denies that there are "essentially similar configurations" of institutions that play crucial roles in history, or that there is a tendency towards convergence around "typical" ensembles of institutions. In particular, it suggests that we reject the idea that there are only a few historically possible configurations of institutions -- capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, democracy -- and rather analyze each social order as a fairly unique configuration -- assemblage -- of specific institutional arrangements.

This perspective casts doubt on the value of singling out "capitalism," "liberal democracy," "religious autocracy," "apartheid society," "military dictatorship," or "one-party dictatorship" as schemes for understanding distinctive and sociologically important patterns of un-freedom. Rather than considering these different "ideal types" of social-political systems as structures with distinctive dynamics, perhaps it would be more satisfactory to consider the problem from the point of view of the citizens of various societies and the degree to which existing social, political, and economic institutions serve their development as full and free human beings.

Amartya Sen's framework for understanding human wellbeing in Development as Freedom is valuable in this context (link). Sen understands wellbeing in terms of the individual's ability to realize his or her capabilities fully and to live within an environment enabling as much freedom of action as freely as possible. Sen's framework gives a powerful basis for paying close attention to inequalities within society; a society in which one-third of the population have exceptional freedom and opportunities for development, one-third have indifferent attainments in these crucial dimensions, and one-third have extremely limited freedoms and opportunities is plainly a less just and desirable society than one in which everyone has the same freedoms and a relatively high level of opportunities for development -- even if the average attainment for the population is the same in the two scenarios.

This prism permits us to attempt to understand the structural characteristics of society -- political, cultural, religious, economic, or civic -- in terms of the effects that those institutional arrangements have on the freedoms and capacity for development of the population. This is the underlying rationale for the Human Development Index, but the HDI is primarily focused on development rather than freedom.

We might try to evaluate the workings of a given ensemble of social and political institutions by devising an index of human wellbeing and freedom that can be applied to each society. Examples of indexes along these lines include the Human Development Index, the Opportunity Index, and the Cato Institute Freedom Index. Every index is selective. It is interesting and important to observe, for example, that political freedom plays no role in the Human Development Index, while the Cato Institute index pays no attention to the prerequisites of freedom: access to education, access to health care, freedom from racial or ethnic discrimination.

So each of these indices is limited as a scheme for evaluating the overall success a particular institutional configuration has in creating a free and enabling environment for its citizens. But suppose we had a composite index that reflected both freedom (broadly construed) and wellbeing? Such an index might look something like this:

• Rule of law 
• Security and safety 
• Movement 
• Religion 
• Association, assembly, and civil society 
• Expression and information
• Identity and relationships 
• access to quality education
• access to quality healthcare
• freedom from racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in employment, education, housing, and other social goods
• equality of opportunity

(It is interesting to observe that these characteristics align fairly well with the contents of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Using an index like this, we could then ask important comparative questions: How do ordinary citizens fare under the institutions of contemporary Finland, Spain, China, Russia, Nigeria, Brazil, Romania, France, and the United States? An assessment along these lines would put us in a position to give a normative evaluation of the various social systems mentioned above: what social, political, and economic arrangements do the best job of securing each of these freedoms and opportunities for all citizens? Under what kinds of institutions -- economic, political, social, and cultural -- are citizens most free and most enabled to fully develop their capacities as human beings?

It seems evident that the answer to this question is not very esoteric or difficult. Freedom requires the rule of law, respect for equal rights, and democratic institutions. Real freedom requires access to the social resources that permit an individual to fully develop his or her talents. A decent life requires a secure and adequate material standard of living. These obvious truths point towards a social system that embodies the protections of a constitutional liberal democracy; extensive public support for the social resources necessary for full human development (education, healthcare, nutrition, housing); and an extensive social welfare net that ensures that all members of society can thrive. There is a name for this set of institutions; it is called social democracy. (Here are several earlier posts that reach a similar conclusion from different starting points; link, link.)

And where are the social democracies in the world today? They are largely the Nordic countries: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Significantly, these five countries consistently rank in the top ten countries in the World Happiness Report (link), a rigorous and well-funded attempt to measure citizen satisfaction with the same care as we measure GDP or national health statistics. The editors of the 2020 report describe the particular success of Nordic societies in supporting citizen satisfaction in these terms:

From 2013 until today, every time the World Happiness Report (WHR) has published its annual ranking of countries, the five Nordic countries – Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland – have all been in the top ten, with Nordic countries occupying the top three spots in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Clearly, when it comes to the level of average life evaluations, the Nordic states are doing something right, but Nordic exceptionalism isn’t confined to citizen’s happiness. No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.

And here is their considered judgment about the circumstances that have led to this high level of satisfaction in the Nordic countries:

We find that the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other, which play an important role in determining life satisfaction. (131)

The key factors mentioned here are worth calling out for the light they shed on the current dysfunctions of politics in the United States: effective institutions, extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, well-functioning democracy, a limited range of economic inequalities, a strong sense of autonomy and freedom, and high levels of social trust and social cohesion. It is evident that American society is being tested in each of these areas by the current administration, and none more so than the areas of trust and social cohesion. The current administration actively strives to undermine both trust and social cohesion, and goes out of its way to undermine confidence in government. These are very disturbing signs about what the future may bring. Severe inequalities of income, wealth, and social resources (including especially healthcare) have become painfully evident through the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic. And the weakness of the social safety net in the United States has left millions of adults and children in dire circumstances of unemployment and hunger. The United States today is not a happy place for many of its citizens.

Personalized power at the local level

How does government work? We often understand this question as one involving the institutions and actors within the Federal government. But there is a different zone of government and politics that is also very important in public life in the United States, the practical politics and exercise of power at the state and local levels.

Here is an earlier post that addresses some of these issues as well; link. There I present three scenarios for how our democracy works: the ideal case, the "not-so-ideal" case, and the "nightmare" case.

The Nightmare Scenario Elected officials have no sincere adherence to the public good; they pursue their own private and political interests through all the powers available to them. Elected officials are sometimes overtly corruptible, accepting significant gifts in exchange for official performance. Elected officials are intimidated by the power of private interests (corporations) to fund electoral opposition to their re-election. Regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries they regulate; independent commissioners are forced out of office; and regulations are toothless when it comes to environmental protection, wilderness protection, health and safety in the workplace, and food safety. Lobbyists for special interests and corporations have almost unrestricted access to legislators and regulators, and are generally able to achieve their goals.

This is the nightmare scenario if one cares about democracy, because it implies that the apparatus of government is essentially controlled by private interests rather than the common good and the broad interests of society as a whole. It isn't "pluralism", because there are many important social interests not represented in this system in any meaningful way: poor people, non-unionized workers, people without health insurance, inner-city youth, the environment, people exposed to toxic waste, ...

 If anything, personal networks of power and influence appear to be of even greater importance at this level of government than at the Federal level.

So how does personal power work at the local level? Power within a democracy is gained and wielded through a variety of means: holding office within an important institution, marshaling support from a political party, possessing a network of powerful supporters in business, labor, and advocacy groups; securing access to significant sources of political funding; and other mechanisms we can think of. Mayors, governors, and county executives have powers of appointment to reward or punish their supporters and competitors; they have the ability to influence purchasing and other economic levers of the municipality; and they have favors to trade with legislators.

Essentially the question to consider here is how power is acquired, exercised, and maintained by a few powerful leaders in state, county, and city, and what are the barely-visible lines through which these power relations are implemented and maintained. This used to be called "machine politics," but as Jessica Trounstine demonstrates in Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers, the phenomenon is broader than Tammany Hall and the mayor-boss politics of the nineteenth century through Mayor Daly's reign in Chicago. The term Trounstine prefers is "political monopolies":

I argue that it is not whether a government is machine or reform that determines its propensity to represent the people, but rather its success at stacking the deck in its favor. When political coalitions successfully limit the probability that they will be defeated over the long term -- when they eliminate effective competition -- they achieve a political monopoly. In these circumstances the governing coalition gains the freedom to be responsive to a narrow segment of the electorate at the expense of the broader community. (KL 140)

What are the levers of influence available to a politician in state and local government that permit some executives to achieve monopoly power? How do mayors, county executives, and political party leaders exercise power over the decisions that are to be made? Once they have executive power they are able to reward friends and punish enemies through appointments to desirable jobs, through favorable access to government contracts (corrupt behavior!), through the power of their Rolodexes (their networks of relationships with other powerful people), through their influence on political party decision-making, through the power of some of their allies (labor unions, business associations, corporations), and through their ability to influence the flow of campaign funding. They have favors to dispense and they have punishments they can dole out.

Consider Southeast Michigan as an interesting example. Michigan's largest counties have a history of longterm "monopoly" leadership. Wayne County was led for 15 years by Ed McNamara and Oakland County was led by L. Brooks Patterson, and both men wielded a great deal of power in their offices during their tenure. Neither was seriously challenged by strong competing candidates, and Patterson died in office at the age of 80. Some of the levers of power in Wayne County came to light during a corruption investigation in 2011. Below are links to several 2011 stories in MLive on the details of this controversy involving the Wayne County Executive and the Airport Authority Board.

Labor unions have a great deal of influence on the internal politics of the Democratic Party in Michigan. Dudley Buffa's Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party, 1972-83 describes this set of political realities through the 1980s. Buffa shows that the UAW had extraordinary influence in the Democratic Party into the 1980s, and even with the decline of the size and influence of organized labor, it still has virtually veto power on important Democratic Party decisions today.

As noted in many places in Understanding Society, corporations have a great deal of power in political decision-making in the United States. Corporate influence is wielded through effective lobbying, political and political action contributions, and the "social capital" of networks of powerful individuals. (Just consider the influence of Boeing on the actions of the FAA or the influence of the nuclear industry on the actions of the NRC.) G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance) provided a classic treatment of the influence of corporate and business elites in the sphere of political power in the United States. He has also created a very useful website dedicated to helping other researchers discover the networks of power in other settings (link). Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett provide a more contemporary overview of the power that businesses have in American politics in Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy.

When I speak of corporate power in politics, let me be very clear: I do not mean just the activities of the incorporated entities themselves. The billionaire owners of corporations are often actively engaged in battle to expand the influence of the corporations that give them their power and their wealth. Front groups and lobbying groups are often the ground troops when corporate powers don’t want to get their own hands dirty or when they want to institutionalize their influence. So-called philanthropic foundations are often the proxies for billionaire families who want influence and who launch these tools. (kl 214)

Contributors to Corporations and American Democracy provide extensive understanding of the legal and political history through which corporations came to have such extensive legal rights in the United States.

Business executives too have a great deal of influence on the Michigan legislature. Here is a Crain's Detroit Business assessment of the top influencers in Lansing, "Michigan's top power players as Lansing insiders see them — and how they wield that influence" (link). Top influencers in the business community, according to the Crain's article, include Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans Inc., Daniel Loepp, president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Rich Studley, CEO of Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Patti Poppe, CEO of Consumers Energy Co., and Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors Co. Most of these individuals are members of the state's leading business organization, Business Leaders for Michigan (link). Collectively and individually these business leaders have a great deal of influence on the elected officials of the state.

Finally, elected officials themselves sometimes act in direct self-interest, either electoral or financial, and corruption is a recurring issue in local and state government in many states. Detroit's mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a string of Illinois governors, and other elected officials throughout the country were all convicted of corrupt actions leading to personal gain (link).

These kinds of influence and actions underline the extensive and anti-democratic role that a range of political actors play within the decision-making and rule-setting of local government: monopoly-holding political executives, political party officials, big business and propertied interests, labor unions, and special advocacy groups. It would be interesting to put together a scorecard of issues of interest to business, labor, unions, and environmental groups, and see how often each constituency prevails. It is suggestive about the relative power of these various actors that the two issues of the greatest interest to the business community in Michigan in recent years, repeal of the Michigan Business Tax and passage of "Freedom to Work" legislation, were both successful. (Here is an earlier post on the business tax reform issue in Michigan; link.)

Data for case study about networks of influence in SE Michigan

Jeff Wattrick, November 2, 2011. "This didn't start with Turkia Mullin: The inter-connected web of Wayne County politics from Ed McNamara to Renee Axt", MLive (link)
___________, November 4, 2011: "Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano replaces top officials, vows to end 'business as usual'", MLive (link)
___________, November 7, 2011: "Renee Axt resigns as Chair of Wayne County Airport Authority", MLive (link)
___________, November 8, 2011: "Almost half of Wayne County voters say Executive Bob Ficano should resign", MLive (link)
Jim Schaefer and John Wisely. November 15, 2011. "Wayne Co. lawyer who quit is back". Detroit Free Press. (link)
David Sands. November 15, 2011. "Wayne County Corruption Probe Gathers Speed, Turkia Mullin To Testify", Huffington Post (link)

Detroit had its own nationally visible political corruption scandal when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was charged with multiple counts of racketeering and corruption, for which he was eventually convicted. Stephen Yaccino, October 10, 2013. "Kwame M. Kilpatrick, Former Detroit Mayor, Sentenced to 28 Years in Corruption Case", New York Times (link).

The internal machinations of Michigan's political parties with respect to choosing candidates for office reflect the power of major "influencers". Here is a piece about the choice of candidate for the office of secretary of state in the Democratic Party in 2002: Jack Lessenberry. March 30, 2002. "Austin has uphill fight in Michigan secretary of state race", Toledo Blade (link).

The ontology of power

There have been quite a few posts on the concept of power over the years in this blog (link). This continues to be an intriguing subject for me. Fundamentally the question of the moment is this: how does "power" fit into a social ontology of the kinds of things that exist in the social world? Does "power" exist, or is it a term that encompasses a range of other social things and relations? At one point I characterized power as an "influence" concept (link), analogous to "is humorous," "is rude," or "is charismatic". In each case the concept is defined in terms of a capacity possessed by the agent to influence certain kinds of behaviors by others around him or her.  Along these lines we might define power as a feature of an individual as follows:

Caesar is powerful =df Caesar has access to social levers of coercion that permit him to coerce certain kinds of behavior by others.

Those levers might include --

• command of military or paramilitary forces
• relations with conformant legislators positioned to enact legislation and regulation
• relations with conformant private citizens positioned to coerce their dependents to behave this way or that

On this approach, "power" is a dispositional concept attaching to individuals and invoking access to certain kinds of instruments of coercion.

What is "coercion"? This is a topic that Robert Nozick picked up early in his career (“Coercion” in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel). We might define coercion very simply in terms of an actor's ability to influence the terms of choice that confront another actor. The Godfather put it best: "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse." Here is a possible definition:

x coerces y =df x creates a choice situation for y in which the costs of choosing other available options are unacceptably high, leaving only O_n+1 to be chosen.

(Here is an article on coercion in SEP; link.)

We can then broaden this concept to groups in society by postulating that certain groups have greater access to the levers of coercion than others. So we might say that "capitalists have more power than workers" because capitalists have access to the lever of unemployment, whereas workers have access only to the power to withhold their labor at substantial personal and familial cost. And we might say that organized crime lords have more power than shopkeepers because the criminals have greater ability to use and threaten violence against the shopkeeper than the reciprocal.

We can also broaden the concept by grouping the levers of coercion into different families: economic coercion, physical coercion, community coercion (shunning within a religious community, for example), … This allows us to identify the sources of power within a given society. Individuals and groups who are favorably positioned with respect to these different categories of instruments of coercion are more powerful than others.

What this account leaves out is the range of "soft" power associated with framing and ideology. This is a different avenue of social influence. It is possible to impel individuals or groups towards certain kinds of actions by shaping their beliefs and cognitive-affective frameworks. Using the media to shift the terms of debate over a policy -- taxing the rich at higher rates or providing universal health insurance -- is a way of exerting power without coercion.

A few features of "power" emerge from these observations. First, power is a relational concept. An individual possesses power over other individuals (relation 1) and does so in virtue of the relations he bears to other persons and institutions (relation 2). Second, power is the activity side of structure: structures and sets of social relations constitute the environment within which individuals are empowered to exercise power over others. The structures perdure, and individuals act within their elements to exert their will over others. And third, power is distributed over many individuals and groups within society at a time. But it is fluid and subject to fluctuations as structures and individuals change. Dick Cheney was powerful at one point in time but not at other points. And what changed was not Cheney but the levers of power and social networks to which he had access.

This seems to imply that power is not itself a "thing" within a reasonable social ontology. It is rather a relational characteristic that exists at various social locations depending on the connections those locations have to the levers of influence over individuals and groups.

(We might speculate that there is an art to exercising power that means that not everyone is equally adept at the activity. Being well situated with respect to the levers of influence is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for being powerful.)

This account lines up well with some aspects of Steven Lukes' analysis of power in his classic book, Power: A Radical View (link). It also aligns well with Michael Mann's definition of social power in The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 and elsewhere: "My earlier work identified four primary 'sources of social power' in human societies: ideological, economic, military, and political" (Fascists, 5).

Power within organizations

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.

Slow institutional change

Institutions are interlocking sets of rules and practices that shape specific sets of actors to behave this way rather than that. The institutions governing public comment on newly proposed regulations provide an interesting case in point. Citizens have interests with respect to new policies, and the rules and formal processes define the means through which they are permitted to express their concerns formally as part of the process. The specific ways through which comments are solicited and processed make a difference for the quality and effectiveness of citizen feedback on public regulatory regimes.

There are several interesting questions that arise concerning institutions. First, how do they come about in the first place? Second, what processes and forces maintain institutions over time, so that they have a degree of stability? And third, what factors cause change in institutions,either gradually or dramatically?

Jack Knight and various collaborators have a basis for one kind of answer to both the second and the third questions. Their framework emphasizes the role that powerful actors exert in both sustaining and changing institutions. (Mahoney and Thelen note that historical institutionalists commonly take a perspective along these lines; kl 294). Rather than imagining that institutions somehow evolve so as to optimize the public good, they argue that we can understand many instances of institutional change as adaptations stimulated by the efforts of powerful actors influenced by the institution. (Charles Perrow's account of the evolution of land use near the Mississippi River is a case in point. Developers rather than farsighted legislators set the terms of the policies (The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (New in Paper); kl 5198.)

The causal issues boil down to two main directions of social causation: first, from a set of individual and social circumstances to the structure and functioning of a given institution. (For example, how did competition between landed interests and business interests influence the evolution of the House of Lords in the nineteenth century?) And second, from the specifics of the institution to patterns of individual behavior and to patterns of persistence and change in social arrangements exterior to the institution. (For example, how did the constitution and rules of functioning of the House of Lords influence the pace of social welfare policies in Great Britain?)

A very interesting recent contribution to this set of issues is a volume edited by James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. The collection offers a new framework for analyzing institutional change and includes stellar contributions by Tulia Falleti, Ato Kwamena Oomo, Alan Jacobs, Dan Slater, Adam Sheingate, and Peter Hall. The issues involved here are highly relevant to the ongoing thread of interest here concerning "meso" level causation. Mahoney and Thelen review the three main tributaries of institutionalism theory -- institutionalist sociology, rational choice institutionalism, and historical institutionalism -- and they argue that each approach leaves an important gap: what factors internal to institutions are relevant to their patterns of stability and change over time? This collection represents a group of researchers interested in exactly that family of questions.

Here are a few defining questions that guide the research summarized in the volume.

Exactly what properties of institutions permit change? How and why do the change-permitting properties of institutions allow (or drive) actors to carry out behaviors that foster the changes (and what are those behaviors)? How should we conceptualize these actors? What types of strategies flourish in which kinds of institutional environments? What features of the institutions themselves make them more or less vulnerable to particular kinds of strategies for change? (kl 208)

A particularly important part of the new framework is the idea that capacity for change is embedded within institutions. So the idea that institutional change results from exogenous shock is rejected.

We propose that the basic properties of institutions contain within them possibilities for change. What animates change is the power-distributional implications of institutions. (kl 414)

One key internal feature that this approach identifies as promoting change is ambiguity:

Compliance is inherently complicated by the fact that rules can never be precise enough to cover the complexities of all possible real-life situations. When new developments confound the rules, existing institutions may be changed to accommodate the new reality. These changes can involve rule creation, or they may simply entail creative extensions of existing rules to the new realities. (kl 379)

So what happens when institutions change? Mahoney and Thelen categorize gradual change into four types: displacement, layering, drift, and conversion (kl 444). And they argue that these categories are significant given the different roles that actors and strategies play in each of them. (This categorization seems to have something in common with the way geneticists and ecologists might characterize different modalities of adaptation within a changing environment.) They provide a 2x2 table that predicts the kind of adaptation that will occur, depending on combinations of strong/weak veto possibilities and low/high levels of discretion in interpretation of rules. For example, they assert that strong veto associated with high discretion produces drift rather than layering or conversion. They offer a similar analysis of different types of change agents, and attribute different kinds of strategies to the different categories of change agents.

How does this framework relate to the topics of "actor-centered" social science and "meso-level causation" that have been considered in earlier posts? The theoretical framework Mahoney and Thelen describe is clearly actor-centered. They are focused on identifying the ways in which different categories of actors are empowered to interact with various features of a set of institutional rules. This picture seems to correspond to the ascending and descending links of the macro-micro analysis proposed by Coleman's boat.

Institutions are just the sorts of social entities that I want to say are meso structures with causal properties. That said, the analysis provided by Mahoney and Thelen offers few examples of meso-meso causation. This isn't to say that their approach doesn't countenance such relations, but only that this isn't the focus of analysis in the current set of studies.

Technology change

The past century has witnessed an amazing amount of technology change, and the pace seems to be quickening. How does a technology develop, and how do social conditions and institutions interact with this process?

These aren't new questions, of course. There is a well developed field of the history of technology, with its own research traditions and assumptions (see the journal Technology and Culture, for example). There is a related field of research called "social construction of technology" (SCOT), which looks particularly intently at the second of these questions. (Here is a nice page by Robert Keel describing the central ideas of SCOT, through a consideration of Wiebe Bijker's important work. Bruno Latour's thinking falls into this category as well, including his "Actor-Network Theory"; link.) And there is even a field called the philosophy of technology, with Heidegger at one end and Carl Mitcham at the other. (Here is a nice article on philosophy of technology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) So lots of smart people are thinking about these questions.

But some of the big questions don't really require specialist knowledge to gain real insight through careful reflection. After all, we have our own phenomenological experiences -- especially useful during the thirty years in which information and communication technologies have exploded in impact and reach. And in this area there are also some useful insights from Karl Marx's view of history as well.

We could begin by postulating that technology is ...

the extension of human capacities through the application of scientific knowledge in the design and creation of material artifacts.

Bicycles extended the range and speed of human-powered transportation. Electric lights extended the ability of people to engage in work and leisure after natural light waned. Armored motorized vehicles extended the ability of states to wage war over large territories. Steel plows extended the ability of immigrant farmers to break the sod of the grasslands of the middle west.

But how do these developments in material culture come about?

The most basic thing we can say is that human beings have material needs, and they are compelled to use tools and artifacts to transform materials provided by nature to satisfy needs. The ensemble of tools, artifacts, practices, and technical knowledge available to a population at a time is its technology. Moreover, human beings are innovative problem solvers. So they are capable of inventing and designing new tools and techniques. This capacity is a primary source of technology change. This is the heart of Marx's insight in The German Ideology.

But technologies are also levers for power and wealth. Control over a technology -- or strong influence over the way in which the technology is developed -- can be a great source of power and wealth for specific groups. And so we need to look closely at the ways in which new technologies are being shaped in ways that serve specific social interests. This is much of what Marx was getting at when he focused on the forces and relations of production as being central to the historical development of a society.

Modern technologies generally require complex human systems in order for them to be broadly implemented. Thomas Hughes documents these complex systems in the case of electric power in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Research institutions, engineering firms, municipal governments, and power companies combine to develop and establish the power generation and distribution that basic advances in the understanding of electricity made possible. These institutions aren't guided by a benign optimizing intelligence that produces the optimal implementation for aiding human wellbeing. Rather, they are propelled by private interests, profitability, political competition, and government action. The market plays a role, the demands of the consuming public come in, and the political interests of decision makers and policy mavens are key as well. Technology doesn't direct its own path of development, and neither do the abstract best interests of humanity. (Does the growth of a slime mold colony fit the situation -- locally smart, globally stupid?)

Finally, detailed study of specific technologies -- railroads, steel, chemicals, genetic informatics -- demonstrates a very high degree of contingency in the sequencing of solutions to technical and organizational problems as the technology develops. And these contingencies have significant influence on the outcomes. So technology change is an instance of a path-dependent process.

All of this suggests several important keys for studying the history of various technologies. First, don't make the functionalist assumption that a technology will ultimately develop in a way that is most beneficial to human wellbeing. History is replete with great technical innovations that either quietly disappeared before they could benefit anyone, or were co-opted in ways that primarily benefited elites and power-holders. (The labor-saving water wheel in ancient Rome is a good example.) Second, look for the concrete interests that are at work as the institutional basis and technical solutions for a given technology are chosen. Hughes's discussion of electric power is fundamental. And third, always understand that technology change is a process that demonstrates great contingency and path dependency. So expecting to anticipate the outcome in advance is highly questionable.

These observations have some relevance to the question of trying to understand the technological revolution we are currently experiencing, the information revolution. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science?

If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies and behavior of all those affected by those institutions.

There is one clear sense in which politics and government contain "levels". This derives from the fact that governance systems have a hierarchical, semi-nested structure of ascending scope of control and authority. In the United States we have Federal laws, state laws, and county and municipal laws. And this differentiation also imposes a criterion of level: higher level means broader jurisdiction over territory and population. Each possesses a set of legislative institutions and officials, along with a bureaucracy focused on implementation and enforcement. These zones of governance authority differ in terms of scope and scale, with units of governance ranging from national to state to county and city.

However, these zones of political governance are not hierarchical in another important sense: the Federal level is not composed of the state or municipal governance systems. Rather, each is independent from the other. Higher-level units have the authority to enact rules and laws (in some instances) that constrain the actions of the lower-level jurisdictions. But the personnel, officials, and systems of the two jurisdictions are distinct and independent. And it is entirely possible, even predictable, that there will be policy disagreements between them.

A second clear interpretation of "levels" of governance corresponds to the formal hierarchy of a large administrative system. The President exercises authority at the highest level within the executive branch. Cabinet secretaries report to the president and manage and direct complex and extensive organizations (Departments) dedicated to specific functions: Justice, Environmental Protection, Education, ... Each department of the executive branch in turn consists of a descending proliferation of bureaus, regional offices, field offices, and the like. The Chicago field office of the XYZ department reports to a regional director, who takes direction from the Secretary. The layers of the organization of government can be referred to as "levels," differentiated by position within a hierarchical system.

It is also evident that the networks of power and influence that operate at the Federal level are distinct from those at the state or local level. The powerful individuals are different, the organizations through which they exercise their influence are different, and the sources of their power are different. The Daley machine in Chicago in the 1960s exercised great power in city politics, middling power in the corridors of Illinois government, and less influence at the Congressional level. So the different "levels" of government correspond to different loci of influence and activism, and the study of Congressional politics may lead to rather different findings from the study of state or municipal politics.

This means that scholars who are primarily interested in the political mechanisms through which various policies get chosen will select carefully the networks of individuals and organizations they study, in order to shed light on the operative level of governance. But it would be misleading to describe these as different "levels" of politics; rather, different people and organizations are at work in similar policy areas with uncoordinated results in Chicago, Cook County, Springfield, and Washington.

So the idea of "levels" of politics doesn't seem to be a particularly valuable conceptual scheme when it comes to analyzing political behavior and organization. It misleads us into thinking that politics has a fundamental structure from low to high. Instead, we are perhaps better served by a view that picks out various arenas of conflict over resources -- politics -- without the orienting language of higher and lower levels.

Wherever we start our examination of the social world, from the situation of particular individuals, to labor unions, firms, and faith organizations, to federal agencies and multinational trading regimes, the logic of the social world seems to be the same: there are groups of actors planning and acting in that locus, there are structures and rules that surround them, and there are organizations and structures that are broader in scope and jurisdiction and there are such at lesser levels of scope and jurisdiction. There is an up, down, and sideways everywhere in social action. And this is equally true in the zone of political action and institution.

Marx's critique

Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even more importantly, he was a critic of the society he observed around him. The key here is to uncover systemic features of a given society that are fundamentally inconsistent with important human values. His earliest social criticism took its aim at the German society he inhabited in the 1830s and 1840s. But it is his critique of modern capitalist society that is the most enduring, and this critique took shape through his observations of the society and economy of Great Britain in the 1850s and 1860s.

I think that Marx's critique of 19th-century capitalist society can be summarized in three words: exploitation, domination, and alienation. These are simple ideas, but they invoke large and somewhat separate theories. The first has to do with economic relations in capitalism, in which one group extracts wealth from the work of another group. The second has to do with political relations in which one group has the power to compel subordination on the part of another group. And the third has to do with consciousness and the social psychology of the members of capitalist society.

You might say that it is the work of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 to address the first set of questions. Capitalism depends on free labor and freedom of property; it depends on a system of free exchange; so how can exploitation take place? The exploitation inherent in slavery or feudalism is apparent in the formal legal and political relations of those regimes: slaves and serfs are compelled to transfer part of the product of their labor to the masters through a juridical regime enforcing inequality. But how does this work in the system of free exchange in capitalism? Marx's answer, briefly, is that the privilege of ownership of the means of production allows owners to set the wage at a level that permits the creation of a profit; this profit is a form of surplus value.

Marx's political writings, and his writings about power within capitalism, are less systematic. But in his writings about French politics and the revolution of 1848 he expresses some of his ideas about how domination works through a political system (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune). And in Capital he offers a vivid description of the social power wielded by the capitalist (link).

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

Marx's writings about alienation are among his earliest writings. The most systematic exposition occurs in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he describes the social consciousness associated with the "modern" factory system. The worker is separated from the product; he is separated from the process; and he is separated from his own essence, his creative capacity for invention and creative labor. Here are a few representative passages (link).

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[18]; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[19]
...
All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
...
Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Each of these theories highlights a different dimension of the social reality of modern society, in Marx's worldview. Each implies a positive theory of a good society; it is one that emphasizes a kind of human equality, and a positive view of society as an environment that enables the full development of each as a condition of the full development of all. So equality and the fullness of human flourishing are the underlying values.

Finally, there are systemic connections among the three areas. It takes power to sustain an exploitative system; so exploitation and domination are interlinked. A specific group of individuals are privileged by both systems; and Marx has a subtle view of the ways in which the propertied classes wield power through a group of power specialists. Alienation, finally, is a predictable consequence of the circumstances of life created by the social relations of exploitation and domination. There is the alienation of the worker; but there is also the alienation of the consumer and the voter, each carried along by a system of activity that frustrates real human engagement and satisfaction.

Does any of this seem relevant in the contemporary world? The inequalities we see in the current economy certainly suggests the idea of exploitation of someone; wealth is being created and a large proportion of it is flowing to a small privileged group. Power is visibly concentrated in contemporary society -- whether it comes to legislation, regulation, or the influence of the media. This implies a degree of domination on the part of a small segment of society -- a "ruling elite". And few would doubt that there seems to be a growing sense of value-less-ness in contemporary society -- a condition strikingly like what Marx described as alienation. So it certainly seems timely for all of us to sharpen our critical skills and help figure out what we need to do to create the foundations of a more just and more humanly satisfying social order.

This is a short posting about a large subject. Is it possible to argue that these few paragraphs capture the heart of the view? Could Marx have formulated his key ideas in a posting in the New York Herald Tribune? Essentially, I'd like to argue yes. Much of Marx's work takes the form of detailed discovery of the facts that make this case and an unconvincing effort to formulate a mathematical economic theory, the labor theory of value. But what is probably of the greatest value today are the dimensions of social criticism outlined here, not the economic theory.

Quiet politics

image: Conspiracy, Edward Biberman (cover illustration, Quiet Politics)

Pepper Culpepper's Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan sheds some very interesting light on one key question in contemporary western democracies: how do corporations and business organizations so often succeed in creating a legislative and regulatory environment that largely serves their interests?  And, for that matter, why do they sometimes fail spectacularly in doing so, even while spending oceans of money in the effort to influence public policy?

The book is a careful comparative study of the development of corporate governance laws and institutions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.  It offers special focus on the institutions governing hostile corporate takeovers (very different across the four examples), but also takes on other issues of current interest, including executive pay.  But though the cases and issues considered in the book are fairly esoteric and specialized, Culpepper's analysis is intended to provide a broadly useful tool for understanding how corporate influence is exercised in a democracy.

Culpepper wants to know what political and situational factors explain the divergent course that corporate governance has taken in these four contemporary democracies, from more permissive to more restrictive.  Do elected officials determine the broad outlines of the governance regime?  Are differences across states the result of differences in the platforms of large political parties in these states?  Or are the outcomes driven by something else?  Culpepper thinks that it is usually something else:

In this book, I argue that the outcomes observed in these four countries result not from variations in government partisanship or from different interest coalitions, but from differences in the political preferences of managerial organizations.  In all four countries, the rules favored by the managers of large firms are those that triumphed, often against substantial political opposition. (3)

Or in other words, the outcomes are those favored by the business elites rather than elected officials or mass-based political parties.  And differences in outcomes are explained by differences in the business environment in the four countries.  This is the "business power" part of the question, and Culpepper's fundamental empirical finding is that businesses elites generally have proven successful in creating the institutional and regulatory regimes in their polities that they prefer.  But how do they succeed?

Here Culpepper's central finding is encapsulated in the other half of his title: these corporate governance issues usually fall in the domain of what he refers to as "quiet politics."  Noisy politics arise around the issues that generate significant and sustained interest by large numbers of voters; these issues have "high salience" to the electorate, and parties and elected officials find it in their interest to adjust their positions around voter preferences on these salient issues.  Quiet politics arise in the context of issues with "low salience" -- issues to which the mass of voters are largely indifferent.  "The political salience of an issue refers to its importance to the average voter, relative to other political issues" (4).  In the context of "low salience" issues that matter to the interests of high-level business managers and elites, it is possible for these elites to deploy an arsenal of influential tools that succeed very well in bringing about the legislative and regulatory outcomes that the managerial elites prefer.  Most fundamental is an information asymmetry between managers and policy makers:

The managerial weapons of choice in quiet politics are a strong lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators and reporters toward managerial expertise.  The political competitors of managers, be they liberalizing politicians or crusading institutional investors, lack access to equivalent political armaments, so long as voters evince little sustained interest in and knowledge about an issue. (4)

Culpepper unpacks the political advantage residing with business elites and managers in terms of acknowledged expertise about the intricacies of corporate organization, an ability to frame the issues for policy makers and journalists, and ready access to rule-writing committees and task forces.  These factors give elite business managers positional advantage, from which they can exert a great deal of influence on how an issue is formulated when it comes into the forum of public policy formation.  Culpepper refers to British Cadbury Committee, tasked to develop "best practices" in corporate governance (9), as an important example of an occasion where high-level managers had a very powerful ability to write the rules that would govern their behavior.  Vice President Cheney's energy committee during the Bush administration is another great example (link).  Informal working groups, containing a significant representation of managerial elites, have an ability to set the agenda for a regulatory regime that allows them to privilege positions they prefer and to protect their organizations from worst-case outcomes.

As in the case of direct lobbying, the power of managers in this context is the power to set the terms of the debate in an environment that is established with an explicit eye to protecting their interests. (9)

Here is one of many detailed examples that Culpepper studies in the book: the Peters Committee in the Netherlands in 1997, tasked to "establish a voluntary code of best practice in corporate governance" (100).  He notes that the Peters Committee was very similar in structure to the Cadbury Committee.  It was chaired by a former CEO, and had representation from the VEUO (Dutch Association of Securities-Issuing Companies), pension funds, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.  Unions were not represented.  And, Culpepper reports, the forty recommendations of the Committee were essentially ignored by the Dutch corporate actors.

Scholars of corporate finance point to the Peters Committee as a textbook example of the failures of self-regulation of business without any legal enforcement.  Yet from the viewpoint of the managerial interests that dominated the committee, its results were consistent with their highest political priority: to defend protection mechanisms [against hostile takeovers]. (101)

In other words: from the point of view of Dutch corporate elites, the committee was not a failure, but rather a demonstration of their ability to shape the agenda and secure a near-term environment that enabled their freedom of action.

So essentially Culpepper's empirical-institutional argument is that top business managers (CEOs and their teams) have a very powerful set of tools on the basis of which they are able to influence legislation and regulation.  This tool set leads to an impressive win percentage when it comes to legislation and regulation affecting the business environment.

But he also finds that these tools are really only decisive in the context of "low salience" issues -- issues that have not engaged the voting public with any intensity.  When a hitherto boring and technical issue of corporate governance suddenly jumps into high salience -- for example, the conflicts of interest faced by accounting firms involved in the Enron debacle -- these weapons of quiet influence essentially lose their ability to shape the outcomes.

The more the public cares about an issue, the less managerial organizations will be able to exercise disproportionate influence over the rules governing that issue. (177)

Parties, political entrepreneurs, legislative committees, and elected officials become interested in the issue; it becomes worthwhile for business journalists to learn the technical details; and the public demands solutions that may be contrary to the preferences of the business elite.  And Culpepper works through one of these examples in detail as well: the public and public policy debates that have flared up concerning executive pay (chapter 6).

In addition to its substantive political-institutional findings, the book is interesting for its methodology.  Culpepper explicitly favors the "causal mechanism" approach to social research and investigation.  He treats cases comparatively; and he attempts to "process-trace" the paths through which outcomes came about.  He depends extensively on interviews with pivotal actors in some of the cases studied.  He does a very good job of aligning his analysis against its main competitors -- median voter theories and coalition politics analysis.  Finally, the book is explicitly comparativist; he want to understand in some detail the situations and factors that lead to different outcomes with respect to corporate governance, and the rules governing hostile takeovers, in the four countries he studies.  So the book does an admirable job of sketching out some of the microfoundations of corporate influence in existing democracies.  As such, it is a very useful contribution -- it helps to connect the dots (link).

Inequalities and the ascendant right

The playing field seems to keep tilting further against ordinary people in this country -- poor people, hourly workers, low-paid service workers, middle-class people with family incomes in the $60-80K range, uninsured people, ....  75% of American households have household incomes below $80,000; the national median was $44,389 in 2005.  Meanwhile the top one percent of Americans receive 17% of total after-tax income.  And the rationale offered by the right to justify these increasing inequalities keeps shifting over time: free enterprise ideology, trickle-down economics, divisive racial politics, and irrelevant social issues, for example.

Here is the trajectory of US income by quintile since 1965 (link); essentially no change in the bottom three quintiles over that 40-year period. Plainly the benefits of growth and productivity change in the national economy have benefited the top 40% of the population, and disproportionately have flowed to the top 5%.

Just consider what has happened to income to the "middle" class versus the top 1% in the US economy. The 40-60% segment of earners have declined from 16.5% to 14.1% of after-tax income, while the top 1% has more than doubled its share, to 17.1%.

And here's a very graphic demonstration of the rapid increase in the percent of income flowing to the top percent of US income earners since the Reagan revolution (thanks to benmuse):

Meanwhile, the power of extreme wealth in the country seems more or less unlimited and unchallenged.  Corporations can spend as much as they want to further candidates -- as "persons" with freedom of speech rights following Citizens' United v. Federal Election Commission (link). Billionaires like the Koch brothers fund the anti-labor agendas of conservative governors. Right-wing media empires dominate the airwaves. Well-financed conservative politicians use the language of "budget crisis" as a pretext for harshly reducing programs that benefit ordinary people (like Pell grants). Lobbyists for corporations and major economic interests can influence agencies and regulations in the interest of their clients, more or less invisibly.  And billionaire lightweights like Donald Trump continue to make ridiculous statements about President Obama's birth status.

The political voice of the right, and the economic elite they serve, has never been louder.  And it is becoming more reckless in its attacks on the rest of society.  Immigrants come in for repressive legislation in Arizona and other states.  Racist voices that would never have been tolerated a generation ago are edging towards mainstream acceptability on the right. Self-righteous attempts to reverse health care reform are being trumpeted -- threatening one of the few gains that poor and uninsured people have made in decades.  And the now-systematic attack on public sector unions is visibly aimed at silencing one of the very few powerful voices that stand in the political sphere on behalf of ordinary working people.

The big mystery is -- why do the majority of Americans accept this shifting equation without protest? And how can progressive political organizations and movements do a better job of communicating the basic social realities of our economy and our democracy to a mass audience?  Social justice isn't a "special interest" -- it is a commitment to the fundamental interests and dignity of the majority of Americans.

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.