Editorial

This issue of the Journal provides insight into power in all its dimensions and manifestations. The first article, by Ross Zucker, is framed within the first dimension of power. He asks himself the question that motivated Dahl: Who governs? (Dahl 1961). Then, we move to the third-dimension, through a careful examination of the contested nature of the cognitive frame of Social Corporate Responsibility, in a paper by Allison Marchillon. The contested nature of power in its third dimension raises the issue of agency, which is theorized relative to the work of Margaret Archer, by Gisli Vogler. On the theme of agency, powerlessness is not simply an externally imposed state that renders the subject passive. Rather, it reflects a self-reinforcing constitution of the cognitive and emotional social ontology of the social subject, which is theorized and empirically examined by Warren TenHouten. The constitution of agency has diachronic macro-effects, which are examined by Peter Triantafillou, through a comparison of the methods of genealogical method with Historical Institutionalism. Overall, this issue mirrors the fundamentals of theorizing power from individual agency, through systems, to the constitution of subjects, and the meaning of history.

The issue opens with Zucker’s reminder that analysing power in the first dimension is still a valid starting-point for researching the big empirical questions of normative democratic theory – who governs? Dahl perceived that answering this question is not simply a question of ascertaining whether or not power resources are equally distributed. It is possible for there to be resource inequality, thus elites, but as long as there is competition between these elites the outcome will be polyarchy. In Dahl’s model, democracy constitutes an ideal type, which is never perfectly realized, with polyarchy as one of the imperfect variants.

In the debates of the 1950s and early 1960s, the emphasis was upon critiquing Dahl’s by arguing that his focus upon the first dimension of power (measuring democracy in terms of overt decision-making) was too restricted. The protagonists of the power debates argued that Dahl did not take account of inbuilt structural bias (Bacharach and Baratz), the ability of elites to instil false consciousness (Lukes) and (if we add a fourth dimension of power) the constitution of social subjects (Foucault), which reinforces relations of domination.

In contrast to the multidimensional critiques, Gilens’ recent work (Gilens 2012) criticises polyarchy from within the one-dimensional perspective. The conclusion is that contemporary USA is a plutocracy, which does not qualify as a weak form of democracy. However, in this issue, Zucker challenges this by demonstrating that Gilens’ own figures suggest that the middle-class are significantly more politically prominent than is suggested by the analysis of the USA as a plutocracy. Interestingly, rather than interpreting this normative judgement as an either/or question (either a democracy or plutocracy), Zucker suggests that there exists yet another point on the democracy scale between polyarchy and plutocracy. This is unequalocracy, which is not as normatively desirable as polyarchy, but still not full plutocracy and, thus, somewhat democratic. Unequalocracy still retains elements of democracy but is not generally characterized by the competitive countervailing powers of polyarchy.

Zucker is careful to argue that he has only examined unequalocracy relative to the first dimension of power. He observes that it could still be the case that a three-dimensional analysis would yield different results from his hypothesis of unequalracy. As argued by Lukes, the third-dimension of power shapes the epistemic environment in which decisions are made. Corporations have significant overt one-dimensional power through lobbying but, as argued by Marchildon in the second article, they also have the covert capacity to frame the ways of thinking in public debate. Currently, in the framing of environmental discourse, Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a socially accepted way of dealing with ethical issues. CSR has gained this legitimacy through the tendency to overlook alternative frames. Viewing CSR as reflecting the natural order of things is a consequence of overlooking the social constructed and contested nature of CSR framing. Using the empirical example of bio-engineering as a test case, Marchildon shows that there are in fact six alternative ways of framing that are popular among the general public. Consequently, the representation of CRS as the natural order of things obscures a massive exclusion of alternative frames of analysis. Rather than one taken-for-granted way of framing environmental issues there are at the very least seven. However, the dominant one, which presents itself as the only player in the field, represents corporate interests.

The three-layer characterization of Foucault’s archaeological method (Renaissance, Classical and Modern) can mislead us into thinking that typical epistemic conflicts are tectonic conflicts between great systems of meaning. The strength of Marchildon’s paper is that it reminds us that there are continual conflicts concerning frames of meaning within epistemes. Meta-discourses, such as that of modernity or post-modernity, are made up of a seething mass of epistemic conflicts over the production of truth. Within this the position of the speaker is crucially important. Teams of scientists working at a corporate laboratory are more likely to have their knowledge validated as truth than those who do not have the organizational capacity, resources and access to political power that large organizations provide. This constitutes a direct reinforcing link between one-dimensional resources and three-dimensional power.

When Lukes (1974) developed the third dimension of power he did so within the Marxist tradition of false-consciousness, which suggests that the subalterns do not know what their real interests are (Lukes 1974). Such a theorization implies a lack of agency, bordering on passivity and ignorance. In contrast, Scott’s (1990) account of peasant and other subaltern resistance suggests that they are discursively conscious of the structures of domination that oppress them. Such subalterns often exhibited a split discursive consciousness, with a public discourse that is consistent with dominant ideology (suggesting absence of agency), which is coupled with a private discourse that is reflexive and critical of dominant ideology. Yet, because of its private nature, such reflexivity does not necessarily result in a challenge to the order of things.

In her discussion of reflexive agency, Vogler argues that Archer’s work, which has been conspicuous by its absence within the power debates, offers critical insights into the reflexivity across all four dimensions of power. Vogler opens by discussing the use of Bourdieu’s account of habitus as a conceptual tool to understand why social actors can internalize domination on a quasi-subconscious level. The habitus becomes a kind of second nature to them, which shapes their everyday praxis, in a manner that entails structural reproduction of social structures inimical to their own interests. However, this form of argument is open to the critique made of Lukes’ model, that it under-estimates actor’s everyday reflexivity. However, as shown by Scott, reflexivity itself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for challenging a system of domination. Archer argues that reflexivity can develop into a kind of modus vivendi acceptance of social relations, through patterned learning of socio-cultural context. In Archer’s model, there are four modes reflexivity, only one of which is destabilizing to social order, through social critique. For instance, what Archer calls an autonomous reflexive may be brilliant at problem solving within the existing order of things, thus not destabilizing to three-dimensional domination. In contrast, only the reflexivity of meta-reflexives has the potential to challenge the order of things.

When Gaventa undertook his study of subaltern mining communities, it was from a three dimensional perspective. However, he found many of these subalterns were significantly more reflexive than one might be expected from the premises of the three-dimensional model. Yet this subaltern reflexivity did not translate into resistant social action. In fact, often it translated into a kind of fatalism, consistent with Archer and Scott. These observations can be interpreted as foreshadowing Foucault’s four-dimensional account of power, whereby the subaltern is dominated through discipline and subject formation (Hayward 2000). However, the fit is not perfect, as the subalterns of Gaventa’s study were not made docile through panoptical measures of subject formation. Their fatalism was a cognitive emotional state that reflected the cognitive frames of powerlessness itself and, in so doing, re-constituted that state of being-in-the-world.

As was convincingly argued in the special issue of this Journal (JOPP 6.3), the emotions were, until recently relatively under-theorized in sociology and political science, which is an absence that is reflected in the power debates. In this regard TenHouten’s article represents a theoretically significant systematic account of the relationship between domination and powerlessness. TenHouten’s theoretical analysis analyses the dialectic between the cognitive aspects of powerlessness and their emotional consequences. The model is applied and tested on an extensive data set from Australia.

In TenHouten’s analysis, the emphasis is not upon the powerful deliberately shaping the dispositions of social subjects (panopticism), nor is there absence of reflexivity, as suggested by the concept of false consciousness (Lukes). Rather, echoing Archer and Scott, the reflexivity of the social actors feeds into the self-subjectification as subalterns. For instance, for all social actors, the shaping of their cognitive frame of anticipation and expectation is a consequence of a continual reflexive monitoring of everyday life. However, when reflexivity entails observing the lack of control of their external social environment this feeds into anticipation based upon a sense of external inevitability, which happens irrespective of the actions of self. This reflexive observation feeds into creating an emotional state of fatalism. Once fatalism becomes constitutive of a person’s emotional state, they will respond to the external environment in ways that reproduce their own powerlessness. If, for instance, by good luck or hard work they acquire a small amount of money, they do not see these power resources as the starting point for gaining control, through their actions, of the external social environment or their future. Rather, they will put this money toward some external agent who may, almost miraculously, deliver social change for the better. This includes either buying lottery tickets or giving the money to some religious organization that they believe to have the magical powers to deliver them from their condition of powerlessness. In short, they are not the type of capitalist subjects described by Weber in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1976). Rather, their emotional state gives them an ontological predisposition to waste opportunities that could, potentially, assist them to overcome their powerlessness. In short, TenHouten shows how fatalism, and several other emotional states, contributes to creation of acquiescent subordinate subjects.

The ontological-cum-emotional predispositions of agency have macro-systemic implications. After all, the inner anxiety experienced by Calvinists had, according to Weber, the effect of triggering one of the most historically significant historical changes ever experienced – the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In the last paper of this issue Triantafillou compares Historical Institutionalism (HI) to Genealogy. These are two approaches that have existed in relative academic isolation from each other, yet they have significant theoretical overlaps. Genealogy theorizes how the formation of social subjects is inextricably tied to relations of power, in both senses of the word – as power-to and power-over. Central to Foucault’s account of history is the panoptical revolution of the modern period, whereby agents become both subjects and objects of power/knowledge. This transition represents a discontinuity with the previous historical epochs, when humans (‘man’), as both subject and object of knowledge, were relatively absent. HI also emphasizes the relationship between social ontology and historical trajectory but the paradigm is different. Power is relatively absent, as is discontinuity, while the significance of patterns of human predispositions to knowledge formation are foregrounded. So, for instance, the human cognitive predisposition to expect repetition of cause and effect creates an underlying social ontology that feels emotionally secure in repeating past actions. On a macro-systemic level, this means that historical actors will gravitate toward patterns of path dependency. Thus, there is an inherent bias against innovation, and toward systemic stability. In his conclusion, Triantafillou suggest that a combination of the two approaches may give us an insight into the tension between social change and systemic stability. Observing the parallel between the cognitive states fatalism and path dependency, I would like to add, that this would be further enhanced by a diachronic use of TenHouten’s study of emotion. Given that path dependency is reflexive, yet conservative, Archer’s analysis of reflexivity would be another useful conceptual tool.

Mark Haugaard
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