Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice.

Abstract

Preface Like so many of its kind, this book was hatched in the classroom. More than ten years in the making, it grew out of a jointly taught seminar at Bryn Mawr College for undergraduate students in political science and economics. The result of many hours of discussion, research, and refinement of written drafts, the book is truly a joint product. To put it another way, although our individual contributions are still identifiable in the final version, everything in the book bears both our imprints. Our original interest in the subject matter is well suggested by the title of our course, The Problem of Power in Contemporary Society. Intrigued by the controversy between elitist and pluralist students of community power, typified respectively by Floyd Hunter and Robert A. Dahl, we focused initially on the limitations of each approach. Out of this came our first joint article, Two Faces of Power, reprinted almost unchanged as Chapter I of this book. The next step was definitional. Early we had been impressed with the many meanings assigned to power, meanings unstated as often as not. We also observed that the concepts of power, authority and influence were often used inter-changeably, leading to imprecision of analysis and, not seldom, confusion. The product of our musings along these lines was Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework, first published in 1963 and reprinted here in modified form in Chapter II and part of Chapter III. Neither of these articles attracted much attention at the time it first appeared. Within a few years, however, they caught on, attracting both devotees and severe critics. The latter, by and large, acknowledged the theoretical significance of the nondecision concept, which is our major innovation, but they directed strong (and still continuing) fire at the empirical worth of the notion. How, they asked, can anyone establish the existence of a non-event? The criticism, though anticipated and though inappropriately put (nondecisions are anything but non-events), was basically well taken and had to be met. As soon as possible after each of us had fulfilled independent commitments of other kinds, we rejoined forces for an empirical analysis of the relationship between the anti-poverty effort and the political process in Baltimore, Maryland. Our chief objectives were: to clarify the concept of nondecision-making, demonstrate its empirical utility, and analyze the diverse means of exercise and the impact of power and its correlates in relationship to political ideology and institutions in a community undergoing change. The city of Baltimore was admirably suited to our purposes. Throughout the period of our field research, long-submerged tensions rose to the surface, culminating in a major race riot which signaled the beginning of an overt political conflict between leaders of inner-city blacks and white political elites. ……