robert dahl structural functional theory

In fact, Dahl's paper was also the first shot in the counterattack by him and his students against the concepts that Hunter and Mills were putting forward, which were rightly taken by Dahl as an in-your-face attack on the idea that there was as much power sharing and democracy in the United States as most political scientists claim. Dahl's (1957) 'The Concept of Power,' was concerned about far more than a 'dominant legalistic approach' that supposedly had 'obscured fundamental relations in society,' as the Call for the meetings piously stated. As so often, pluralists not only had the last word, they had the only word.īut Mills and Hunter should have been central to the whole discussion because the very paper that was the basis for the reconsideration, Robert A. One of the program organizers, Richard Vallely (2006), wrote a piece before the meetings for the Chronicle of Higher Education that said Mills and Hunter were 'legendary' sociologists who had triggered the power debate, but there was nary a word about their work at the meetings except during the presidential address and on the NPS panel for which an earlier version of this article was written. Not only was it a wonderful coincidence that political scientists were asked to reconsider how they have handled the concept of power on a major anniversary of Mills's book, it is a scandal that the book and the research field it helped create were not really a part of that reconsideration.

Organizations can be restructured and controlled by the rank-and-file through a variety of means when people organize themselves through a combination of unions, political parties, cooperatives, and other means. For them, power at the top is not inevitable.

Power structure researchers differ from Michels in that they believe in the promise of greater equality and participation. However, they do not resign themselves to this situation, as Robert Michels (1915/1958) did when he said that he who says organization says oligarchy. Power structure researchers start with and are wary of organizations because they see them as power bases for those at the top due to the information and material resources that leaders control, as supplemented by their ability to reshape organizational structures, hire and fire underlings, make alliances with other organizational leaders, and many other factors. This often means that the organizational theorists are trying to help control the workforces for the managers who hire them, or get more out of them ('efficiency'), which is just the opposite of the approach Hunter and Mills would advocate. On the other hand, Mills, Hunter, and the field of research they created do not see organizations in the neutral and benign way characteristic of most organizational theorists, whose primary focus since their field arose in the 1920s has been to help make organizations function more efficiently and smoothly. Mills, Hunter, and power structure research are relatively distinctive in that they see power as originally rooted in organizations, not in individuals, voluntary associations, interest groups, and parties, as mainstream political science does, nor in classes, as Marxists do, although they certainly agree that voluntary associations, interest groups, and classes can arise historically in some countries from their organizational base, as has been the case in industrialized capitalist societies. It is the 50 years of research findings from this new field that will be the main focus of this indictment of mainstream American political science for its failure to realize the fact that power is far more concentrated and class-based in the United States than any of its theories acknowledge.

Along with Floyd Hunter's Community Power Structure (1953), which challenged the discipline at the local level as much as Mill's book did at the national level, The Power Elite created the field of power structure research within sociology and political science. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956), a book that can be seen as a challenge to everything that political science has had to say about the structure and distribution of power in the United States before and since its publication. It was a wonderful coincidence that the meetings of the American Political Science Association for 2006 reconsidered the concept of power on the 50th anniversary of C. Wright Mills, Floyd Hunter, and 50 Years of Power Structure Research' on this Web site. NOTE: For a more extended version of the substantive content of this document, including a critique of structural Marxists - but without any critique of mainstream political science - see ' C.

Robert dahl structural functional theory