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By Sivad
#14945897
Meta-power

Meta-Power is a concept of having control not simply of individuals, but of the social structures themselves. The idea has stemmed from work by sociologists such as Tom R. Burns and Peter Hall, the economist Thomas Baumgartner, as well as by political scientists such as James Rosenau and Stephen D. Krasner. Its study often uses the language of game theory since at some level, having meta-power over a group of people means that one can control the form of the game, thereby controlling the outcome.

Power and social control are typically conceptualized and investigated in terms of interpersonal or intergroup relationships in which one actor tries to get another to do something, usually against the latter's will.[1] That is, power is on the level of interaction or relationships involving “situated contests between opposing actors”.[2] The object of power is more or less direct behavioral control. Such an approach to the study of power captures only a part of the power activities of groups, organizations, and states.

A large, and historically more important part involves attempts to structure or re-structure the social and cultural matrix within which power activities are played out; such structuring may involve the manipulation of institutional arrangements, norms, and values. A given institutional or socio-cultural structure may be viewed as the macroscopic resultant of the application of structural or meta-power to determine permissible or acceptable activities and relationships of individuals and groups to one another and to resources or forms of property.

Since the mid-1970s there emerged a substantial body of work on meta-power or relational and structural control, that is control over social relationships and social structure, the structuring of interaction situations and conditions, for instance the opportunity structures of the actors, their payoff structures and incentive systems, and their orientations, beliefs, and norms vis a vis one another.[3]

Although structural types of control have specific behavioral consequences and may be used as a means of behavioral control, the purpose of its exercise is generally the long-term structuring of institutional arrangements, key social processes and their outcomes: the individual and collective activities of those whose social relationships are structured. Structural control is used by social groups to ensure the effective functioning of a social system and/or to promote or stabilize their advantages or dominance over others. Among other things, it may be used to encourage cooperative social organization on the one hand, or to produce competition or conflict between actors on the other, and generally, to increase power in relation to others.

There are at least three bases of structural control with respect to such systems: control of action opportunities, control of differential payoffs or outcomes of interaction, and control of cultural orientations and ideology. That is, conditions of social action and interaction are structured with the result that certain social relationships and institutional arrangements are established and maintained.

In investigations of the exercise of meta-power, one is also interested in differences among actors in resources, skills, strategies, and so forth, but the main focus is on capacities to mobilize power resources to manipulate the matrix of rules or "the rules of the game," other conditions of interaction, and the distribution of resources as well as normative and ideological orientations. Meta-power entails the capacity to shape and set the limits of lower order power. Clearly, although an actor B may have social power within an interaction situation or "game" (e.g., greater ability than others to select a preferred outcome or to realize his will over the opposition of others within that social structural context (e.g., Dahl, Weber), he or she may or may not have power to structure social relationships, to alter the "type of game" the actors play, the rules and institutions and related conditions governing interactions or exchanges among the actors involved.


Basic Types

The operation of meta-power on a systemic level, for example, capitalism as a complex of meta-power, can be distinguished from that of particular agents, the bourgeoisie, for instance their positional structuring powers:[5]

Structural meta-power

Structural meta-power shapes and constrains the social conditions of social agents, their interactions, their opportunities, and limitations. For instance, institutions and institutional arrangements such as those of capitalism and the state entail organizational bias, that shapes opportunities, that provides careers, status, income, limited power over others as well as constrains certain activities and developments. Rules, procedures, and programs generate patterns of social activities, effects, and developments. Institutional selection may operate, for instance, to change the frequency of certain activity patterns or to alter the distribution of resources (concentration, and centralization, e.g. through ratchet effects), to determine the parameters of power, the forms and types of games actors play. A system like capitalism entails generative processes of meta-power (based on accumulative processes which provide the resource base (material, knowledge, social, political) combined with knowledge development to set in motion new economic and socio-technical developments. Major socio-technical systems, once established, operate as legislative bodies shaping and reshaping human conditions.

Agential meta-power

Agential meta-power is where some agents shape particular structural conditions and institutional arrangements for other actors: to establish a constitution; to carry out substantial reforms, to restructure an industry, to transform social relationships and interaction opportunities and potentialities. The state launches projects, protects workers vis-à-vis their employers, supports (or blocks) the development of nuclear power, and outlaws certain chemicals, and, in general, regulates societal interactions with the environment.

Among the processes and developments in which meta-power researchers are interested, some involve powerful agents, for instance capitalist leaders, using their positions of structural power to mobilize resources in order to develop new systems of production, new products, new institutional arrangements, for example in the shaping of economic globalization. The initiatives may also come from state agencies, for example, to establish an infrastructure (airport, highway system, water system, electricity networks) or a regulatory agency; or, the initiative may come from a dominant political leader or party with a mandate (possibly presumed) to reform or transform social conditions. One or more agents is involved in mobilizing power resources for the purposes of launching a project(s), program(s), and institutional innovations. Such projects may be anticipated – or are experienced – by other agents as having positive and/or negative impacts, or possibly mixed consequences along with negative. Opposition may emerge and try to block or modify the project(s). This is part of the dialectics of meta-power and social change, as analyzed and illustrated in a number of works of dating back to the mid-1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-power
By Sivad
#14946543
George William ("Bill") Domhoff, Ph.D. (born August 6, 1936) is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Psychology and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College.[1]

He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? and its six subsequent editions (1967 through 2014).


Domhoff's first book, Who Rules America? (1967), was a 1960s sociological best-seller[1], arguing that the United States is dominated by an elite ownership class, both politically and economically.[6] Who Rules was followed by a series of sociology and power structure books like C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968), Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1978), and three more best-sellers: The Higher Circles (1970), The Powers That Be (1979), and Who Rules America Now? (1983).[1]

Domhoff has written six updates to Who Rules America?; every edition has been used as a sociology textbook. In 2017, he contributed to Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America, a collection of essays and critiques.[7] He also has a "Who Rules America?" Web site, hosted by UCSC.




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