New Directions in the Study of Elites: Part II. The Collectivity Structure of Community Influence (original) (raw)
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COMMUNITY OR COMMUNITIES? -- A DILEMMA FOR STUDIES OF COMMUNITY POWER
Social Thought and Research, 1967
The great majority of writings in the field of corr~unity power tend to use an undifferentiated concept of the cmmnunity, classifying together social units performing widely differing functions. This paper argues that in order for the field of community power to advance toward developing comparative propositions, it is necessary to formulate a more differentiated classification for communities. Approaches to this problem utilized in other areas besides crnnmunity power are reviewed, and an abstract typology for classifying communities according to their functions is presented. Indicators for measuring the various functions are suggested. The utility of the typology is demonstrated in several comparative propositions concerning community power. Twenty-six items on which it is suggested that future community power studies collect data are listed.
At a time when policy recommendations are increasingly relying on data generated by social scientists, it is incumbent upon political scientists and sociologists to make explicit the arbitrary element in choice of techniques adopted for analytical purposes. Grave consequences can obviously flow from social science data which conceal cleavages in our society or minimise the gap between those who wield power and those who are without the sociopolitical resources needed to participate effectively in community decision-making. The choice of what appears to be a methodological detail can influence the entire picture which one presents of community leadership. On the one hand, the leadership can appear remarkably democratic, especially when the distribution of socioeconomic variables among the leadership is juxtaposed with similar distributions among the national population at large, the State population and the community sample. The distributions, if not normal, appear comparatively similar to those applicable to the larger populations. On the other hand, given a different methodological choice, the same data can yield a radically different picture of community leadership. The wider, more egalitarian dispersion of political resources may be revealed as a misleading fallacy. The leadership emerges as an aristocracy which possesses disproportionate access to key political resources.