Community Power Structures and Partisanship

Abstract

rent study, in a period of excellent business profits and full employment, in a period when social forces were more conducive to intergroup harmony than to inter-group conflict, prevailing business and labor lines were characterized by immediate and limited politico-economic interests. The organizational literature of business and labor for period under review shows that these interest groups were not engaged in an ideological conflict of durable consequences for longrange dynamics. Thus, research procedure was designed to discover presence or absence of immediate and limited class consciousness. Within this limited historical context, findings suggest that big business men were much more alert than unionists to advantages of a common politicoeconomic front. This disparity was primarily a function of differential out-group hostility. Readiness to stand in opposition may be typical of dominant groups in periods of relative quiescence. On other hand, class conscious persons in both groups seemed to be equally alert to advantages of common political action. To be sure, the numerical strength of business and industrial community ... is such that complete group solidarity at polls is of little significance. 31 But solidarity obviously would augment power of elite to manipulate political situation. It would provide, for example, additional opportunities to sell their program to general community. In contrast, if working consciousness were highly developed, numerical strength of that could have direct influence on political situation. One final remark concerns a problem which was not treated in this study but should be examined in future. Why were some unionists class conscious while others were not? An approach to this problem designed to measure diverse aspects of individual's class-related experiences might turn up an index of some predictive value.