The Urban Political Community: Profiles in Town Politics.

Abstract

Until now much of the research on community power structures and processes has centered around the related problems of clarifying the concept of power itself and of developing reliable techniques for identifying who governs and how they do so. Since the classic work of the Lynds and the more recent efforts of Floyd Hunter our theoretical and methodological sophistication in this area has increased substantially. The time is now ripe to shift focus toward systematically exploring the consequences of certain types of power structures for the functioning of communities and their political and social institutions. It seems to me that this, at least in part, is what the authors of this series of eight community case studies are attempting to do as they examine the relationship between turnover and tenure for city managers and certain types of power processes and structures. For reasons to be dealt with shortly, this worthwhile project doesn't come off very well. The eight communities selected for case study have several things in common: all were in the state of Florida, all had some form of council-manager government, and all but one (despite the title of the book) had a population of less than 20,000 in 1960. We are told that they were selected because they represented one or the other extreme of turnover in city managers in all council-manager cities in the state. Apparently size and economic base also entered into the selection procedure in some fashion, though how or why is never made entirely clear. Consequently, we do not know what population, if any, the sample communities are supposed to represent. A number of ambitious, but unclear and conflicting, purposes are outlined for the study. We are told at one point that these are simply