Power Structure Research Research Articles

Power Structure Research: An interview with G. William Domhoff, May 24, 2023

Power Structure Research: An interview with G. William Domhoff, May 24, 2023

Geopolitics and the ‘New’ State Capitalism

ABSTRACT We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across the world economy while generating a multiplicity of geopolitical tensions. This Forum reflects upon what it means, theoretically, methodologically, and politically, to articulate a geopolitics of contemporary state capitalism. It brings together interventions which draw on various theoretical approaches, including critical political geography, historical materialism, geographical political economy, and power structure research, in order to probe into the multiple spatialities at the core of contemporary state capitalism. The contributions aim to destabilise the assumptions and taken-for-granted ideas which have largely framed the debate thus far, including problematic binaries such as liberal/illiberal, state/market, commercial/geopolitical logics, and realist narratives of interstate power-maximising behaviour. Studying the (geo)political re-organisation of global capitalism requires moving beyond the castigation of a ‘rogue’ state capitalism as well as narratives of a clash between rival political-economic models, and disassembling the category state capitalism.

Class capacities and climate politics: Coal and conflict in the United States energy policy-planning network

This article employs a power structure research approach and exploratory network analysis to describe the differing stances on climate action that existed within the United States elite energy policy-planning network during efforts to generate climate legislation in 2009. These divisions are explored in relation to the structural location of the coal industry, other energy sectors, and environmental organizations within the network of director interlocks. My key findings are that coal interests are well integrated into the policy-planning network with major coal producers and reserve holders most connected to ultra-conservative business policy groups and industry associations committed to climate denial while a “coal coalition” of coal-related interests provide linkages to influential moderate conservative groups and industry associations taking a conciliatory stance on climate action. The largest oil and gas firms vary more than the coal industry in their affiliations. In general, policy groups that support climate action are on average significantly less central within the overall EPPN compared to those that do not. I discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the boundaries of United States and global climate policy formation.

The Knowledge-Shaping Process: Elite Mobilization and Environmental Policy

Both using and contributing to power structure research, this article presents evidence that corporate and military elites form networks and mobilize resources to influence the development of environmental policy. This influence may be achieved when elites form and utilize knowledge-shaping processes, which involve four principle exercises of power. First, elites suppress information that may threaten their interests. Second, elites organize and fund institutions to produce and promote research that may be useful in efforts to secure their goals. Third, elites fund experts willing to attack and discredit potentially damaging research. Finally, they attempt to exert influence in knowledge administration, or in selecting what information counts as knowledge and what does not. Archival evidence is used to construct a case study of a knowledge-shaping process created to influence the national policy debate over ammonium perchlorate, the primary constituent of solid rocket fuel and a widespread water contaminant in the USA.

Counterinsurgency and terror expertise: the integration of social scientists into the war effort

In this paper the authors draw upon the tradition of Power Structure Research to analyse the increased interpenetration of the military and the social sciences, particularly the recruitment of anthropologists and the adoption and adaptation of counterinsurgency strategies. It is argued that such actors should be understood not as disinterested ‘experts’ but as being organically embedded in a military–industrial–academic complex. The paper considers a number of contemporary examples as well as considering the historical roots of these trends. It is argued that this interpenetration violates the ethical norms of the academy and the moral and social responsibilities of intellectuals.

The Power Elite and Their Challengers

Drawing on findings in the literature on power structure research, this article argues that many of the biggest and most important nonprofit organizations are central components in the ongoing conflict between the corporate community and the power elite on the one side and the liberal—labor coalition and progressive social movements on the other. The article overviews five case studies to demonstrate the role of various types of nonprofits in specific policy conflicts.

C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science

“Power Reconsidered” was the theme of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2006. In a steady stream of analytically focused and empirically rich books and articles over the last 40 years, G. William Domhoff had made a unique and challenging contribution to the study of power and politics in the United States. In this commentary, based on a presentation at an APSA panel sponsored by the New Political Science section, Domhoff criticizes the narrow and misleading ways in which the concept of power has been used by pluralist, state autonomy, and historical institutionalism approaches in political science. Drawing on the path-breaking work of C. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter in the 1950s, Domhoff restates and develops his class and organizational interpretation of the American power structure. As a progressive and scholarly journal, New Political Science encourages authors to submit research articles that engage with the theoretical questions raised by Domhoff.

Boardroom Networks among Australian Company Directors, 1976 and 1996

This article examines the (interpersonal) network of boardroom contacts among the directors of Australia's largest companies in 1976 and 1996. Interlocking directors create an intercorporate network but also an interpersonal, contact network. The network reaches all directors serving on any board that has a connected interlocker/networker on it. The interpersonal network of 1996 is broader, more cohesive and more densely connected than that of 1976. However, there is only minimal change in the density of inter-corporate linkages over these two decades. These findings suggest that, by the late 1990s, internal social organization among the corporate elite in Australia is independent of the political economy of intercorporate relations and changing in directions suggested by Useem's study of `investor capital-ism' in the USA. Australian corporate power structure research needs to study the interaction of these trends with the pre-existing concentrations of corporate control in this country.

Networks of Elite Structure and Decision Making

Recent research on community power structures and national political elites increasingly incorporates social network concepts, principles, and methodologies. Analysts using this perspective seek to uncover the various mechanisms underlying the cleavages and coalitions among state managers, political parties, corporations, interest groups, social movements, mass publics, class segments, and other social formations. By combining reputational, positional, and decision-making measures, researchers delineate the networks of communication ties and resource exchanges, which shape collective actions that attempt to influence the outcomes of political controversies. This article critically reviews recent power structure research that applies network techniques to the analysis of elite structures and decision making. Specifically, the following topics are examined: the specification of political network content, the delineation of political elite system boundaries, the identification of key or core actors, the representation of network structures, elite actors' individual and collective participation in policy events, the determination of policy event outcomes, and future directions for elite research using network perspectives.

Power structure research in America and the promise of democracy

Reaganomics in theory and practice : its ups and downs. Reaganomics was based on the assumption that tax cats could spur individual initiative and promote economic growth, whereas increased military expenditures could enhance the US's world stature. In spite of its promise, Reaganomics finally engineered an economic recovery with huge budget deficits and high private consumption leading to record deficits of the balances of trade and payments.

Review: The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893-1921, by William H. Becker; Power Structure Research, by G. William Domhoff; and The American Corporate Network, 1904-1974, by Mark S. Mizruchi

Review: <i>The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893-1921</i>, by William H. Becker; <i>Power Structure Research</i>, by G. William Domhoff; and <i>The American Corporate Network, 1904-1974</i>, by Mark S. Mizruchi

Power Structure Research.

Brings together contributions by some of the leading young researchers in the field of power structure research -- the study of how the upper class is positioned within society. They describe the current state of the subfield, and what further lines of investigation are being pursued. Topics include the family office, the backing of ballot initiatives, businessmen in governmental advisory committees, and how businessmen work to influence local politics. 'For this anthology, Domhoff has assembled 10 original essays on the distribution and exercise of power...Most of the essays bring new research data to bear on these debates, which point to a relatively cohesive and pervasive capitalist class that attempts to dominate policy, decision making, and politics...are provocative and stimulate the ongoing debates in power structure research.' -- Journal of Political and Military Sociology

The Contributions of Organizational Sociology To Power Structure Research

The Contributions of Organizational Sociology To Power Structure Research

Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined, by G. William Domhoff

Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? is a classic pluralist study which has had an important influence on American social science since the early sixties. Who Really Rules? provides a categorical challenge--empirical, methodological, and theoretical--to Dahl's work. Empirically, Domhoff's restudy of New Haven shows through newly discovered documents that Dahl was wrong about the pluralism of New Haven's power structure. He also presents the most systematic statement of power structure methodology yet made, a statement that contradicts Dahl's methodological claims which have been the prevailing wisdom in American social science for over fifteen years. Finally, Domhoff outlines the national policy planning network through which the big business ruling class dominates urban government. Who Really Rules? is unique in that it makes possible for the first time a dialogue between pluralist and ruling-class views on the basis of studies of the same city by leading exponents of the rival theoretical positions. It is original in that it includes much data not revealed by Dahl. It presents the methodology of power structure research in the most comprehensive fashion yet attempted, and reveals a ruling-class network for urban policy planning that has never before been fully articulated.

Theories of the State and Power Structure Research

Theories of the State and Power Structure Research

Watergate international unlimited: Peter Dale Scott's ‘the war conspiracy’

ExtractPeter Dale Scott, Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, has pieced together a masterpiece of crime detection which may be considered a counterpart to I.F. Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War. His book, The War Conspiracy, significantly deepens and sharpens the methodology of “power structure research” and becomes in the end a major scholarly contribution to the study of contemporary U.S.-Southeast Asian foreign relations and the politics of revolution in the region. Scott's findings should decisively affect conventional academic treatment of this subject matter, even if his hypothesis of conspiracy ultimately proves flawed.

How to Study Community Power: The Pluralist Alternative

POLITICAL SCIENTISTS ARE BEGINNING TO VIEW certain major contributions to the study of community politics less favorably than one would have expected after hearing the fanfare surrounding the original acceptance of these works.1 Often billed as studies of "community power structure," these works have been produced mostly by sociologists, whose orientation has been to study the politics of American communities as a subsidiary aspect of social structure. "The political organization of Jonesville," writes one