Non-coercive power?

The most visible exercise of power involves the direct use of force or the threat of violence. Demonstrators are cleared from the streets by police with truncheons and water cannons. Storekeepers are compelled to pay protection money by the example of a few mysterious fires. But are there also instruments and tactics of power that do not ultimately depend on force?

Recall a familiar definition of power. A wields power over B if A can bring it about that B behaves in such-and-so a way against B's will, desire, or choice. There are several mechanisms we might consider that involve the imposition of another's will without recourse to the threat of violence.

Consider beach-front property owners who prefer that the public should not stroll on their bits of beach. If the property owners have the political clout needed to install "residents-only" gates on all the points of access, then they have succeeded in controlling the behavior of the strolling public -- without having to hire a private security company to threaten the public with violence if they trespass. They have used power and influence to block certain kinds of behavior. But of course the enforcement of law brings with it the threat of force -- so the private power identified here is actually effective only because it can leverage the coercive power of the state.

So here's another strategy the private group might consider: deception. They might suborn the publishers of the local maps, disguising the points of access to the beach. Public picnic-seekers set off for an afternoon at the beach, only to fall into confusion because of the misleading maps. The private property owners have used their power to alter behavior -- without the trouble of threat of force. (And it is in fact difficult to find some if the exclusive resort communities that have cropped up in the American west!)

And how about this: a well-financed program of disinformation designed to bring the public to believe that the beaches are unsafe, unhealthy, or uncool. The public loses its taste for beaches -- and the property owners once again get their way. No random strollers on the beach. They've exercised power non-violently, by shifting the beliefs and wants of the public. Here the media can be an instrument of power.

And we might imagine, finally, that the property owners exercise their will by "log-rolling" with the community groups who are interested in gaining access to the beachfront -- "our support for your issues X, Y, Z is contingent upon your dropping this issue. You may prevail on this issue, but then you'll lose on X, Y, and Z." The tradeoff is severe, and the property holders prevail.

We might refer to these strategies of power generically as "manipulating institutional outcomes," "manipulating knowledge and belief," and "manipulating preferences and desires."

Where does Marx's quip that "religion is the opiate of the people" come into this analysis? It's relevant in several ways. First, it has to do with preferences. If a religious system leads a group to favor its spiritual redemption over its material improvement, its behavior will change. But it is also relevant to something not yet mentioned: the strength of motivation an individual or groups have to bring about the changes they favor. Strategies that blunt the effective motivation of a group to carry out its purposes are themselves an important avenue of power. And this is suggested by the "opiate" part of the statement, suggesting as it does the image of torpor. So when religion functions as an opiate, it serves to reduce the motivation for action by the group; it is demobilizing.

These examples suggest that elites can effect their will through a variety of means that do not depend upon threat of violence, but that nonetheless work effectively to constrain the actions of other groups.

Non-coercive power?

The most visible exercise of power involves the direct use of force or the threat of violence. Demonstrators are cleared from the streets by police with truncheons and water cannons. Storekeepers are compelled to pay protection money by the example of a few mysterious fires. But are there also instruments and tactics of power that do not ultimately depend on force?

Recall a familiar definition of power. A wields power over B if A can bring it about that B behaves in such-and-so a way against B's will, desire, or choice. There are several mechanisms we might consider that involve the imposition of another's will without recourse to the threat of violence.

Consider beach-front property owners who prefer that the public should not stroll on their bits of beach. If the property owners have the political clout needed to install "residents-only" gates on all the points of access, then they have succeeded in controlling the behavior of the strolling public -- without having to hire a private security company to threaten the public with violence if they trespass. They have used power and influence to block certain kinds of behavior. But of course the enforcement of law brings with it the threat of force -- so the private power identified here is actually effective only because it can leverage the coercive power of the state.

So here's another strategy the private group might consider: deception. They might suborn the publishers of the local maps, disguising the points of access to the beach. Public picnic-seekers set off for an afternoon at the beach, only to fall into confusion because of the misleading maps. The private property owners have used their power to alter behavior -- without the trouble of threat of force. (And it is in fact difficult to find some if the exclusive resort communities that have cropped up in the American west!)

And how about this: a well-financed program of disinformation designed to bring the public to believe that the beaches are unsafe, unhealthy, or uncool. The public loses its taste for beaches -- and the property owners once again get their way. No random strollers on the beach. They've exercised power non-violently, by shifting the beliefs and wants of the public. Here the media can be an instrument of power.

And we might imagine, finally, that the property owners exercise their will by "log-rolling" with the community groups who are interested in gaining access to the beachfront -- "our support for your issues X, Y, Z is contingent upon your dropping this issue. You may prevail on this issue, but then you'll lose on X, Y, and Z." The tradeoff is severe, and the property holders prevail.

We might refer to these strategies of power generically as "manipulating institutional outcomes," "manipulating knowledge and belief," and "manipulating preferences and desires."

Where does Marx's quip that "religion is the opiate of the people" come into this analysis? It's relevant in several ways. First, it has to do with preferences. If a religious system leads a group to favor its spiritual redemption over its material improvement, its behavior will change. But it is also relevant to something not yet mentioned: the strength of motivation an individual or groups have to bring about the changes they favor. Strategies that blunt the effective motivation of a group to carry out its purposes are themselves an important avenue of power. And this is suggested by the "opiate" part of the statement, suggesting as it does the image of torpor. So when religion functions as an opiate, it serves to reduce the motivation for action by the group; it is demobilizing.

These examples suggest that elites can effect their will through a variety of means that do not depend upon threat of violence, but that nonetheless work effectively to constrain the actions of other groups.

Non-coercive power?

The most visible exercise of power involves the direct use of force or the threat of violence. Demonstrators are cleared from the streets by police with truncheons and water cannons. Storekeepers are compelled to pay protection money by the example of a few mysterious fires. But are there also instruments and tactics of power that do not ultimately depend on force?

Recall a familiar definition of power. A wields power over B if A can bring it about that B behaves in such-and-so a way against B's will, desire, or choice. There are several mechanisms we might consider that involve the imposition of another's will without recourse to the threat of violence.

Consider beach-front property owners who prefer that the public should not stroll on their bits of beach. If the property owners have the political clout needed to install "residents-only" gates on all the points of access, then they have succeeded in controlling the behavior of the strolling public -- without having to hire a private security company to threaten the public with violence if they trespass. They have used power and influence to block certain kinds of behavior. But of course the enforcement of law brings with it the threat of force -- so the private power identified here is actually effective only because it can leverage the coercive power of the state.

So here's another strategy the private group might consider: deception. They might suborn the publishers of the local maps, disguising the points of access to the beach. Public picnic-seekers set off for an afternoon at the beach, only to fall into confusion because of the misleading maps. The private property owners have used their power to alter behavior -- without the trouble of threat of force. (And it is in fact difficult to find some if the exclusive resort communities that have cropped up in the American west!)

And how about this: a well-financed program of disinformation designed to bring the public to believe that the beaches are unsafe, unhealthy, or uncool. The public loses its taste for beaches -- and the property owners once again get their way. No random strollers on the beach. They've exercised power non-violently, by shifting the beliefs and wants of the public. Here the media can be an instrument of power.

And we might imagine, finally, that the property owners exercise their will by "log-rolling" with the community groups who are interested in gaining access to the beachfront -- "our support for your issues X, Y, Z is contingent upon your dropping this issue. You may prevail on this issue, but then you'll lose on X, Y, and Z." The tradeoff is severe, and the property holders prevail.

We might refer to these strategies of power generically as "manipulating institutional outcomes," "manipulating knowledge and belief," and "manipulating preferences and desires."

Where does Marx's quip that "religion is the opiate of the people" come into this analysis? It's relevant in several ways. First, it has to do with preferences. If a religious system leads a group to favor its spiritual redemption over its material improvement, its behavior will change. But it is also relevant to something not yet mentioned: the strength of motivation an individual or groups have to bring about the changes they favor. Strategies that blunt the effective motivation of a group to carry out its purposes are themselves an important avenue of power. And this is suggested by the "opiate" part of the statement, suggesting as it does the image of torpor. So when religion functions as an opiate, it serves to reduce the motivation for action by the group; it is demobilizing.

These examples suggest that elites can effect their will through a variety of means that do not depend upon threat of violence, but that nonetheless work effectively to constrain the actions of other groups.

Innovation in social research

The social sciences are charged to arrive at a good empirical understanding of the social world around us. They are charged to provide hypotheses and theories on the basis of which to explain the outcomes and patterns they discover. And they are charged to help design policies and interventions that will contribute to durable solutions to important social problems.

This is a big agenda, and it will only be achieved, I believe, if the next several decades witness a substantial burst of creative new thinking in all the social sciences. The disciplines, the inter-disciplines, and the social science institutions need to stimulate a lot of innovative thinking, if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the social world and a better ability to solve social problems.

Why should we think this is true? What makes us think that the current theories and research methodologies are not sufficient? And what kinds of innovation should we be aiming at?

The need for innovation results from several points. First is the tendency of the social science disciplines to give excessive primacy to a few methodologies and theories as the preferred wisdom. Quantitative methods, survey methodology, rational choice theory, and formal modeling techniques have defined "cutting-edge" social science research for several decades in several disciplines. When we take full measure of their specific limitations, these are perfectly useful components of social science research. But we should never imagine that they suffice for every research problem. The problems confronting the social sciences need a broader palette, a larger tool box.

Second, social phenomena almost always involve a mix of processes and behaviors that fall within the boundaries of distinct disciplines. This means that the hypotheses and theories of a single discipline will not capture the dynamics of the given body of phenomena. This in turn means that it is essential for social scientists to approach research problems with an interdisciplinary spirit; they need to welcome a somewhat eclectic mix of approaches.

Third, there is a need for some new thinking about causal processes and the reasoning we use to investigate causation in the social realm. The turn to causal mechanisms is an important step in this direction, but more new thinking is needed as well.

Fourth, it is important to find better ways of incorporating the study of agency and concrete individual behavior into social science theories. The cultural turn and the willingness to attempt to make use of some of the tools of ethnography and social psychology within structural and quantitative approaches is a good start, and we need to go further.

Fifth, we need some new ideas about how separate social processes aggregate and interact. The basic idea of a social agglomeration as a composition of lesser processes seems very compelling; so a better set of tools for modeling and analyzing these compositional processes is needed.

Much of this has to do with a particular kind of innovation: finding ways of borrowing across disciplines to permit the construction of analyses that are more sufficient. But there is also a need for a more fundamental form of innovation as well, at the level of the concepts and theories we use to characterize the social world. Could we arrive at a new concept of social identity that captures more of the fluidity and variability of the ways social identities actually work in a complex social world? Could our concept of social class be replaced by a different construct that was more friendly to the many strands that are involved in the phenomena of social class? Could we arrive at a better conceptual scheme for analyzing the institutions of government power and the exercise of state power?

Here is a short list of innovative social theorists whom I would recognize in the past several decades: Albert Hirschman, Ben Anderson, James Scott, Charles Sabel, Seyla Ben-Habib, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Schelling, Edward Said, Charles Tilly, Pierre Bourdieu, G. William Skinner, Elizabeth Perry, Robert Bates, Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Brenner, Mark Elvin. Each brought forward some genuinely novel ideas that shed new light on some aspect of the social world. And in many instances those ideas have demonstrated their staying-power. And, with almost no exceptions, none of these thinkers is narrowly defined by a single discipline.

Innovation in social research

The social sciences are charged to arrive at a good empirical understanding of the social world around us. They are charged to provide hypotheses and theories on the basis of which to explain the outcomes and patterns they discover. And they are charged to help design policies and interventions that will contribute to durable solutions to important social problems.

This is a big agenda, and it will only be achieved, I believe, if the next several decades witness a substantial burst of creative new thinking in all the social sciences. The disciplines, the inter-disciplines, and the social science institutions need to stimulate a lot of innovative thinking, if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the social world and a better ability to solve social problems.

Why should we think this is true? What makes us think that the current theories and research methodologies are not sufficient? And what kinds of innovation should we be aiming at?

The need for innovation results from several points. First is the tendency of the social science disciplines to give excessive primacy to a few methodologies and theories as the preferred wisdom. Quantitative methods, survey methodology, rational choice theory, and formal modeling techniques have defined "cutting-edge" social science research for several decades in several disciplines. When we take full measure of their specific limitations, these are perfectly useful components of social science research. But we should never imagine that they suffice for every research problem. The problems confronting the social sciences need a broader palette, a larger tool box.

Second, social phenomena almost always involve a mix of processes and behaviors that fall within the boundaries of distinct disciplines. This means that the hypotheses and theories of a single discipline will not capture the dynamics of the given body of phenomena. This in turn means that it is essential for social scientists to approach research problems with an interdisciplinary spirit; they need to welcome a somewhat eclectic mix of approaches.

Third, there is a need for some new thinking about causal processes and the reasoning we use to investigate causation in the social realm. The turn to causal mechanisms is an important step in this direction, but more new thinking is needed as well.

Fourth, it is important to find better ways of incorporating the study of agency and concrete individual behavior into social science theories. The cultural turn and the willingness to attempt to make use of some of the tools of ethnography and social psychology within structural and quantitative approaches is a good start, and we need to go further.

Fifth, we need some new ideas about how separate social processes aggregate and interact. The basic idea of a social agglomeration as a composition of lesser processes seems very compelling; so a better set of tools for modeling and analyzing these compositional processes is needed.

Much of this has to do with a particular kind of innovation: finding ways of borrowing across disciplines to permit the construction of analyses that are more sufficient. But there is also a need for a more fundamental form of innovation as well, at the level of the concepts and theories we use to characterize the social world. Could we arrive at a new concept of social identity that captures more of the fluidity and variability of the ways social identities actually work in a complex social world? Could our concept of social class be replaced by a different construct that was more friendly to the many strands that are involved in the phenomena of social class? Could we arrive at a better conceptual scheme for analyzing the institutions of government power and the exercise of state power?

Here is a short list of innovative social theorists whom I would recognize in the past several decades: Albert Hirschman, Ben Anderson, James Scott, Charles Sabel, Seyla Ben-Habib, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Schelling, Edward Said, Charles Tilly, Pierre Bourdieu, G. William Skinner, Elizabeth Perry, Robert Bates, Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Brenner, Mark Elvin. Each brought forward some genuinely novel ideas that shed new light on some aspect of the social world. And in many instances those ideas have demonstrated their staying-power. And, with almost no exceptions, none of these thinkers is narrowly defined by a single discipline.

Innovation in social research

The social sciences are charged to arrive at a good empirical understanding of the social world around us. They are charged to provide hypotheses and theories on the basis of which to explain the outcomes and patterns they discover. And they are charged to help design policies and interventions that will contribute to durable solutions to important social problems.

This is a big agenda, and it will only be achieved, I believe, if the next several decades witness a substantial burst of creative new thinking in all the social sciences. The disciplines, the inter-disciplines, and the social science institutions need to stimulate a lot of innovative thinking, if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the social world and a better ability to solve social problems.

Why should we think this is true? What makes us think that the current theories and research methodologies are not sufficient? And what kinds of innovation should we be aiming at?

The need for innovation results from several points. First is the tendency of the social science disciplines to give excessive primacy to a few methodologies and theories as the preferred wisdom. Quantitative methods, survey methodology, rational choice theory, and formal modeling techniques have defined "cutting-edge" social science research for several decades in several disciplines. When we take full measure of their specific limitations, these are perfectly useful components of social science research. But we should never imagine that they suffice for every research problem. The problems confronting the social sciences need a broader palette, a larger tool box.

Second, social phenomena almost always involve a mix of processes and behaviors that fall within the boundaries of distinct disciplines. This means that the hypotheses and theories of a single discipline will not capture the dynamics of the given body of phenomena. This in turn means that it is essential for social scientists to approach research problems with an interdisciplinary spirit; they need to welcome a somewhat eclectic mix of approaches.

Third, there is a need for some new thinking about causal processes and the reasoning we use to investigate causation in the social realm. The turn to causal mechanisms is an important step in this direction, but more new thinking is needed as well.

Fourth, it is important to find better ways of incorporating the study of agency and concrete individual behavior into social science theories. The cultural turn and the willingness to attempt to make use of some of the tools of ethnography and social psychology within structural and quantitative approaches is a good start, and we need to go further.

Fifth, we need some new ideas about how separate social processes aggregate and interact. The basic idea of a social agglomeration as a composition of lesser processes seems very compelling; so a better set of tools for modeling and analyzing these compositional processes is needed.

Much of this has to do with a particular kind of innovation: finding ways of borrowing across disciplines to permit the construction of analyses that are more sufficient. But there is also a need for a more fundamental form of innovation as well, at the level of the concepts and theories we use to characterize the social world. Could we arrive at a new concept of social identity that captures more of the fluidity and variability of the ways social identities actually work in a complex social world? Could our concept of social class be replaced by a different construct that was more friendly to the many strands that are involved in the phenomena of social class? Could we arrive at a better conceptual scheme for analyzing the institutions of government power and the exercise of state power?

Here is a short list of innovative social theorists whom I would recognize in the past several decades: Albert Hirschman, Ben Anderson, James Scott, Charles Sabel, Seyla Ben-Habib, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Schelling, Edward Said, Charles Tilly, Pierre Bourdieu, G. William Skinner, Elizabeth Perry, Robert Bates, Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Brenner, Mark Elvin. Each brought forward some genuinely novel ideas that shed new light on some aspect of the social world. And in many instances those ideas have demonstrated their staying-power. And, with almost no exceptions, none of these thinkers is narrowly defined by a single discipline.

What is social scientific knowledge?

The social and behavioral sciences endeavor to describe, explain, and interpret the range of the social and behavioral facts that surround us. To refer to this body of findings as “science” is to claim a set of epistemic values about the nature of the methods of inquiry and evaluation that are used to arrive at and assess the conclusions offered about this domain. The label “science” brings with it a set of presuppositions about rigor, evidence, generalizability, logical analysis, objectivity, cumulativeness, and the likelihood that the assertions that are made are true.

Consider a few assumptions that are often made about scientific knowledge—some valid and some not. Science is based on a set of rationally justified methods of inquiry and testing. Scientific knowledge progresses, in scope, in detail of understanding, and in reliability. Science is performed by specialists, working within equally exacting communities of peers and competitors and subject to a demanding set of standards of evaluation—peer-reviewed journals, university review processes, national laboratories, and international associations and conferences. The result of these processes of testing and evaluation, we expect, is an expanding body of hypotheses, experimental findings, observations, theories, and explanations that have substantial credibility—and substantially higher credibility than the writings of casual observers of a given range of phenomena. We come to know the nature of the world better through the institutions and methods of science.

In addition to these reasonably valid assumptions about scientific knowledge, there is another group of more questionable ideas that derive from assumptions drawn from the natural sciences. Science permits generalizations; it permits us to systematize otherwise apparently separate domains of phenomena (planetary motion, the tides; rational choice theory, behavior of the family) and to demonstrate that apparently heterogeneous sets of phenomena are in fact governed by the same general laws. Science permits predictions; if the fundamentals are thus-and-so, then the compounds will behave thusly. Science aims at unification: the discovery of unitary systems of forces and entities whose aggregate properties represent the whole of nature.

Notice that these latter expectations are derived from the successes and specific characteristics of certain of the natural sciences. And this marks the first of many opportunities for error in the philosophy of social science. There is no reason to expect that the social domain possesses the underlying nature and orderliness that would make it possible to achieve some of these characteristics (in particular, uniformity, generalizability, unification, simplicity). Consider some other areas of possible empirical research—for example, animal behavior. We should not expect there to be comprehensive theories of animal behavior. Instead, we should expect many threads of research, corresponding to many dimensions of animal behavior: cognition, memory, instinct, social behaviors, migratory behavior. And these many strands of research would reach out to different kinds of causal backgrounds: evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, intra-group learning. Likewise with the domain of social behavior. There is no single unified “theory of human motivation”—whether rational choice theory, social psychology, or any other unified theory. And this is so, because there is no unified reality of motivation and action; rather, there is a heterogeneous range of motives, errors, impulses, commitments, and habits that together constitute “dispositions to behave.”

What underwrites the claim of truthfulness for scientific knowledge? What gives us a rational basis for believing that the results of the socially constructed activities of science lead to true hypotheses about the nature and workings of the phenomena that scientific inquiry considers? There is, first, the basic argument of empiricism: we can observe some features of the world and establish certain statements as being probable. And we can use a collection of tools of inference to establish credibility of other non-observational statements (deductive and inductive logic, statistics, the experimental method, causal modeling).

This simple empiricist epistemology underwrites the strongest claims for veridicality and justification for the social sciences. The discovery of empirical facts about the social world is possible but challenging; this is what much of social science methodology attempts to under-gird. And hypotheses about the causal relationships that exist among social entities and processes can be tested using a variety of methods of inference that themselves possess strong epistemic justification. We have learned from the writings of philosophers of science since the 1960s to emphasize corrigibility and anti-foundationalism in our interpretation of scientific knowledge; but a coherentist epistemology and a perspective of causal realism provides a philosophically powerful grounding for social science knowledge. (See articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on coherence epistemology and scientific realism by Kvanvig and Boyd).

In addition, in some areas of the natural sciences, there is the fact that cumulative scientific research leads to the invention of technologies that work as they were designed to do: new materials are invented in the electronics industry, new designs are created for large structures (buildings, aircraft, electron microscopes), and these materials and artifacts perform as expected on the basis of the underlying theories. So scientific theories of materials, structures, and natural systems are supported by the effectiveness of the technologies that they give rise to. If the theories and hypotheses were fundamentally untrue about the parts of the natural world that they describe, then we would expect the technologies to fail; the technologies do not fail; so we have some additional reason to believe the scientific theories that underlay these technologies. (This is a version of Richard Boyd’s argument of methodological realism.)

Is there anything analogous to the relationship between the natural sciences and technology, for the social and behavioral sciences? On the whole, there is not. Social predictions are notoriously unreliable; public policies based on social-science theory commonly give rise to unanticipated consequences; and the twists and turns of deliberate social processes (war, alliance, efforts to address global warming) continue to surprise us. This unpredictability in the social world derives from the nature of social action. Human behavior and social processes are plainly subject to an open-ended range of causes, motives, and influences. The construction of various areas of science with the goal of understanding and explaining this multiplicity is therefore a profoundly challenging task.

Here, then, is a very elliptical description of a plausible interpretation of social science epistemology: There are empirical foundations for knowledge in the form of social observation (empiricism); there are social causes that influence social behavior, processes, and outcomes (causal realism); there is no a priori reason to expect strong generalizations across social phenomena, “regulating” the social world; and there is no reason to expect unified master theories of social phenomena, suggesting instead a preference for theories of the middle range.