Power (Social sciences)

“Building Cosmopolitical Solidarity from the Antigone.” takes an in-depth look at
how the Antigone by Sophocles has been used by social movements and
social/politically concerned playwrights, theorists and activists as either a tool for
discursive and performative resistance, or as a way to reinforce status-quo state rule
since at least the Enlightenment to present day. I argue that Sophocles’ characters
Creon and Antigone are not ideal images for social movements who seek a
cosmopolitical democracy. Rather it is to Sophocles’ Chorus and the Watchman that we
must turn when proposing democratic cosmopolitanism. Thus, a new communication
approach is proposed: a choral dialogue driven by pragmatic logic and employing an
aesthetic, often comedic, improvisational experience. Further, this work strives to unite
theories from social science, social movement theory, rhetoric, philosophy and theatre.
Its aim is to offer practical tools for social movements who wish to gain international,
cosmopolitical, stature and to encourage a progressive democratic space. Core study
groups include the Project for a New American Century, Reverend Billy and the Church
of Stop Shopping, ACT-UP, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the validity of previous theories concerning women’s access to roles of power within hunter-gatherer societies. This study examines how accurately immanent social identity theory and bifurcated role circumstantiality predict women’s access to the role of healer (shaman) within California hunter-gatherer groups. A sample of 27 California hunter-gatherer groups was analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Notably, chi-square tests of independence evinced a correlation between men’s and women’s circumstantial labor and observed healer gender. Through the statistical verification of such engendered ideas, this study tests notions concerning the strict binary division of labor and posits that gender may have operated as a role-based identity marker rather than one structured around innate characteristics. This research ultimately provides a better analytical framework from which archaeologists can interpret the past through the use of ethnographic analogies that are more inclusive of gender-enriched methodologies.

This study uses Foucault's (1979, 1983, 1995) theoretical work as a guide in examining relation of power and resistance within the unique context of street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980). It explores relationships by asking how employees and managers are objectified within street level organizations, if there are any similarities in objectifications across organizations providing different government services, and how these objectifications intersect within relations of power and resistance. As an artifact of the relations of power between street-level bureaucrats and managers, ten purposively selected collectively bargained contract documents from public organizations in Florida are analyzed in this research. Ethnographic Content Analysis (Altheide, 1996) was used to study the collective bargaining agreements selected, with phrases from the documents serving as the unit of analysis. Using Foucault's (1979, 1983a, 1995) descriptions of techniques of power as a guide, four specific protocol matrices were developed, tested and then used to collect and code phrases as illustrative of one or more techniques of power. The results of the analysis are first summarized using displays and matrices. Then, rich illustrations from the data is are discussed in detail, using Foucault's categories of normalization, individualization, panopticism and pastoralism as a framework for presentation. Results of this research demonstrate that, in the collective bargaining agreements analyzed, both 'managers' and 'employees' are objectified in ways that were similar across all of the documents studied. Through techniques of power as theorized by Foucault, 'managers', 'employees', and 'union representatives' are produced, but also constrained as well. The collective bargaining agreements in this analysis serve to 'fix' relationships between these two objectifications that are discursively affirmed as unequal. Constrained by this 'reality', any potential for changing relationships between managers and employees through prescriptions that ask street-level bureaucrats to be 'leaders'; "responsible choice-makers" (Vinzant & Crothers, 1998, p. 154) rather than policy implementers simply carrying out management directives are largely futile. As persuasive as these ideas might be, within the context of this project it is impossible to think of employees in terms of 'leader', given the objectifications of 'employee' and 'manager' found in the documents analyzed.

This thesis applies Higgins (1997) Regulatory Focus Theory to the study of conflict by exploring the relationship between power and promotion vs. prevention orientation. After considering the earlier work of Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson (2003) that established the considerable effect that power has on approach and avoidance behaviors, the present research shows that this link also applies to regulatory focus. In this study, participants had their sense of power experimentally manipulated by a set of vignettes and then answered follow-up questions to determine what effect this had on their regulatory focus orientation. Results indicated that high power is associated with a promotion focus, while low power, a prevention focus. The implication of these findings were discussed and were integrated with the work of Cesario, Higgins & Scholer (2008) on regulatory fit and persuasion to create a novel strategy for conflict resolution.

With the cessation of cooperation between groups or individuals comes the threat that temporary competition transforms into destructive intractable conflict. To better understand how intractable conflicts develop, Liebovitch, Naudot, Vallacher, Nowak, Bui-Wrzosinksa, and Coleman (2008) recently developed a non-linear model of two-actor cooperation-competition incorporating interaction feedback and valence. This study tested their model's predictions by investigating attitude and valence change depending on whether a social exchange was cooperative or competitive. Participants experiencing an exchange that switched from cooperation to competition exhibited greater attitude change than participants in the control or the continuously competitive interaction condition and more valence change than the control or competition switching to cooperation condition. These results support the model's prediction that greater attitude and valence fluctuation manifests in interactions transitioning from cooperation to competition, providing the first verification of the model. These findings offer new insights into how human cooperation and competition evolve over time.

This project examines the role of political learning in predicting the recent rise of left-of-center governments in Latin America, ranging from moderate center-left coalition governments to one-party populist regimes. Studies of populism consistently point to the role of natural resources and economic crises in predicting the rise of populist regimes. This study adds the concept of political learning by using measures of moderation in the current regime as a dependent variable and measures of oppression in earlier regimes as independent variables. Utilizing case studies of Venezuela and Chile as ideal types and plotting ten further cases on indicators of repression, military spending, corporate tax rates, government spending, the percent of votes going to moderates, and economic freedom scores from Freedom House, I argue that the likelihood of the rise of populist regimes is greater in countries that have not experienced the sort of intense political repression that generates political learning.