Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

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MANAGERIALISM

We have begun, in a word, to encounter the vocabulary of power while thinking in terms of a property frame.

Adolf Berle

FROM PROPERTY TO POWER?

Presumably, I need not further insist that the power theme is written all over the face of contemporary sociology; many sociologists take it for granted as the stuff out of which all things social are made. It has been central to the conflict paradigm of, for example, Mills, Rex, and Dahrendorf, that long-standing alternative to normative functionalism which, in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, managed to reshuttle the basic themes of domination theory back into the sociological mainstream. It has been equally constitutive for the exchange theory of Emerson and Blau, for Bell’s, Aron’s, and Touraine’s proposals about the ‘post-industrial’ society, for the actionism of Giddens and Lukes, for the neo-Weberian ‘closure’ paradigm of Parkin and Murphy, for Luhmann’s systems theory, for the historical sociology of Elias and Mann, for Foucault’s and Donzelot’s analyses of the ‘disciplinary’ society, and more recently, for the Beck/Giddens paradigm of ‘reflexive modernization’ in late modern ‘risk societies’. Without putting too fine a point upon it, Foucault’s catholic conception of disciplinary power may well represent something like a journey’s end for sociology; it in a sense completes the secular process of generalization which has slowly transfigured the political sociology pioneered by Mosca, Pareto, Comte, and Tocqueville into the general theory of societal power advanced by their modern descendants. To some extent, Foucault also reconciles the Durkheimian or consensualist and the Weberian or conflictual strands in the theory of power.1

It is often assumed, in this context, that the ‘crisis’ which ravaged sociology during the 1960s and early 1970s resulted in a broad pendulum swing from a ‘Durkheimian’ emphasis on value consensus and integration towards a supposedly more realistic ‘Weberian’ analytic of conflict and power. But the

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truth in this is only partial, and remains so if the broader historical backdrop of the power-property dualism is ignored. As Giddens has demonstrated, one of the pervasive myths of the sociological trade was precisely this ‘myth of the schism’ between consensus and conflict theory, which in his view was sterile and artificial, and did little to clarify the issues separating academic sociology (and its theory of industrial society) from Marxism (and its theory of capitalist society) (1977:208ff.). Parsons’ well-known polemic with Mills, for example, departed from a functionalist theory of power-as-authority which closely approached the Durkheimian one; by redefining power as ‘a facility for the achievement of collective goals’, Parsons did not so much avoid issues of power but instead resolved them in a particular direction (Parsons 1967; 1968; Giddens 1977:333ff.). The intra-sociological dispute, from this aspect, did not so much concern the relative theoretical weight of consensus vs. power, but was rather conducted in terms of consensualist vs. conflictual theories of ‘knowledgeable organization’. While in the former, legitimacy entered into the very definition of power (‘power-to’), and social organization was immediately specified as ‘value community’, the latter chose to identify normative conflict, forced consensus, and domination (‘power-over’) as the main structuring principles of the social order. Much of the apparent landslide of the 1970s therefore involved an intra-sociological resettlement of these two major strands.

To adopt the larger perspective of a cross-cutting fault line between the sociological tradition (both consensualist and conflictual) and the tradition of Marxist theorizing is was once again to mark the unique positional centrality and the curious dialectical mirror-play of their two key concepts of power and property. In both traditions, centrality was paired to paucity of definition, so that both concepts gravitated towards something like the ‘raw material’ of social life, the ‘stuff’ of social inequality, or the ‘vertical axis’ of social structure. In addition, both concepts tended to include and subordinate one another, following a pattern of ontological prioritizing which implied contrary and competing definitional expansions and contractions. Pioneer sociologists such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, and Weber considered power or social authority as larger in scope and causally ‘deeper’ than property, while the concept of property itself was often whittled down to become equal to ‘income’ or ‘wealth’. Thus transformed into a residual category, it bore but little resemblance to ‘heavy’ property in the Marxist sense, which was normally taken to include decisional or control rights over the major means of production.2

In the modern sociology of stratification, the gradual turn away from the logic of property towards the logic of power marked a virtually uncontested theoretical baseline. Many theorists followed the path broken by Weber, Mannheim, and Geiger, who all observed a long-term shift from property to power as the dominant axis of social stratification in Western societies (cf. Geiger 1949). C.Wright Mills, in his seminal analysis of the rising new middle class, similarly proposed that

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negatively, the transformation of the middle class is a shift from property to no-property; positively, it is a shift from property to a new axis of stratification, occupation…. In modern society, occupations are specific functions within a social division of labour, as well as skills sold for income on a labour market.

This new occupational hierarchy, in his view, simultaneously constituted an unequal division of power or effective control over the means of production (Mills 1951:65). The social structure of capitalism, he argued, had changed to such an extent as to require a new statement of the causal weight of economic institutions and of their causal relationships with other institutions; it was politics or ‘political forms’ more especially, which increasingly proved decisive (1969:121–3).

Although the prevailing view in the modern sociology of stratification thus stressed a secular shift away from the property axis towards a function/ skill/power axis, important differences of emphasis remained. Whereas the functionalist wing tended to place its main emphasis upon occupation and functional authority, its critical or ‘agonistic’ counterpart restored the idea of power inequality to a position of prominence. For Parsons and others, traditional property-based class inequality was being replaced by a hierarchy of roles defined by their functional importance for collective social goals; status groups were pictured as accessible and fluid and as being filled through individual achievement rather than ascription (cf. Parsons 1954). Critics such as Dahrendorf, Lenski or Parkin thought differently. Social stratification, Dahrendorf argued, was ‘only a secondary consequence of the social structure of power’ (1969:38). Lenski emphasized that it was not system needs nor objective functions that determined social distribution, but that power should be seen as the key variable: ‘class’ was then redefinable as the aggregate of those who stood in a similar position with respect to some form of power, privilege, or prestige. He added a fundamental distinction between the ‘power of position’ and the ‘power of property’, whose linkage was neither necessary nor inevitable since property was frequently dissociated from occupancy of a particular office or role (1966:58, 74–5). For Parkin, likewise, the occupational order constituted the backbone of the class structure and of the entire reward system of Western society, a notion which was immediately extended towards a Weberian interpretation of class, status, and party as phenomena of the distribution of power (1972:46).

Notwithstanding such differences, it was agreed upon by both schools that, generally speaking, property inequalities, since the turn of the century, had greatly diminished in stratificational significance, and had ceded before inequalities due to either functional authority or conflictual power. In this respect, they together confronted another tradition of thought which took the erosion of property by no means for granted, but affirmed its continuing impact as an ultimately decisive stratificational variable. This tradition, of course,

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included the many strands of palaeoand neo-Marxism. In the 1950s, for example, Mills’ The Power Elite became the subject of a wide controversy which once again lined up the protagonists of the power idiom over against the advocates of property theory. Many of the latter worried about the ‘disarming simplicity’ and the circular nature of Mills’ definition of the power elite as those who occupied the command posts of the major economic, military, and political institutions (Sweezy 1968:115ff.; Lynd 1968:103ff.; Bottomore 1966:33ff.). Mills’ tautological conception of power, his critics charged, was wedded to unduly restricted conceptions of economics, property, and class.3 Since when, one of them queried, was the concept of class only ‘an economic term’ that no longer referred to social aggregates (Lynd 1968:112)?

Mills only fully explicated his definition of property in The Marxists, a book of final reckoning which postdated the power elite debate. In his exposé of Marx’s doctrine, he translated the variable ‘relations of men to the means of production’ into ‘property as a source of income’. He went on to affirm the indispensability of this property criterion to the understanding of the stratification of capitalist society, not as the ultimate dimension, but as one dimension among others, such as occupation, status, and of course, power (Mills 1969:84, 105–6; cf. 1963:305ff.; 1951:71). Such stratificational pluralism proved to be anathema to his Marxist critics, who univocally supported the theory of the ruling class and the ultimate significance of economic property. Herbert Aptheker could do no better than repeat Noah Webster’s conjuration: ‘In what, then, does real power consist? The answer is short, plain—in property.’ Mills, in Lynd’s accusation, reserved property as a basis of power only for one discrete set within the elite, and made no solid effort ‘to appraise the relative weight and the diffused spread of the power of property throughout all institutions under capitalism’. ‘What we have in the United States’, Sweezy proclaimed, ‘is a ruling class with its roots deeply sunk in the apparatus of appropriation which is the corporate system’ (Domhoff and Ballard 1968:160, 111, 127–9).

Mills’ argument may be briefly compared with Dahrendorf’s nearcontemporary view, which likewise originated in a studied rejection of Marxist class theory and elicited a similar critical response. Unlike Mills, however, Dahrendorf accepted the Marxian position that class conflicts did not spring from differences of income or income sources, but in property as an effective force of production, or ‘ownership of means of production and its denial to others’. However, the role of property in Marx’s theory of class posed a problem of interpretation: did Marx employ a broad definition in terms of ‘factual control and subordination’ in the enterprises of industrial production, or did he mean authority relations in so far as these were based on the legal title of property? Was there still class and class conflict after the separation of legal title and factual control? Was property for Marx a special case of authority—or vice versa, authority a special case of property? (1959:20–2) Dahrendorf decided that Marx’s analyses were indeed based upon the narrow, legal concept. In his own view, however, it was evident that power and

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authority were not tied to the legal title, and that a class theory which was based upon the criterion of possession of, or exclusion from, effective private property lost its analytical value as soon as legal ownership and factual control were separated. The more basic criterion of class was the exercise of, or exclusion from authority:

Power and authority are irreducible factors from which the social relations associated with legal private property as well as those associated with communal property can be derived…. But property is by no means the only form of authority; it is but one of its numerous types. Whoever tries, therefore, to define authority by property defines the general by the particular—an obvious logical fallacy.

(Dahrendorf 1959:136)

‘Class’ could then be newly defined as referring to social conflict groups which were primarily determined by participation in or exclusion from authority, exercised within what Dahrendorf called ‘imperatively coordinated associations’. Economic classes now only constituted a special case of the larger phenomenon of class itself (1959:136–9). It had been the failure of the Soviet experiment to eliminate conflict by abolishing property, which had led many to abandon the ‘century-old obsession with property’ as the basic social force:

Instead of the legal and economic implications of ownership, the political and social ones of power came to the fore. Relations of property may indeed give rise to conflict, but if they do, they do so because they are a special case of relations of power. There is conflict, and class, after property.

(Dahrendorf 1967:5; cf. 1988:141ff.)

The Marxist riposte to this stuck to familiar terms. While being disfigured by a ‘misleading’ and ‘erroneous’ evaluation of Marx’s work, Dahrendorf’s analysis was also said to be tainted by a ‘liberal ideological bias’ which diverted attention away from the actual sources of power and conflict in capitalist society, in which the principal structural cleavage derived from the private ownership of productive property. Dahrendorf’s account clearly depended upon a ‘transparently metaphysical reification of authority as the key determinant’. At no point did he systematically approach power as a problem to be examined by scientific methods, or attempt to explicate theoretically the source of power itself. In circular and tautologous fashion, it was assumed to lie in the ubiquitous authority relations which were a defining characteristic of social institutions as ‘imperatively coordinated associations’ (Binns 1977: 78–9, 88–9, 98).4

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SMALL SHOES, BIG FEET

Such polemics illustrate a logic of conceptual expansion and contraction which is characteristic of the entire history of the dispute between Marxism and sociology, from its beginnings in the criticism of economic determinism by Durkheim, Weber, and the Italian elitists up to these middle and late twentieth-century disputes. On one side, one witnesses a gradual enlargement of the vocabulary of power or authority, which is balanced by narrow conceptions of property as legal private ownership or as source of wealth or income. On the other side, one encounters an enlargement of the alternative vocabulary of property and possession, which now emphatically includes rights to control productive assets as well as income rights, and hence tendentially coincides with generalized conceptions of domination or control. In this fashion, the long-standing tension between a ‘property’ and a ‘power’ theory of social class, while showing a continual repetition of reductionist reversals of the argument, also exemplifies a long drift (explicit or implicit) in the direction of the vocabulary of power or domination (cf. Wolff and Resnick 1986:107–8). Parkin has footnoted this trend with the ironic comment that ‘inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Weberian struggling to get out’ (1979:25).

In a more politically charged ambiance, the double reductionist pattern is also evident in the reaction by New Left critics to the argument about the ‘demise of ownership’, as it was forwarded both by sociologists and by postwar revisionist social democratic writers. Conceptually restricting ownership to legal form, Crosland for example concluded that it was no longer of over-towering relevance to the constitution of social class since, as a result of the ‘technological fact’ of growing complexity and scale of factory organization, capitalist ownership was increasingly being divorced from effective control (Crosland 1963:36–7, 42). This argument was already a well-rehearsed one within the socialist movement, reaching back to the debates about the significance of the new middle class of Angestellten, entered upon by orthodox Marxists such as Kautsky, revisionists such as Bernstein and De Man, and ‘academic socialists’ such as Schmoller and Wagner (cf. Burris 1986). As noted in Chapter 4, De Man’s influential conception of planisme articulated a shift from property to power or authority, as did Déat’s néo-socialisme in contemporary France. Right-wing political thought, as represented by Spengler, Sombart, Freyer, and the intellectuals around Die Tat, had also emphasized this ‘political’ turn in ownership relations. In Crosland’s postwar analysis, power similarly figured as the dominant stratifying factor in industry, in the politico-administrative sphere and in the professions. It was a basic variable in industry

where a clear hierarchy exists in respect of power to sack, demote or promote, pay higher or lower incomes, move people from one place to another, organise work in a particular way, and

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generally influence, if not determine, the income, nature of employment, and occupational status of employees. This hierarchy is not, as the Marxists suppose, related to an index of ownership, but simply to location in the organisational structure.

(Crosland 1963:112)

New Left writers such as Sweezy, Poulantzas, Carchedi, and Wright typically chose to counter this argument by introducing a fundamental distinction between ‘formal’ legal ownership and the more strategically decisive variable of ‘factual’, ‘effective’, or ‘economic’ property—which was largely coincident with the exercise of decisional power or discretionary control in the (economic) division of labour, and hence was no longer definitionally tied to individual legal property. The same long-term institutional development, i.e. the gradual disaggregation of the full liberal package of ownership rights into various component parts (cf. Grey 1980), which sociologists and revisionists saw as a ‘separation of ownership from control’, could be alternatively interpreted in terms of a strengthening of the constitutional bond between them. Since ownership-as-control or as management still identified the strategic core of the ‘global function of capital’, in practice the ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois’ class label was conferred according to a criterion of differential power (cf. Johnson 1977: 211, 222; Parkin 1979:23–5). For Carchedi, to mention but one example, the ‘function of capital’ was so completely separable from private ownership that it left ‘position in a hierarchy of control and surveillance’ as the only tangible criterion of class membership. ‘Real ownership’, on the other hand, identified the top range of a positional hierarchy of control and supervision, so that the ‘global function of capital’ was definitionally exercised by a hierarchy of controllers and a bureaucracy of command (Carchedi 1977).

The presumed ideological shift ‘from property to power’ can hence only be treated as an object of general consensus if one remains confined within a narrow sociological (or revisionist) perspective. The Marxist ‘property theory’ of social class could successfully adapt to the embarrassment posed by the rise of new, formally ‘propertyless’ economic elites, by diluting the concept of ownership itself from strictly private to collective forms. The method was already latently active in Marx’s own analyses of management and bureaucracy, and took advantage of the structural ambiguity in the master concept of property itself. Marx’s own account of the growing positional separation in large-scale capitalist firms between the ‘functioning’ or ‘productive’ capitalist (the Anwender) and the passive owner or speculator (the Eigentümer) even anticipated a full separation between ‘pure’ functionaries and ‘pure’ proprietors, which would bring all real economic functions into the hands of the former and hasten the disappearance of the latter from the process of production. However, this apparent demise of private ownership (and the private capitalist) did not imply the disappearance of capitalism as a profit-based competitive economic system. At this point,

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Marx typically vacillated between the narrow criterion of private capital ownership and a broader view which identified the ‘function of capital’ with ‘command over alien labour’ and hence edged closer to a power theory of capitalism and the managerial class (Marx 1894:400–1; 452–6).

More recently, this conceptual elasticity has condoned various enlargements of the classical class vocabulary by a vocal group of ‘analytical’ Marxists, who have variously attempted to stretch the scope of concepts such as ‘exploitation’ and ‘property’ in order to encompass managerial control of production, access to organizational or bureaucratic positions, command of ‘skill assets’, ‘job property’, and even citizenship (Roemer 1982a, b; 1986; Wright 1985a, b; Van Parijs 1993) (see also Chapter 3). A veritable proliferation of productive assets, correspondent forms of ownership, and dimensions of inequality has ensued, which is once again suggestive of the large measure of arbitrariness and verbalism which often inhabits these reductionary disputes across the property-power binary. Roemer’s initial rephrasing of the concept of exploitation in terms of property relations, conceived as unequal access to alienable means of production, was quickly enlarged towards a more general taxonomy which also accommodated ‘feudal’ ownership of people and ‘socialist’ or ‘status’ exploitation resulting from the unequal distribution of skills. To this list, Wright has added ‘organizational’ assets and ‘organizational’ exploitation, while the ‘ownership problem’ with regard to these organizational forces of production was resolved by means of the well-tried extension towards ‘effective’ (and collectively exercisable) economic control (1985b:80–1). In an even more radical generalization, Van Parijs has included ‘job property’ and ‘job exploitation’ as defining the structural axis of a new class struggle under welfare-state capitalism. He has also broadened the Roemerian category of ‘status exploitation’ by subsuming inequalities resulting from race, gender, and citizenship, effectively postulating as many potential class divides as there are factors which systematically effect the distribution of material advantages (1993:119).

One recent example of a contrary set of generalizations along the power axis is the neo-Weberian ‘closure paradigm’ advocated by Parkin and Murphy. As originally employed by Weber, the concept of closure referred to processes of subordination whereby one group monopolized advantages by closing off opportunities to another group of outsiders which it defined as inferior and ineligible. Any convenient, visible characteristic, such as race, language, social origin, religion, or lack of a particular school diploma, could in principle be used to label competitors as outsiders (Murphy 1988:8). Enlarging the focus of the concept of exploitation from its restricted Marxist application, this Weberian view of monopolization is taken to provide an overarching model for the analysis of all forms of domination, e.g. by replacing Marx’s labour theory of value with a power theory of profits and prices (ibid.: 83ff.). Even though Roemer’s new departure is praised for a certain convergence with this Weberian analysis, it is also criticized for not extending far enough, and for its resultant inability to account for gender, racial, ethnic,

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and religious exclusion (ibid.: 103, 104n.). To Murphy, a rigorous conception of exploitation can only be developed as a subcategory of social closure-as- power. Rather than stretching the concept of property to fit positional, credential, cultural, and other species of exclusion, it is far more advisable to begin with more general concepts: ‘Why stretch small shoes to big feet when big shoes are available?’ (ibid.: 175).

In this context, Parkin has likewise discouraged any further expansion of the original definition of property to include cultural assets. It is unlikely, he has argued, that Marxists would welcome such additional tampering, ‘given the exegetical difficulties already encountered in reconciling the notion of managerial control with the classical formula of pure ownership’. Other than property which, even in the revised neo-Marxist sense, still refers to the productive sphere, cultural capital and credentialism are notions that do not easily fit into the vocabulary of modes of production, other than as mere epiphenomena. Indeed, they have the suspicious appearance of concepts relating to the distributive system, with all that this implies in the way of ‘Weberian contamination’ (1979:59). But Parkin’s argument has a somewhat arbitrary ring, not only because he simultaneously favours an expansion of the Marxian notion of exploitation, but also because he ignores that similar objections may well be raised against his own theory of closure-as-power. In presuming the impossibility of a generalized theory of property and capital, Parkin also implicitly respects some of the restrictions imposed by a traditional materialist theory of productivity. This ‘Marxian contamination’ of closure theory includes a taken-for-granted dichotomy between a productive base and a cultural ‘service sector’, and contrasts property, as providing access to productive capital, to credentials, as providing access to key positions in the division of labour (ibid.: 45–8, 54–8). But there is no a priori reason why knowledge, skills, or educational credentials cannot themselves count as forces of production either in the sense of functionalist ‘human capital’ theory or in that of conflict-oriented theories of ‘cultural capital’, while it is also obvious that property is as much a ‘controlling device for key positions in the division of labour’ (and was so conceived by Marx) as a means of access to physical stock.

It is peculiar, in this context, that Murphy recruits both Collins and Bourdieu to the colours of his closure paradigm, even though neither employs the closure vocabulary itself, and both lean over towards generalized metaphors of property and capital. In addition, their writings manifest a rather advanced state of mixture of the two rivalling repertoires (e.g. Collins 1986:6–16). Collins’ ‘political economy of culture’ defines the two major classes in contemporary capitalism as a working class that performs ‘productive’ labour, and a dominant class that performs ‘political’ labour, which includes the forging of alliances and the shaping of others’ views within organizational settings (1979:50ff.). This is indeed close to Bourdieu’s notions of social, cultural, and political capital, as well as to the Roemer-Wright conception of organizational and skill exploitation. Collins also pleads an enlargement of

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the concept of property beyond traditional notions of material and financial possessions towards ‘positional property’ (cf. Van Parijs’s ‘job property’), which also crucially includes definitional struggles about how positions are shaped.5 In this perspective, theorists such as Bourdieu and Collins become more interesting as idiomatic ‘mixers’ than as defenders of one or another reductionist position. The theoretical quarrel about who has the bigger feet (or the bigger shoes) had better be brought to a stop. Indeed, the concept of social closure gains in attractiveness the more it is loosened from the ParkinMurphy identification with power theory, and made to bridge the old divide between a power theory of social stratification and a property theory of social class.

POWER WITHOUT PROPERTY

Map-making and boundary-drawing problems such as the above reappear in prismatic form in the celebrated and wide-ranging debate over the ‘managerial revolution’ —one crucial facet of the many-faceted ‘class debate’ which I will concentrate upon in the remainder of this chapter. The dispute on managerialism usefully refocuses my concern with the sociological object- and-project of ‘knowledgeable organization’, while it also identifies at least one (upper) echelon in the larger ‘new middle class’ that might be described as a positional bearer of this new productive force. In academic sociology, the first systematic exposition of the managerial idea is found in Berle and Means’ seminal The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), which described the modern corporate revolution as resulting in the rise of ‘control’ through the dissolution of the old atom of property. As can be gathered from the title of Berle’s postwar Power Without Property (1959), the basic contention was similar to that of the more comprehensive power theories of stratification referred to above. Power, for Berle as for other managerialists, constituted the ‘thread of their narrative’. Modern corporations were unified and concentrated systems of organization and command, and therefore ‘essentially political constructs’; their study should be undertaken first of all from ‘the staging area of political science’ (Berle 1959:57; Berle and Means 1968:xxvi; Berle 1954:21, 32).6 It is also not difficult to recognize both a functionalist or solidarist and a conflictual or agonistic school of managerial theory. The former expected the rise of a ‘soulful’ corporation to attenuate the alienation of a soulless capitalism, the development of a new corporate conscience of responsible managers who were increasingly subservient to the ‘public consensus’, and the advent of a largely beneficial system of people’s capitalism or collectivism. The conflict tradition expected a fearful concentration of economic power in the hands of a new selfinterested elite, which administered capitalism—or what came after it—as a new breed of absolutist princes. As I will illustrate, this core issue remained largely undecided in Berle and Means’ pioneer work and Berle’s postwar

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