SGUK Ep 154
Dynamics of Power – The Human Cost
Introduction
“The Role of Power in Society: Theories and Examples”
August 29, 2020
“Power is a word derived from the Latin word, potere that means, “to be able”. The sociologist Max Weber defined power as the ability to bring about a desired outcome, even when opposed by others. This article discusses the three different sociological theories of power, followed by the importance of power in everyday life. It concludes with a section on the various political, cultural and economic uses of power”.
The Pluralist Model
This model is based on the functionalist approach of sociology. Power is said to be held by a number of groups within society that compete with each other for control over resources and influence. This is most commonly found in democratic systems of government because no one group is able to dominate over all others due to a system of checks and balances. The political process of competition for power is supervised by the government and thus functional for society due to three main reasons. Firstly, any hostility and conflict is given a proper channel for expression through the political process. Secondly, it gives a chance to each group to fight for their ideals and achieve their goals. Finally, government supervision ensures that the outcome of the political process is in the interest of the majority of society.
The Power-Elite Model
The historian Charles Wright Mills proposed this model in 1956 as a representation of non-Marxist theory regarding elites in democratic countries. Mills argued that power was concentrated among a few wealthy shareholders, namely, the government, the military and big businesses. These elites form a ruling class that circulate and co-operate with each other. (“Power and Politics”; “Theories of Power” 2016). The military requires government permission to take action and the government depends on the support of the military to enact major political decisions. For example, when the Government of India revoked the special status under Article 370 of Jammu and Kashmir last year, paramilitary security troops were recruited to enforced curfew and a communication lockdown. Here, the military could be seen serving the needs of only the ruling class comprising of large corporations with defense contracts and the government. Many prominent scholars and activists like Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy protested against the government’s decision but the voices of the majoritarian public went unheard.
The Marxist Model
This model of power is based on the conflict perspective of sociology. It argues that political power is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie or those who control economic production within a capitalist society. There are two approaches to the Marxist model. The first is the instrumentalist approach. This approach is useful in determining who rules the society. The second is the structuralist approach. This approach is useful in showing how the ruling class is able to operate within a capitalist economy through the concentration of political, economic and ideological power. Those who control the economic modes of production in a country, end up having control over the religious, political and social aspects of a country too.
Types of Power in Everyday Life
The earlier section discussed the major theories related to power. But power can also be observed at the micro-level in day-to-day social interactions among people. Sociologists have studied the presence of various power bases among small groups such as families, friend circles and clubs and larger organizations like schools. The most relevant ones have been explained below:
Coercive power refers to one party’s ability to punish others through the withholding of resources or by inflicting harm. An authority figure is able to control other’s actions through the fear of negative consequences. For example, police officers at riots help maintain order through threats of arrests or violent consequences such as lathi charges.
Expert power is based on the perception that a person is highly qualified in a particular field. For example, a surgeon has expert power in medical matters relating to a patient. It is important to note that expert power is about the perception of knowledge rather than the actual knowledge itself. Hence, someone in an authority position may be perceived as carrying expert power, whether or not they actually possess expertise. For example, sometimes elected representatives in a political system may not be experts on matters regarding their constituencies. But they are still viewed as knowledgeable due to their superior positions. On the other hand, a person with real expertise in an area may not be recognized if they do not have the associated authority position with it.
Referent power is based on feelings of admiration and respect for another person, even if that person does not seek power. For example, a senior in high school may have influence over his juniors since they look up to him as a role model.
Informational power is possessed by those who use facts, evidence or data to argue in a rational manner. Moreover, anyone who has information vital to others can use it to control them. For example, a wife may use evidence of adultery to obtain alimony from a husband during divorce (Croteau & Hoynes 2013).
Uses of Power:
Political Power: Making Decisions
Power can be used to influence the actions of others. On a micro-scale, parents set household rules that are expected to be followed by children. In more formal institutions like schools and universities, the administration sets rules to be followed by all students and professors. The management in workplaces determines the rules for social interaction among employees. On a macro scale, politicians set rules expected to be followed by entire countries. The legislative, executive and judiciary all make decisions regarding the actions of citizens. For example, judges are responsible for deciding the fate of criminal offenders. On the other hand, members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha aid in passing or rejecting laws concerning the welfare of Indian citizens. Thus, those in powerful political positions have the capacity to regulate the actions of those without any power (Croteau & Hoynes 2013).
Economic Power: Allocating Resources
Any individual or group in charge of economic resources such as income has power over the actions and outcomes of other groups. On a small scale, within families, the bread earner of the family wields considerable power over the rest of the members. For example, if the father is the sole individual with an income, he may decide how to use that money for his family by dividing money amongst food, clothes, education etc. On a larger scale, business owners can control their employees with incentives regarding their salaries. Thus the employer is not only influencing the lives of individual employees, but also their entire families and communities. On a macro scale, governments have the power to allocate resources to different divisions through their budget. Politicians control the outcomes of different strata of society by deciding the distribution of money among public projects and social welfare schemes (Croteau & Hoynes 2013).
Cultural Power: Defining Reality
Our social reality is defined by our interactions with different people, media, religions etc. Parents influence the behavior of children from a young age by exposing them to various storybooks, certain types of formal education and a variety of forms of entertainment. Children imbibe the values and worldviews and accept them as their reality. On a larger scale, the media shapes our thoughts by selecting certain news that they think is worthy of covering. In the process, they might marginalize other important stories by failing to give them a voice. For example, the lives of celebrities may be widely covered but the issues faced by indigenous tribal communities might be ignored at their expense. Noam Chomsky spoke widely about the powerful role that media plays in shaping our societies.
The Impact of Job Displacement
What causes job displacement?
- The phenomenon of job displacement, driven primarily by technological advancements such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, represents a significant shift in the global workforce landscape. This section explores the various dimensions and implications of job displacement, providing a clearer understanding of its causes and effects.
“As the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation reshapes the horizon of the global workforce, the phenomenon of job displacement emerges as a critical concern warranting immediate attention. The rapid advancement in technology, while promising enhanced efficiency and innovation, also poses a significant threat to traditional job roles, potentially altering the employment landscape irrevocably.”
Sectors Facing High Risks of Job Displacement
Certain industries are more susceptible to the impacts of AI-driven job displacement:
- Manufacturing: Advanced robots perform not only repetitive tasks but also those requiring adaptability, significantly reducing human labor needs.
- Transportation and Logistics: The integration of autonomous vehicles and drones is set to revolutionize this sector, decreasing the demand for drivers and warehouse workers.
- Retail and Customer Service: AI-driven platforms and chatbots are increasingly taking over customer interactions, diminishing the need for human customer service representatives.
- Administrative and Clerical Work: AI’s capability to rapidly process and analyze large volumes of data makes it ideal for automating routine administrative tasks like data entry and appointment scheduling.
Economic and Social Implications
“The immediate effect of AI-induced job displacement often manifests as job loss, leading to economic and social challenges for affected individuals. This can trigger a ripple effect throughout the economy, impacting sectors interconnected with those directly affected.
Over time, while the economy might adjust, introducing new job opportunities, this transition requires significant investments in reskilling and education to align the displaced workforce with emerging job requirements. The disparity in skills and access to education can exacerbate inequality, highlighting the need for targeted policies and support mechanisms.”
Long-term Outlook and Adaptation Strategies
In the long run, technological advancements may lead to the creation of new industries and job opportunities, potentially offsetting the jobs lost to automation. However, the pace and distribution of this job displacement are difficult to predict and vary by industry, occupation, and demographics. It’s crucial for policymakers, businesses, and educational institutions to collaborate on developing strategies that not only mitigate the adverse effects of job displacement but also harness the potential benefits of technological advancements.
Industries Most Affected
The integration of AI and automation across various industries has led to significant shifts in job roles and employment patterns. Several sectors have emerged as particularly susceptible to these changes, experiencing high rates of job displacement.
Customer Operations
In the realm of customer operations, AI-driven chatbots and automated service platforms are increasingly taking over tasks traditionally performed by human customer service representatives. This shift is evident in industries like retail and customer service, where automated systems handle a large volume of customer inquiries and transactions, thereby reducing the need for human intervention.
Despite the potential reduction in traditional roles, AI also creates opportunities for customer experience designers who can design, manage, and optimize AI-driven customer engagement platforms, thus requiring a new set of skills focused on AI technology and customer interaction.
Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales have also undergone transformation due to AI and automation. The adoption of marketing automation systems (MSP) and AI technologies allows for the automation of repetitive tasks such as data analysis and personalized content creation. This shift not only enhances the efficiency of marketing campaigns but also changes the skill set required in the marketing sector.
There is now a higher demand for professionals who can handle AI tools and data analytics to craft targeted and strategic marketing initiatives. As routine tasks are automated, the focus in marketing shifts towards creativity and strategic planning, emphasizing the need for innovative thinking in campaign development.
Software Engineering
The field of software engineering faces both opportunities and challenges with the rise of AI. While AI can automate certain tasks like code generation, testing, and maintenance, it also spurs the creation of new roles in machine learning, data analysis, and AI system development.
However, AI’s capability to perform routine programming tasks could decrease the demand for jobs focusing solely on basic coding, thereby shifting the industry’s focus towards more complex and creative software development tasks. Software engineers are now required to continually update their skills and adapt to new AI technologies that can enhance their work but also potentially replace certain aspects of it.
Research and Development
In research and development, AI’s impact is twofold. On one hand, AI assists in automating data analysis, which can accelerate the R&D processes and lead to faster innovation cycles. On the other hand, the reliance on AI for routine data analysis tasks necessitates a shift in skills for R&D professionals towards more strategic and creative roles. They are required to manage and interpret the outcomes of AI processes and integrate them into broader research objectives and development strategies.
As industries continue to adapt to the advancements in AI and automation, the nature of jobs will evolve, necessitating a workforce that is flexible, technologically adept, and ready to manage the challenges and opportunities that come with these technological shifts.
Job Creation Due to AI
While artificial intelligence (AI) is often viewed as a disruptor of traditional job roles, it simultaneously fosters an environment ripe for job creation. As AI automates routine and manual tasks, it opens up new avenues for employment that require a higher level of skill and creativity.
New Job Roles
The advent of AI has led to the emergence of entirely new job roles that did not exist before. For instance, the demand for machine learning engineers, data scientists, and specialized researchers has surged as more companies integrate AI into their operations. These professionals are essential for the development and maintenance of AI systems. Similarly, the healthcare sector has seen the creation of roles like health data analysts, who leverage AI to provide more precise and personalized medical diagnoses.
In the agricultural sector, AI has introduced roles such as agrotechnologists, who utilize AI to optimize crop management and improve agricultural yields. The integration of AI in marketing and customer service has also created roles for AI chatbot developers and prompt engineers, reflecting the diverse opportunities AI brings across various industries.
Reskilling Opportunities
The shift towards an AI-driven economy necessitates a parallel shift in the workforce’s skill set. Companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of reskilling their employees to handle new technologies and responsibilities that AI brings. For example, Amazon’s “Upskilling 2025” initiative is a significant investment in training its workforce for high-tech roles, reflecting a broader trend of corporate responsibility in employee development.
Reskilling is not just about learning to use new tools; it’s about understanding the strategic implications of AI and adapting to a rapidly changing work environment. Organizations are forming partnerships with educational institutions and leveraging nonprofit collaborations to facilitate these transitions, ensuring broader access to the necessary training.
The Human Cost: Housing crises and the new feudalism
Ref:
Housing as an engine of inequality and the role of policy
Cody Hochstenbach, Justin Kadi, Sophia Maalsen,
Megan Nethercote – Pages 1-17 | Published online: 15 Jan 2025
“Housing is not only an outcome but also an engine of socio-economic inequality. In many cities across the world, there are weekly headlines about the ‘housing crisis’—our home countries Australia, the Netherlands and the UK being no exception. In Australia, renters report stories of having to frequently move further away from jobs and schools to find more affordable accommodation. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, even once affordable regional towns no longer offer much relief from rising rents. An increasing cohort of young adults is facing renting for life, a precarious housing future characterised by very little security and stability over lease length or rent increases. In the Netherlands, late 2021 saw the largest housing protests take place since the 1980s, with tens of thousands of people, many of them young adults, taking the streets in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other cities. These protests highlighted the wide range of housing problems: from rapidly increasing levels of homelessness and parental co-residence, to growing social divides between owners and renters. Housing has remained high on the public and political agenda ever since. In the UK, policy-makers continue to tout homeownership as a preferred tenure of choice, despite mounting difficulties for many to access the tenure, particularly in London. Renting privately for longer periods of your life has become the ‘new normal’, especially for younger people without significant savings and parental support. While highly precarious and unaffordable, private renting often remains the only available alternative in a housing system with highly inaccessible homeownership and a severe shortage of social rental housing. This process of rising precarity among the ‘housing-have-nots’ contrasts sharply with an accelerated accumulation of property wealth and rental income among the ‘housing-haves’.
Framed as a response to Robert Allen’s contribution, this commentary explores the impact of technological change on economic inequality over the very long run of history and emphasizes the role of power relations as another key driver of the distribution of income and resources.
In his exploration of the ebb and flow of British and American inequality during the last four centuries, Allen focuses primarily on the interplay of wages and technological change. In some periods, productivity and wages grew together, whereas in others, wage growth lagged behind rising productivity and wage dispersion increased. By and large, technology is in the driver’s seat of what is essentially a story of supply and demand shaping incomes from labour and thus income inequality.”
Extract
“Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world’s population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.”
The history of inequality: the deep-acting ideological and institutional influences
Simon Szreter
Oxford Open Economics, Volume 3, Issue Supplement_1, 2024, Pages i217–i230, https://doi.org/10.1093/ooec/odad059
Published: 17 July 2024
Abstract
“After reviewing evidence on long-run national trends in inequality since the 1320s and the history of ideas and measures of inequality, the focus is on the history of institutions which have influenced the trends in inequality. Here, the major surprise for many will be to learn that a progressively funded universal social security, health and welfare system was instituted by Elizabeth I in 1601. The welfare state was not invented but restored by the Labour government of 1945–51, decreasing inequalities substantially. In 1834, the parliament had reduced the Elizabethan Poor Law to a deterrent workhouse system, its funding halved in accord with the ideas of Bentham, Malthus and economic liberalism. Since 1979, the successor ideology of neo-liberalism has again increased inequality by reducing the progressivity of taxes and restraining expenditure on public services. After 1979, child poverty more than doubled to over 30% and has never returned to previous lower levels.”
Conclusion
The human cost of power dynamics is profoundly revealing when examining four critical areas: job displacement, access to healthcare, housing crises, and extreme inequality. Job displacement often arises from economic policies influenced by elites and power structures, leaving many individuals without stable employment and leading to a cycle of poverty. This lack of job security also severely impacts access to healthcare, as the uninsured and underinsured populations face significant barriers in receiving necessary medical attention. Furthermore, the housing crisis, exacerbated by inflation and inadequate policy responses, contributes to lower affordability, with many families struggling to secure safe and stable living conditions. As these issues compound, they lead to increased rates of homelessness and a stark reality of extreme inequality, reminiscent of historical eras marked by socioeconomic divides.”
For those interested in exploring these themes further, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty offers an in-depth analysis of wealth concentration and its implications for society, making it a valuable resource for understanding the enduring impacts of power dynamics on human lives. This book delves into the mechanisms of inequality and provides a comprehensive overview of how economic policies shape social outcomes.
In conclusion, power is all around us and each of us possesses different types. It can be used to make both positive and negative impacts. While studying our society, it is vital to recognize the power held by certain individuals and institutions in shaping our social reality.
Ivy Barrow
13th April 2025
Reference Sources
Croteau, D., & Hoynes, W. (2013). Experience sociology (1st ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.
Power and Politics. Retrieved from http://www.sociology.org.uk/notes/papt1.pdf
Theories of Power and Society. (2016). Retrieved July 08, 2020, from https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/14-3-theories-of-and-society/
Read Here: Mass Media as a power institution
https://workonpeak.org/ai-and-automation-the-threat-of-job-displacement/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2024.2444043
https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i212/7708041?login=falseHistorical parallels: Previous periods of extreme inequality
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/xgabaix/files/dynamics_of_inequality.pdf
https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i217/7708113?login=false