Field (Bourdieu)

About: Field (Bourdieu) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 180769 citations.

Power and social influence in relationships.

Abstract: As the philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, power plays a central role in everyday social interactions, and it serves as an organizing principle in the social and behavioral sciences (Reis, Collins, & Berscheid, 2000). Given its paramount importance, one might expect power would hold a privileged place in the field of social psychology and particularly in the study of relationships. Although there are major theoretical statements on what power is (e.g., French & Raven, 1959; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959) and how it should affect relationship dynamics (e.g., Huston, 1983), and there are isolated pockets of research on how power influences interpersonal outcomes (see the References), power has never been a hotbed of theoretical or empirical activity. One overarching goal of this chapter is to begin to change this state of affairs. There are several reasons why power has not become a central, organizing construct within either social psychology or the field of interpersonal relationships. First, the construct of power has multiple components, making it challenging to define and measure. This, in turn, has made it difficult to interpret the effects that the amount of power wielded by each partner has on important relationship or individual outcomes. Second, most prior studies of power in relationships have been descriptive and have relied on global assessments of power (e.g., “In general, how much power or influence do you have over your partner?”). Partners in established relationships, however, often have and may exert different amounts of power in different decision-making domains (e.g., financial, sexual, future plans), and global conceptualizations and measures of power do not assess—and often may not predict—domain-specific areas of power in relationships, especially in close and committed relationships. In addition, the degree to which people are accurately aware of the power dynamics in their relationships remains unclear. Overreliance on self-report measures may have masked some of the actual processes of power and influence in many relationships. Despite these challenges, understanding power and the influence strategies and tactics that individuals use to get what they want from their relationship partners is essential to understanding a host of important relationship dynamics and outcomes (Reis et al., 2000). Although power can be (and has been) defined in different ways, we provisionally define power as the ability of one individual in a relationship (the influence agent) to exert influence on another person (the target of influence) so that the influence agent obtains the specific outcomes he or she wants in a given situation while being able to resist influence attempts by the target. We define influence strategies as the higher level goals and interpersonal approaches that influence agents use to try to

Rerum cognoscere causas: Part I — How do the ideas of system dynamics relate to traditional social theories and the voluntarism/determinism debate?

Abstract: This is the first half of a two-part paper which deals with the social theoretic assumptions underlying system dynamics. The motivation is that clarification in this area can help mainstream social scientists to understand how our field relates to their literature, methods and concerns. Part I has two main sections. The aim of the first is to answer the question: How do the ideas of system dynamics relate to traditional social theories? The theoretic assumptions of the field are seldom explicit but rather are implicit in its practice. The range of system dynamics practice is therefore considered and related to a framework - widely used in both operational research (OR) and systems science - that organises the assumptions behind traditional social theoretic paradigms. Distinct and surprisingly varied groupings of practice are identified, making it difficult to place system dynamics in any one paradigm with any certainty. The difficulties of establishing a social theoretic home for system dynamics are exemplified in the second main section. This is done by considering the question: Is system dynamics deterministic? An analysis shows that attempts to relate system dynamics to strict notions of voluntarism or determinism quickly indicate that the field does not fit with either pole of this dichotomous, and strictly paradigmatic, view. Part I therefore concludes that definitively placing system dynamics with respect to traditional social theories is highly problematic. The scene is therefore set for Part II of the paper, which proposes an innovative and potentially fruitful resolution to this problem.