COMMUNITY POWER AND COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION

In: The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Band 385, S. 76-88

Abstract

The debate among sociol'ts & pol'al sci'ts about community power structure was concerned primarily with questions of methodology & the appropriate imagery for describing the distribution of power in US communities. The question of what cliff it made for a local community & its citizens, if any, whether power was narrowly concentrated or widely dispersed, was seldom raised. 2 alternative hyp's relating the concentration of community power to community mobilization are discussed. The first argues for a positive relationship between concentration of power & community mobilization, while the 2nd argues the obverse of this hyp. A diffusion-of-power scale is constructed based on a content analysis of 31 Amer communities that were the subject of decision-making studies, & this scale is related to community participation in 4 federal self-help programs - public housing, Ur renewal, Model Cities, & the war on poverty. The results show that the cities in which power is most diffused have greater participation in these programs. An outline of some key concepts that may be most appropriate for explaining such findings is suggested. Modified HA.