POWER AND THE ILLEGITIMATE LEADER:
A GUIDE FOR THE SOCIAL EQUITY ACTIVIST
by
Lester Leavitt
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
College for Design and Social Inquiry
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL
August 2014 - version 8
Copyright by Lester Leavitt 2014
POWER AND THE ILLEGITIMATE LEADER:
A GUIDE FOR THE SOCIAL EQUITY ACTIVIST
by
Lester Leavitt
This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s dissertation advisor, Dr. Ali Farazmand, School of Public Administration, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College for Design and Social Inquiry and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Public Administration.
SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:
____________________________________
Ali Farazmand, Ph.D. – Chairperson
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Arthur Sementelli, Ph.D.
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Fred Fejes, Ph.D.
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Khi Thai, Ph.D.
Director – School of Public Administration
____________________________________
Rosalyn Carter, Ph.D.
Dean, College for Design and Social Inquiry
____________________________________ _____________________
Deborah L. Floyd, Ed.D. Date
Interim Dean, Graduate College
Vita
(Optional, and restricted to one page)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Committee
Stay appropriate and professional in wording.
Anyone who was instrumental in the ideas and writing of the dissertation.
(Optional, always kept brief, and not placed in Table of Contents)
ABSTRACT
Author: Lester Leavitt
Title: Power and the Illegitimate Leader:
A Guide for the Social Equity Activist
Institution: Florida Atlantic University
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Ali Farazmand
Degree: Ph.D. in Public Administration
Year: 2014
Insert abstract text here. The abstract summarizes the thesis or dissertation, and should echo the style, reflect the emphasis, and follow the structural patter of the manuscript. The abstract should be succinct, accurate, and written in complete sentences. The paragraphs are double-spaced, and indented on the first line.
Restrict to 350 words, and do not list in the Table of Contents.
DEDICATION
To Edward “Mickey” Rowe – a man who dislikes risk, but took the biggest risk of his life when he allowed me into his heart.
Mickey, I thank you first for your trust, second, for your belief that a single person has the potential to make the world a better place if they can find the right ally, and third, for being that ally and remaining at my side throughout it all.
Finally, thank you for believing in marriage. We now cross the next threshold of our life together.
The dedication is not numbered, and not counted in pagination.
POWER AND THE ILLEGITIMATE LEADER:
A GUIDE FOR THE SOCIAL EQUITY ACTIVIST
Governance, Mired in an Unnecessary Detour 4
The Intervening Variable X2. 3
The Intervening Variable X3. 4
Limiting the Scope of the Research. 10
What Other Research and Studies Have Identified. 14
Deficiencies in Those Studies. 14
Importance of this Research to the Audience. 14
Who is following these Leaders?. 14
Coercive Power and Reactivity to a Worldview Threat 16
The Power to Mobilize Bias. 16
Sustaining Institutions and Narrative Communities. 16
Ostensive and Performative Views of Narratives. 18
Hierarchical Authority and Interpretive Monopolies. 19
Terror Management and the Threat of Pluralism.. 21
The Black Male and White Terror 21
Representative Democracy in a Universe of Predatory Capitalism.. 24
The Incompatibility of Hegemony and a Representative Democracy. 25
Zero Sum Thinking, Just-Wars, and Complicity. 25
America’s Inner-cities as Structural Institutions. 26
Gerrymandering for Extremism.. 26
Tools for an Effective Social Equity Activist and Street-level Bureaucrat 27
Conclusion of the Literature Review.. 30
The Advantage of Proxies in the Research Model 33
H1: Bias, Narrative Communities, Sustaining Institutions, and Hierarchies. 34
H2: The Cost of Challenging Authority. 35
H3: Hegemony as a Sustaining Institution, and Consenting to Oppression. 37
Building a Non-hierarchical Institution. 38
Transformative-emancipatory Question. 39
The proposed new institutional design. 40
Socialism vs. Pragmatic Libertarianism.. 41
Sustaining Institutions and Bias. 41
Spiritual Prisons as Structural Institutions. 43
Formalizing Community Networks. 46
Self-funding and self-administering. 46
Heterogeneous networks as sustainable institutions. 46
Policymaking by heterogeneous networks (Sandstom and Carlsson) 46
Legitimizing Leadership (Methodology 2 of 4) 47
Qualitative Methods: Transformational 47
Delimitations of the Survey. 50
Significance of the Survey. 50
Devolving State Functions to Local 51
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 - The Research Model 7
Figure 2 - Research Question #1. 14
Figure 3 - Research Question #2. 15
Figure 4 - The Revised Research Model with Proxies. 18
INTRODUCTION
This theoretical paper builds upon a singular concept that the complaints of street-level bureaucrats, community organizers, social entrepreneurs, and others who can collectively be referred to as social equity activists are rooted in a single problem; a problem of bias. Bias, as it will be defined for this paper, will be examined as a social construct (Gooden & Portillo, ????), and will largely be expanded upon from the idea that dominant and privileged groups use narratives to successfully cast vulnerable groups and classes as undeserving, or even worse, deviant (Schneider & Ingram, 1993, 335). Also central to this paper is the idea that existing forms of governance, with their reliance upon hierarchical power, have become conduits for mobilizing bias, which this paper interprets as justification to call this illegitimate power when such is the case. In the inductive sequence of this paper, a causal path will be outlined to show how this problem with illegitimate power has led to the failings of representative democracy.
This paper takes the approach that the best way to combat this problem will be to train social equity activists, street-level bureaucrats, and community organizers in a way that they not only can identify the structural dynamics of how power is being abused to marginalize vulnerable populations, but to also equip these emerging leaders with an information communication technology that will empower them to bring about transformational change. This technology will also enable them to self-affiliate, at a global level, into a new kind of non-hierarchical governing institution that promises to be self-administering and self-funding. The self-governing nature of this institution is achieved through consensus-building mechanisms that are embedded into the algorithms of the information systems.
Empowered in this way, it is predicted that legitimate power will naturally migrate to these small (but globally-affiliated) self-governing collectives, thereby wrestling the illegitimate power away from the hierarchies that have abused it to preserve power at the top; a mechanism that has favored global elites who not only control the mainstream media, but who also have enormous amounts of cash to mobilize bias on a large scale. The inductive sequence of this paper also unfolds in a way that the mechanisms of hegemony are more easily exposed, showing how hegemonic narratives have been engineered to convince historically dominant and privileged groups that members of the elite class are their allies, and that all of the problems of the world come about because of how “othered” groups are intent on “taking something” from the historically privileged dominant groups.
Outside of the scope of this paper, but nevertheless foundational to the entire inductive sequence that will unfold, is a thoroughly researched and documented idea that is borrowed from cultural anthropology and social psychology. Known as terror management theory (TMT), the premise is that every culture in the world is motivated in their behavior by a fear of death, and the connection between public administration and terror management theory that will be shown in this paper is that every attempt to create a “neutral” public administration has been doomed to failure because people, at a deeply subconscious level, will inherently infuse their own worldview into everything they do, whether it is at home, in their community, in their association with co-workers, and in carrying out the duties of their job. If their job involves the provision of public goods and services, then terror management theory dictates that bias will be inherent in the decisions that are being made on a daily basis in those areas where service recipients in that public sphere are known to pose a worldview threat to the dominant group that has been charged with the provision of those public goods and services. These are the kinds of structural dynamics that this paper promises to examine as it lays out a direction for future research into how to create a new structure within public administration that can mitigate the effects of terror management theory and diminish it in the long term.
By empowering transformational leaders with a mechanism whereby they might more readily expose the tactics of the zero-sum thinking that drives terror management theory, along with its “just war” solutions for dealing with the worldview threats (whether held subconsciously or consciously), it is anticipated that the complicit within the dominant groups will be willing to withdraw their consent to be a part of these institutions that have, since the dawn of recorded history, oppressed both the “othered” and the “privileged,” albeit it in very different ways. In this way, this paper hopes to offer a pragmatic, socio-technical solution to the problems that Frederick Thayer and Ernest Becker so eloquently described in their controversial books, An end to hierarchy! An end to competition! and The Denial of Death. This paper argues that it is no coincidence that both of those books were published in 1973.
Bias and Illegitimate Power
This paper will speak of people who are born without privilege as a generic class unto themselves, but it begs the obvious question of who defines privilege? Because there have been so many failed attempts to define who belongs to which class, and in order to work around the lack of a single definition of privilege, this research will simply view all of those who have, in some manner, had to struggle in some way against oppression by the hegemon as the “unprivileged.” It is easy to say that a Black child from the inner-city was born without privilege in America, but what about Anderson Cooper, the famous white, Christian, male CNN celebrity who was born into the Vanderbilt fortune? For the purpose of this paper, he will be classified as unprivileged for one important reason, and that is he was not heterosexual. In the United States, this paper argues that the truly privileged position in the United States is that of the white, heterosexual, Christian, male, and that, simply put, is merely an accident of birth. This paper will expose how the privilege of the white, heterosexual, Christian, male in the United States is solely derived from narratives that, over a period of centuries, defined that privilege (which nobody can earn or purchase).
As a Christian, white, male, Anderson Cooper should have had every privilege, in the sense that privilege is traditionally defined, but as a gay man (closeted or not) he would live the bulk of his life denied privileges that the heteronormative institutions of American society not only defined, but vigorously defended. All of Cooper’s fortune could not buy him the privilege of living openly with a companion that his very nature dictated that he would be attracted to. Before Cooper could enjoy these privileges, American society itself had to be altered, or, as this paper will argue, a new governing narrative (Miller, 2012) for the treatment of same-sex couples had to not only be defined, but also had to become powerful enough that it would displace the narratives that marginalized people like Cooper; classifying them as “deviants.”
It is in this context that the word unprivileged will be used throughout this paper. Not in the narrow context of defining LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender) individuals as deviants, but in the all-encompassing context that it is primarily through narratives that the undeserving and deviants are marginalized by dominant groups.
Insert “white trash” blog post excerpt here (picture of trailer).
The inductive sequence of this paper will focus on the kinds of sustaining institutions that it takes to defend any marginalizing narrative, and the kinds of leaders who support and guide these institutions while remaining largely out-of-sight at the tops of the hierarchical structures. As elements within a dysfunctional system of governing, this paper will focus on these narrative-defining sustaining that continue to marginalize vulnerable classes of people in a ruthless, zero-sum game where there is little that some at the top of the hierarchical structures would not do to retain their grasp on the levers of power.
Governance, Mired in an Unnecessary Detour
Primarily because of this paper’s focus on social equity activism, the foundational premise is centered on the idea that governance (or public administration, if you will) has spent more than 40 years “wandering in the wilderness.” As will be demonstrated in the literature review, this paper argues that Minnowbrook I stands out as the “last stand” that public administration made for social equity for several reasons (Gooden and Portillo, 2011). After Minnowbrook I, as “voices of reason” similar to Frederick Thayer, several other prominent academics were very vocal in sounding a clarion call that, after the back-to-back victories of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, society was taking a “wrong turn” away from the Great Society ideals (Marini, 1972; Ostrom, 1973; Thompson, 1975; Levitan & Taggart, 1976; Waldo, 1979).
In spite of its significance today, the original Minnowbrook conference does not stand alone as a benchmark of the lost potential that some in society saw for where society had expressed a desire to go during that era. To many, there had been so much potential emerging that was never realized. Speaking to this potential that society seemed so willing to discard, it was in 1971 that John Rawls wrote his seminal work, A Theory of Justice.
Affordable Governance
Generally speaking, from 1968 to 1975, in reading the works of many authors who sounded the alarm about how important social equity was in governance, there was no denying the fact that government was on a collision course with itself as “…the cost of running a welfare state became too heavy and burdensome to governments trying to maintain a balance between butter and guns” (Farazmand, 2013, 221; Burkhead and Miner, 1971). The guns won.
By 1975, the Trilateral Commission on the Governability of Democracies wrote about how, “The demands on democratic government grow while the capacity of democratic government stagnates.” There were undeniable problems that needed to be fixed, but every solution proffered seemed to erode away at the mechanisms that were put in place during the Great Society period; programs that were intended to preserve social equity for the most vulnerable. Writing in 2012, Joan Walsh captured the “wrong turn” aspects of this period eloquently. In introducing Walsh’s book, What’s the Matter with White People, the publisher editorializes the following:
Joan Walsh argues that the biggest divide in America today is not about party or ideology, but about two competing narratives for why everything has fallen apart since the 1970s. One side sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages the underachieving, the immoral, and the undeserving, no matter the cost to Middle America. The other sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages to the very rich, while allowing a measure of cultural progress for the different and the downtrodden. It matters which side is right, and how the other side got things so wrong (Walsh, 2012, overleaf; emphasis added).
This paper follows Walsh’s logic in blaming dialectic narratives for the marginalization of the so-called “undeserving” and “deviant.”
In concluding this section, one other author who has researched and written about how power is wielded in organizations for decades needs to be cited. Few people have captured the concept of this “wrong turn” and framed it so concisely, in just a few words, as Ali Farazmand has. In his capacity as Editor in Chief of Public Organization Review, Farazmand opened the concluding article in the Governance and Organizational Eclecticism Symposium issue of the journal with the words, “Can We Go Home Now?” (2013, 219). Farazmand concludes by stating:
The last 30 years or so has been a long era of trying different ideas, forms and types of experiments staged and led by corporate-market driven designers in regard to public service, governance and administration. Many roads have been taken, targets have been met, and lessons – good, bad, and ugly – have been learned (Farazmand, 2013, 225).
Farazmand then suggests that in public administration we are now faced with three options. The first, and least desirable in Farazmand’s eyes, is to “continue experimentation, a muddling through along with a snakes and ladders approach” where, in a horrible game of chance, there will be as much (if not more) backsliding as there will be ascents (2013, 226). The second option, and one that Farazmand sees as worth experimenting with, would be a return to what he called “the unambiguous options of the old second era choices” that he suggests could include “some of the counter-globalization and locally-oriented citizen-based community organizations in public administration and governance” (2013, 226). Of this choice Farazmand states clearly that “We have nothing to lose or worry about” (2013, 226). Farazmand’s third, and preferred option, is to reinforce a vision of the “rightful role of government – representative, democratic, responsive and competent government – to play the leading role of maintaining a balance, curbing market abuses and correcting for market failures, and the rightful role of a competent public administration to perform its functions of broad public service guided by ‘principled professionalism’” (Farazmand, 2013, 226).
What will be described in minute detail by this paper clearly falls in the realm of what Farazmand described with his second option; something that should be tried because “we have nothing to lose or worry about” by doing so (2013, 226).
Building the Research Model
Before going further with this paper, and of particular importance before getting into the literature review, it is important to understand the theoretical model that will be utilized to work through the inductive sequence. To this end, Figure 1 offers up an introduction into understanding what will become the dependent variable, independent variable, and two intervening variables for this theoretical paper.
The Dependent Variable
Figure 1 - The Research Model
As shown in the model, the dependent variable (Y) is a measure of the effectiveness of a social equity activist, street-level bureaucrat, community organizer, or other social entrepreneur. As a construct, this effectiveness will be measured in terms of how often the progressive policy proposals of these individuals (specifically, proposals aimed at improving the social equity of agreed-upon vulnerable and/or marginalized populations) actually make it onto the political agendas at various levels of government. This effectiveness is an especially important construct in a political climate where the social equity activist and her allies are in the minority. (As an aside, research supports the fact that a majority of social equity activists are women. In recognition of this fact, this paper will use traditional feminine gender pronouns throughout in lieu of adapting a “he/she” qualifier or a plural “they” pronoun.)
The Independent Variable
Returning to the research model shown as Figure 1, the independent variable (X1) is represented as the Power to Mobilize Bias. More broadly, this is interpreted to mean the power that a dominant group has to mobilize bias against another class or group of people who have a history of being cast as either “undeserving” or “deviant.” Because of how subjective this construct would be, a proxy will be introduced in the next section that is intended to make it easier to isolate this variable in the context of doing research. For now, suffice it to say that most individuals can think of instances where powerful groups have stepped in during elections and been very successful in mobilizing bias; in many cases to such a degree that elections have been determined based on the irrational reaction of the electorate to fear-based media campaigns. This claim is central to this paper and will be expanded as it relates to the independent variable and the two intervening variables represented in Figure 1. As a case in point, and just to illustrate the above idea that elections have been swayed by the mobilization of bias, there are two stand-out examples in the case of the United States that are both associated with the “wrong turn” spoken of in the previous section.
Many political historians attribute the resounding defeat of George McGovern by Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election to the fear-based nature of the slogan, “amnesty, abortion, and acid” (Jamieson, 1996, 306-328). To be fair, while every presidential campaign has more than a fair share of bias-mobilizing attack ads, the use of the “amnesty, abortion, and acid” slogan is particularly suited for inclusion in this paper for several reasons. First, the degree to which that mobilization of bias succeeded stands out in history as a benchmark for how modern political campaigns have been conducted since then. Second, it was not an attack ad on McGovern so much as it was a deliberate mass-mobilization of bias against the dreaded “others;” the hippies, feminists, and peace activists. Third, the slogan must be seen in the context of the late 1960s, when progressivism itself was not only seen as immoral, but also anti-God. As it relates to this point, an entire section of the literature review delves into how Terror Management Theory can be indicated in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections.
To be fair, the Democrats used emotionally-charged fear-based tactics to great effect with the “Daisy Ad” when Lyndon B. Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s own words and actions (“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice;”) that gave the fear that Goldwater would initiate a global nuclear war most of its traction (Jamieson, 1996, 181-208). Much more remains to be said about the power to mobilize bias, and what makes the use of that power an illegitimate use in the context of this paper, but for now suffice it to say that when it is power that determines the outcomes of democratic elections, it is important that it first be determined to be legitimate power, which leads us to the first intervening variable.
The Intervening Variable X2
Returning to Figure 1, the theoretical development in this paper dictates that the perceived legitimacy of the power represented by X1 be looked at separately from the actual ability to wield that power. This is a critical distinction that must be underscored here, but once again, just as with X1, it will be incredibly difficult to find a suitable construct that can measure the perceived legitimacy of power. A proxy will be introduced in the next section that is expected to facilitate the measurement of this perceived legitimacy, but before introducing the proxy, the nature of perceived legitimacy, in the context of this paper needs to be clearly understood as a construct.
Illegitimate power that is perceived as legitimate can be thought of as “a convincing lie” through which a group (the population of interest) is convinced that those in a capacity of leadership have the group’s best interests at heart. What this research hopes to expose is a mechanism whereby power that is being abused (and is therefore illegitimate) can be exposed in such a way that these populations of interest can see the mechanisms at work that create a climate in which the marginalized are, in fact, consenting to their own oppression. With this in mind, the suitability of the proxy for X2 that will be introduced in an upcoming section will be more easily understood.
The Intervening Variable X3
The ability of representative democracy to serve a minority or vulnerable population is a topic of research that has filled entire libraries, and is not going to be a major topic of this paper. It is, nevertheless, important that it be recognized as a vital intervening variable in the model. Again, in the simplest of terms, seen through the lens of a social equity activist, if the “representative” nature of representative democracy is working, the social equity activist is already highly effective and there is little to get excited about, from an activist’s perspective.
The very nature of this positive correlation between X3 and Y dictates that when the democracy – or governance, if you will – is working, street-level bureaucrats and community organizers working with marginalized and vulnerable populations can just be happy going about doing what they do best, which is providing public services and goods to the people who need them, advocating for change when things are not going well, and having policymakers respond favorably to those recommendations for change when required. Even disfavored groups in society deserve good governance that strives, at the very least, to integrate them into participants in improving the human condition. Stated another way, even criminals who harm society deserve the opportunity to make restitution to their victims and make an honest effort to become rehabilitated. Social Darwinism (where those who make poor life-choices are left to fend for themselves) should not be a public administration methodology to reduce the cost of providing public goods and services
To use Rawlsian terms, representative democracy should strike that balance between justice and liberty by ensuring that the mechanism works just as well for minorities (protecting their right to be different) as it does for the dominant groups, many of whom argue that any erosion of their privileged status is somehow a “loss of liberty.”
The Research Questions
This paper proposes to use two very different research questions in order to demonstrate how the mobilization of bias is foundational to so many seemingly unrelated “wicked problems” of the societies in which we live. As will be demonstrated, if bias can be mobilized easily, even the world’s best democracies can feel like totalitarian regimes if you are not a member of the dominant group. Unfortunately, many of the states in the United States exist on the fringe of this condition, primarily as a result of race-based and religious bigotry.
As a final comment before exploring the research questions, this paper will unavoidably come across to many as Neo-Marxist in tone, and makes no attempt to avoid that because of how class structure, throughout time, has (generally speaking) been engineered to mobilize bias, spread terror at the mere idea of change (pitting one class against another in zero-sum thinking and “just wars”), and allowed the elite to engage a governing elite to do the dirty work of keeping the proletariat marginalized and powerless.
Research Question #1
The first research question asks, Can street-level bureaucrats and community workers in the inner-city break free from their hierarchical structures to generate a single inter-governmental and inter-institutional point of contact for the diverse needs of their at-risk population? This question supposes several things, but perhaps the easiest way to illustrate why it has been asked in this form is to provide an example from the two years of participant-observation research that the author engaged in from early 2011 to early 2013.
Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood stretches along a 15-block-long corridor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and traces its origins to the Jim Crow Era. The remnants of the segregation wall can still be seen along the eastern boundary of the Liberty Square development that was constructed by rich Miami businessmen with the help of government funding under “the first 100 days” of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1933 (Mohl, 2011). Liberty Square was completed in 1937 and was a huge blessing for Miami’s oppressed Black population, but the pressures of de facto segregation doomed it from the very beginning to become a high-crime, high-poverty concentration of citizens that, by the very structure of society, relied heavily upon government just to survive.
For the purpose of this paper the reader needs to imagine the circumstances of one particular family in Liberty City that will be constructed so as to be representative of how desperate the situation is. Without getting into the structural racism that doomed this family to their circumstances, the reader needs to imagine in their mind an unmarried couple with two children. The oldest is 14 years old and is attending school regularly. The younger child is 4 years old and is attending pre-K. The mother is pregnant with a third child, but she is HIV positive as a result of her boyfriend (the father of the younger child and soon-to-be-born baby) serving time in prison where he became HIV positive. The couple would have been married long ago except for the impact that it would have had on the provision of much-needed services that literally, in every sense of the word, keep the family alive. With his criminal record, the father has been unable to secure a job, but he is hopeful and is attending a job-training program at the local community college. He still has to see his parole officer on a regular basis as a condition of his release. Because the mother continues to work (at barely above minimum wage, and in constantly changing shifts), and the father is at college during the day, the family have a patchwork of childcare arrangements, only some of which qualify for subsidies. For the most part, the mother’s elderly mother is the fail-safe for afterschool supervision of the older boy and the preschooler, but it is debatable as to whether the 14-year-old is a caregiver to both his grandmother and his little brother, and the grandmother is just an adult presence.
This inner-city family, in one form or another, is typical of what the author witnessed and heard of on a regular basis during his two years in association with the Belafonte TACOLCY Center. When examined closely, it is apparent that this family navigates their way through several dozen contacts every week with distinct (and administratively disconnected) community and government service providers. On the institutional side, there is, for the most part, a complete lack of contact between the street-level bureaucrats who are the primary points of contact for the family. This is the scenario that the reader needs to keep in mind in order to understand the important nature of why Research Question #1 has been asked with the wording that it has.
In order to un-pack Question #1 and relate it to the research objectives of this dissertation, Figure 2 has been provided to highlight how the variables of the research model will be applied specifically to the circumstances of the inner-city street-level bureaucrat and the community workers. Looking at our independent variable X1, it is important at this point in the paper to think about who the brokers of power are. In the case of Miami in the 1920s and 1930s, which group was it that historically mobilized bias against African-American descendants of slaves and cast them as “undeserving” of housing in better neighborhoods? Moving forward in time, who were the brokers of power that prevented new narratives about
Figure 2 - Research Question #1
African-Americans from altering the old discourse? Why did the end of the Jim Crow laws and other changes in law in the 1960s have a negative impact on Liberty City, when the original intent of the laws was that American society would begin to integrate?
In examining the first intervening variable X2, highlighted by the red outline in Figure 2 is the question of whether the sustaining institutions that either inspire or support the mobilization of bias are legitimate or not. In many instances, it was only through the complicity of already privileged groups, as well as administrative complicity, that governments, in the decades since the 1930s, held onto policies that would ensure the continued marginalization of Blacks and those of low socio-economic. In such cases where structural racism became entrenched, if that power has only been retained because of a hierarchical structure that works against long-overdue policy changes, is that administrative power a legitimate power? What kind of changes would allow more power to reside with the street-level bureaucrats so that our sample Liberty City family might experience a more coordinated delivery of the services that they need on a weekly basis?
Finally, looking at X3 as it relates to whether or not the city, county, state, or federal government is sensitive to the needs of Liberty City residents or not, that is a question of whether or not representative democracy is working for these citizens. If the Miami-Dade School District has a disproportionate share of high schools in the state that received an “F” grade, what does that say about the representative nature of the state school system?
These are all questions that this paper hopes to address in the coming pages.
Research Question #2
In a deliberate attempt to have Question #2 stand in stark contrast to Question #1, the second research question asks, Can a tiny PFLAG Group (parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) who meet around a dining room table in one of Utah’s homogeneous suburban communities have a measurable impact on state policy decision and thereby gain important rights and protections for their vulnerable children and friends? Similar to Question #1, this question supposes many things that now must also be unpacked. In doing so, the reader should begin to see the connection between the two research questions. The most obvious connection is the fact that both problems exist because of a social construction of bias (Schneider and Ingram, 1993, 335). In Question #1 the bias has cast the population as undeserving, and in Question #2 the bias has cast the population as deviant.
Figure 3 - Research Question #2
In the same way that Figure 2 unpacked the variables of the research model for Question #1, Figure 3 unpacks the variables for Question #2. As it relates to power (independent variable X1), the reader should contemplate who it is that is behind the bias that portrays the LGBT community as deviant? Religion, of course, stands out, but religious liberty was supposed to be restricted in how it impacts governance. At what point did religions assume the power to enshrine religious dogma into state and federal laws?
Again, highlighted by the red outline, the question of legitimacy is asked, and this paper will take an extensive look into whether or not religious arguments have standing when used to support policy proposals; this in spite of a concerted effort on the part of the Founding Fathers to avert this. This begs the question of why long-time congressman Barney Frank felt more comfortable coming out as gay in 1987 than he did coming out as a nonbeliever in religion; an act which took another 25 years before he felt the moment was right (Wing, 2013). In that same article, Wing underscores that the most recent “out” atheist in Congress lost his seat to a challenger in the 2012 election cycle. Furthermore, why were both houses of the Arizona legislature able to pass a law in February 2014 that would allow blatant religious discrimination in the form of a right to refuse service to anyone in public establishments? Why could these legislators not see the comparison to the F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina from the first half of 1960? Is religious-based bigotry so far removed from other forms of bigotry that one seems somehow more tolerable in a society that has a constitution that speaks of equal treatment?
Again, as it relates to representation, if a sworn atheist cannot get elected to public office in the United States, what does that say about the separation of church and state? Who truly speaks for the nonbelievers, agnostics, and non-Christians in the United States, especially in a state like Utah? This is why the second research question has been asked in the format shown. It provides a real test of what it would take before a previously marginalized population would feel that their needs are being met by their elected officials.
In concluding this section, the idea that administrative power is being abused if a vulnerable group or class of people continue to be marginalized by any form of that administrative power, this should render that power illegitimate. This abuse of power is therefore the single phenomenon of interest to this research paper.
Limiting the Scope of the Research
In taking on such “wicked problems” as those represented by the two research questions, a mechanism will need to be put into place to limit the scope of this theoretical paper. In order to keep this paper focused on the single phenomenon of interest – the abuse of power that renders it illegitimate – this paper will ask three questions at the end of each section in order to return to the overarching purpose.
1) Who was marginalized?
2) Which group was made to appear to benefit?
3) Which group really benefited?
Asking the first question provides the opportunity to confirm that the research remains focused on the dependent variable; the effectiveness of the social equity activist. Knowing who is being harmed is important in identifying how the policy making process has treated this group historically.
Asking the second question will help in identifying who the dominant group is. This is an important question to ask because only by identifying this group can one come to terms with what it is exactly that convinces this group to perceive powerful leaders as legitimate leaders, especially when it becomes obvious that others are suffering unequal treatment under that leadership. As noted several times earlier, the bulk of this paper will deal with this question, which is represented in the model as the intervening variable, X2.
The third question that will ensure that the scope of this paper is limited is asked in order to fully understand the independent variable, X1. It is important to know this because, as will be shown through the literature review, the truly powerful are very skilled in constructing narratives that convince those who presume to be in privileged positions to support laws, policies, and regulations that do not have their interests at heart. In this way, the truly powerful convince voters to consent to their own oppression, for numerous reasons that will be discussed in detail later.
This research will not be delving into policy studies, but will instead defer readers to existing research done by others. Neither will it delve too deeply into representative democracy except for how a redistribution of power (as described in this paper) will theoretically improve the outcomes for elections.
The Revised Research Model
To conclude this section, and the chapter, a revised research model will now be put forward that has the more-easily measured proxies in place for X1 and X2. Figure 4 shows the new model, in which the “Power to Mobilize Bias” has been replaced with the “Degree of Worldview Threat,” and the “Perceived Legitimacy of Power” has been replaced with the “Tangible and Emotional Cost of ‘Shunning’”.
Figure 4 - The Revised Research Model with Proxies
Through the literature review for X1 in the upcoming chapter, and through the inductive sequence of the six hypotheses that will be introduced, the connection between the ability to mobilize bias (the power) and the degree of reactivity that a population has to a worldview threat will be explained. As noted earlier, the reason for substituting a proxy such as this is because of how much easier it is to capture constructs that measure reactivity to a worldview threat. Simple survey tactics will allow this kind of research to be conducted in terms that are familiar to the population of interest, whereas questions that ask this population to define “power” would be far more difficult to assemble, and arguable be far less reliable if it could be done at all.
In the literature review for X2 in the upcoming chapter, and the inductive sequence of the six hypotheses, the connection between the perceived legitimacy of power and the tangible and emotional cost of shunning will be explored. What can be implied here is that it should be obvious to most that people feel a need to belong to a group, or community. Such belonging comes with an associated cost of conforming to the group norms. History is full of heartbreaking stories of what it costs in financial terms, terms of personal security, and emotional costs of being rejected by family, church, community, gang, or clan, and it will be shown that this need to conform in order to remain associated with a dominant group will serve as a good proxy with which to measure the perceived legitimacy of power.
Stated another way, when the risk associated with “changing one’s mind” about age-old narratives is high, people tend to be far more complicit in allowing old habits to remain in place, even if one recognizes the great harm that an “othered” population might be suffering. Under these circumstances, it might be easy for an activist to get people to agree with a new idea, but often that agreement is not associated with a willingness to stand up and defend one’s newfound belief in the face of the dominant group.
Conclude the chapter with segue to the next chapter.
LITERATURE REVIEW
INTRODUCTION
This literature review chapter will be composed of five sections. It will first explore the nature of power in general terms before turning the discussion to how coercive power is wielded when specifically leveraging a worldview threat.
The second section will explore the legitimacy of power in general terms before turning to how any legitimacy is lost when the threat of excommunication, shunning, or other action has the power to incur financial, emotional, or other harm upon members of the group or community who fail to conform to the governing narratives of the institution that sustains those narratives. Such power has more in common with extortion than it does with administration.
The third section will speak generally about what was intended when, centuries ago, public intellectuals first advanced the ideas of representative democracy. In this context, modern democratic systems will be examined to show how the theory of a representative democracy has failed to live up to its expectations.
The fourth section will examine the state of solidarity movements in the 21st century in order to show how, after centuries of trying, protestors have failed to devise a mechanism whereby their protest narratives, which have proven successful in disrupting governing systems, have, for the most part, consistently and reliably failed to advance viable policy proposals and have them accepted into the agenda setting process. Simply put, protest narratives have never been afforded a mechanism through which they can be translated into governing narratives. This paper will argue that this is because solidarity movements have failed to translate local initiatives into global campaigns; a process that this paper will refer to as glocalization.
The fifth and final section will open up a new view toward the nature of institutions, specifically as it relates to the above four sections; power, legitimacy, representative democracy, and the glocalization of solidarity movements.
COERCIVE POWER AND REACTIVITY TO A WORLDVIEW THREAT
This section is the literature review for X1 and proxy X1. In the first research model, X1 was described as the power to mobilize bias, but was later revised so that it could be measured with a proxy; the reactivity of a study population to a worldview threat. This literature will explore this link in order to fully understand how power is exploited to maximum advantage when necessary in order to protect the privileges enjoyed by the elite.
Informational Power
A cautious (and highly qualified) examination of French and Raven’s five forms of power (1959) will likely come into play as it relates to how Chomsky and Schattschneider are interpreted. Raven, primarily because of his prominence in social psychology, will be hard to bypass, primarily because of his work with the so-called sixth power; informational power (Raven, 1965).
The Power to Mobilize Bias
This paper is informed by the article Two Faces of Power” as a foundational piece because of how it examined the “mobilization of bias” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1962). Also instrumental in this regard will be John Gaventa’s “third face of power” (1982).
Richard Couto’s work will figure into this part of the research, primarily when he speaks of “ignored terror” of the inner-city, which is another way of lending persistence to bias (Couto, 2010).
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Sustaining Institutions and Narrative Communities
While this paper will not be permitted to expand into a paper on narrative theory (deferring readers to existing research by others on the topic, without even bringing the topic into the literature review), it will nevertheless take an institutional look at what comprises a “narrative community” (Baker, 2006).
Because a narrative community requires a sustaining institution in order to survive, this paper will expand from Couto’s look at “terror” (2010) and examine how terror management theory (Davis, Juhl, & Routledge, 2011), as coercive power, is used when the sustaining institutions of marginalizing narrative communities use their hierarchical structure to “close structural holes” in their homogeneous policy networks (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, pp). These informal networks, which this paper will examine as institutions, are the byproducts of narrative communities that subscribe to marginalizing interpretive monopolies (those socially constructed and biased views that are used to define who the “deviants” and “undeserving” are).
Sustaining Institutions
With the added benefit of Figure ? above, it is now possible to build upon the idea of institutions a bit more, specifically as it relates to how an institution might exist primarily to defend a narrative community. As suggested by the term interpretive monopoly, when the very nature of pluralism poses a threat to a narrative community, the sustaining institution of that narrative must react when others attempt to offer an alternative narrative. It is important to distinguish this kind of a threat (pluralism) from a threat whereby another group is attempting to deconstruct the interpretive monopoly (elimination). When an alternative narrative is offered, nobody is saying that the dominant group is wrong, per se. What they are saying is that there is more than one version of the “truth.” It is merely an offer to allow the two narrative communities to coexist, but where there is an interpretive monopoly narrative community, even coexisting poses a worldview threat. The sustaining institutions for interpretive monopolies – institutions that claim capital “T” Truths – are what this paper is going to primarily focus on.
The inter-group competition to define “truth” is a function of sociology, and in introducing the work on institutionalism by Kingsley Davis and several contemporary sociologists like himself, W. Richard Scott writes about this phenomenon.
Later generations of sociologists discarded the strong biological/evolutionary analogies and functional arguments devised by [Herbert] Spencer [1876, 1896, 1910] and [William Graham] Sumner [Folkways, 1906], but nevertheless recognized the centrality of institutions as a sociological focus. Thus, in his influential mid-20th century text Human Society, Kingsley Davis (1949: 71) defined institutions as ‘a set of interwoven folkways, mores and laws built around one or more functions,’ adding that in his opinion, ‘the concept of institutions seems better than any other to convey the notion of segments or parts of the normative order.’ Every major sociological text and curriculum of the last hundred years has reflected not only the important distinction of levels (e.g., individuals, groups, communities, societies), but also the functional division of social life into spheres or arenas (e.g., kinship, stratification, politics, economics, religion) governed by varying normative systems. The conception of institutions as functionally specialized arenas persists in contemporary notions of organization field or sector (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Scott and Meyer 1983; see Chapters 3 and 8) and is strongly represented in the work of Friedland and Alford (1991), who stress the importance for social change of the existence of multiple, differentiated, and partially conflicting institutional spheres, each governed by distinctive ‘logics.’ (Scott, 2014, 11; emphasis in original).
When a sustaining institution, regardless of how informal it is, is charged with defending a capital “T” Truth as an interpretive monopoly, it is obligated to defend that Truth from outside attacks (pluralism, or as Scott calls it “conflicting institutional spheres), but also from inside attacks, which is where the need for that institution to be “governed by distinctive logics” comes from. Returning to Figure ? above, this is what defines the “ingroup,” but that discussion will be tabled until the next section that discusses the costs of conformity, and relates it to the legitimacy of power.
Next Subsection
James March will pervade this research because it is seen as essential to go through his list of “big ideas” (March, 2008, 5). Each idea will be briefly introduced to explain why it has either been included in the scope of this paper, or excluded. Those included, of course, will be expanded on to ensure that they stay in keeping with, or depart from, March’s research. Of special note will be March’s “logic of appropriateness” and “logic of consequences.” Of particular importance is the following quote: “The context of institutions matters: Organizations and organizational scholars exist in complex networks of legal, political economic and social institutions and must be understood as co-evolving with those institutions and the rules that inhabit them” (March, 2008, 4).
Because of this, a serious examination into Hugh Heclo’s more conservative (and especially libertarian-leaning) views of institutions will be done to explore how to ensure that the new consensus-building, non-hierarchical institution of linked small groups might be structured so that it actually “shrinks” government (Heclo, 2008).
Ostensive and Performative Views of Narratives
In Figure ? (below), the reader will recognize the narrative community on the left side from Firgure ? (above), in which the idea of narrative communities and sustaining institutions were first introduced. It is important to remember that an interpretive monopoly narrative community considers their own narrative to be the only “true” narrative, or, in other words, they claim a capital “T” truth. In the case of Figure ? (above), that interpretive monopoly is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “took something” from whites. As discussed earlier, the sustaining institution(s) that defend this narrative also defend innumerable other narratives about race in America, including the idea that Black men are threatening, violent, and angry. Since these narratives are centuries old, it is safe to assume that members of these narrative communities see the narratives ostensively, which is to say that they see the narratives much in the same way as they see a table that has been set for guests. Once you set the table, you can leave the room and the table remains “set” just as you left it for when you return later.
Alternatively, when one sees narratives performatively, one is forced to see that once actors stop “performing” the narrative, the narrative ceases to exist. In other words, people can change their mind about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by simply leaving the narrative community on the left and joining another narrative community. This suggests that there can be multiple versions of the “truth.” Again, an ostensive view is equivalent to saying there is a capital “T” Truth, and a performative view embraces a pluralistic society.
Hierarchical Authority and Interpretive Monopolies
It can be argued that the modern governing structure, where enormous amounts of power are still being vested in hierarchical leaders, is a relic of an era where kings and feudal lords, and religious institutions, concentrated the power in order to control the masses. Transitioning that power into secular institutions is what revolutions were (and still are) fought over. According to some, and as advocated in this paper, the mistake of modern society, as will be discussed later in this chapter when exploring how representative democracy was intended to work, was to allow those powerful institutions that took over from kings, lords, and religious leaders to retain a hierarchical structure.
Public administration’s failure to challenge the notion that this was the only way it could have been designed is a shortcoming that continues to dog our institutional designs to this day. This paper borrows from Denhardt, and many others, in suggesting that society has been unwilling to critically examine how inappropriate hierarchical structures are (2011, x), and public administration has failed to lead on this topic.
Introduce Chompsky here?
Zero Sum Thinking, Just-Wars, and Complicity
Anomie plays an interesting role in this research because of how the mere threat of it is used to leverage fear through zero-sum thinking and a “just war” mentality. Religious fundamentalist leaders often close their “structural holes” by not only comparing their own “superior” narrative community against the “deviant” others, but often they will aggressively use a “normless society,” in which the fabric of society has been shredded and there is no remaining social identity, to foment a “just war” mentality (i.e. “take our country back” means what…to whom?). When pluralism is equated to anomie by leaders who supposedly “speak for god,” the expansion of civil rights for those cast as “deviants” is the same as a “call to war.”
In this research, the only lens through which the above problems will be examined will be the role of the leader who assumes the role of “protector” for the sustaining institution of the narrative community. Again, this is an examination of “intent to marginalize,” but that examination also necessarily includes the kind of education and training that leaders (activists, as well as street-level bureaucrats) will need in order to circumvent and delegitimize the illegitimate use of power by the elite class who have been masters of exploitation for centuries.
America’s Inner-cities as Structural Institutions
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Deficiencies in Above Research and Studies
Speaking generally of efforts to improve circumstances for vulnerable and marginalized populations, very few researchers have been able to gain any traction with work that proposes alternative to institutional designs that would diffuse power donward to the street-level bureaucrats. It is therefore critically important to ask why that is. Much of it, in the context of this paper, has to do with the skin-color, ethnicity, or socio-economic status of the study population, but more frequently it has to do with the fact that even when it is a white person speaking to a white audience, everything gets a negotiated reading, even if the text has been properly framed and contextualized. Two white authors who speak on this issue are Luke Visconti and Tim Wise.
Luke Visconti (Ask the White Guy) quote.
Tim Wise quote.
The phenomenon of “white guilt,” and the associated emotional cost of actually admitting to the atrocities of the past, also play largely into why racism in the United States (and other forms of ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the world) has been so difficult to deal with. As Susan Gooden writes, this has become a “nervous area of government” (2014). The United States has been able to make reparations with the Japanese-Americans for putting them into concentration camps, and they have allowed the Native Americans to become self-governing so that they now control a measure of their lives, but reparations for slavery and the Jim Crow era segregation appear to be a “bridge to far.” This paper attempts to open a conversation into what is behind that reluctance.
The fact that the movie 12 Years a Slave was nominated on both sides of the Atlantic in either first or second place as the “best reviewed film of the 2013” speaks to how important it is to some that society maintain an accurate account of the horrors of slavery. But in contrast to the general public, film reviewers don’t go to the movies to “feel good.” A common thread in a many of the film critic’s reviews seems to be the idea that 12 Years a Slave is considered to be one of the most accurate portrayals of America’s slave period (McFarnon, 2014).
In keeping with films such as Schindeler’s List (1993), historically accurate films underscore what the Washington State History Museum intuitively understood when they decided on the slogan History is Not for Wimps for a 2007 public relations advertising campaign (Erikson, 2009). Dr. Emily West, an associate professor of history at the University of Reading, opened her interview with a film reviewer by stating, “The subject matter made 12 Years a Slave a very uncomfortable film to watch” (McFarnon, 2014). Journalistic reporting even suggests that as many as eight members of the 450-member executives branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to even watch 12 Years a Slave, even though they were expected to be voting critically on the merits of the film. In the words of Ballot No. 7 reviewer, who admitted she was a senior citizen, wrote, “I’ve lived long enough to know what it was like for a person to be a black person in America. I mean, it’s not anything that I’m not aware of.” She continues on to underscore made here by saying, “At 5 o’clock tonight I’m gonna watch Going My Way on TCM [Turner Classic Movies channel]. That’s my kind of a movie – even if Bing Crosby was actually a bad person. Is there one picture this year that makes you feel better? (Feinberg, 2014; emphasis in original).
What the above citations bear out (Wise, Visconti, and Feinberg) is reflected in the numbers when you compare two representative films that were both released in October 2013. Leading up to the 2014 Oscars (reporting in late February), the website www.rottentomatoes.com compiled a list of the best-reviewed films of 2013, and Gravity, a film starring Sandra Bullock, hit #1 on their list with a 97% positive rating from 299 reviews. Ranked at #2 was 12 Years a Slave, with a 96% positive rating from 253 reviews. Both films competed head-to-head at the Golden Globes and split the top awards, with 12 Years a Slave taking best drama and Gravity taking best director. At the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA), it was a similar outcome with 12 Years a Slave taking Best Movie and Best Actor, but Gravity swept numerous other top honors, including Best British Film. For the industry’s top awards, Gravity has been nominated for ten Oscars and 12 Years a Slave has been nominated for nine.
But that is not the complete story. As of February 18, 2014, Gravity had a total box office take of $268,262,383 compared to $48,427,935 for 12 Years a Slave. That compares head-to-head with Schindler’s List, which also won a bevy of awards from the industry, but only has a lifetime gross of $96,065,768 (Box Office Mojo, 2014). Steve McQueen, the British director of 12 Years a Slave, recognized this when he accepted his BAFTA award for Best Movie by noting that 21 million people today live in slavery, and he concluded by stating, “I just hope 150 years from now, our ambivalence will not allow another filmmaker to make this film” (Hutchinson, 2014).
This paper intends to directly target that kind of ambivalence; reversing it where possible, and preventing it from gaining any additional traction. The process by which this might be done is known as discourse structuration, which will be covered later in this paper. Suffice it to say that films like 12 Years a Slave and Schindler’s List play key roles in changing the discourse in society.
Narrowing the Scope
As promised in the first chapter, at the end of this section we return to our three questions in order to ascertain how this section stayed within the scope of the paper. As a reminder, the three questions are:
1) Who was marginalized?
2) Which group was made to appear to benefit?
3) Which group really benefited?
Body.
THE COSTS OF CONFORMITY
This section of the literature review is an exploration of the first intervening variable, X2, and is the primary topic of interest in this paper. In the first research model (Figure 1) X2 was identified as the perceived legitimacy of power, but in the revised research model it was replaced with a proxy, the tangible and emotional cost of shunning, excommunication, or other mechanism of exclusion from the ingroup. This literature review promises to explore the link between illegitimate power and the tactics utilized by those desiring power that make it illegitimate power when such tactics are used to produce and sustain a marginalizing narrative.
As described in the previous section, and illustrated by the outgroup box in the bottom right corner of Figure ?, the threats against a narrative are not restricted to outside groups attacking the narrative and its worldview. Frequently, threats to a worldview come from inside the narrative community itself. It can be argued that these attacks pose a greater threat than those from outside. This section explores how internal threats are managed by looking at the ability of the sustaining institution to impose harm upon its own membership, thus plugging the “structural holes” in the network (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, pp). It asks whether power, when used to exploit people and extort obedience from them under threat of harm or loss, is legitimate, and it is a question asked by Robert K. Merton.
There may ensue, in particular vocations and in particular types of organization, the process of sanctification. …[T]hrough sentiment-formation, emotional dependence upon bureaucratic symbols and status, and affective involvement in spheres of competence and authority, there develop prerogatives involving attitudes of moral legitimacy which are established as values in their own right, and are no longer viewed as merely technical means for expediting administration (Scott, 2014, 23; Merton, 1940/1957, 202; emphasis added).
Scott goes on to explain how Merton influenced the work of Philip Selznick, who wrote extensively on how the process of institutionalization works.
Institutionalization is a process. It is something that happens to an organization over time, reflecting the organization’s own distinctive history, the people who have been in it, the groups it embodies and the vested interests they have created, and the way it has adapted to its environment. …In what is perhaps its most significant meaning, ‘to institutionalize’ is to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand (Scott, 2014, 24; Selznick, 1956, 16-17; emphasis in original).
Scott picks up from quoting Selznick and provides the foundation upon which this entire section, and indeed, most of this paper, is premised.
As organizations become infused with value, they are no longer regarded as expendable tools; participants want to see that they are preserved. By embodying a particular set of values, the organization acquires a character structure, a distinctive identity. Maintaining the organization is no longer simply an instrumental matter of keeping the machinery working, but becomes a struggle to preserve a set of unique values. A vital role of leadership for Selznick, echoing Chester Barnard’s (1938) influential message in The Functions of the Executive, is to define and defend these values (Scott, 2014, 24-25; emphasis in original).
The above quote is probably the most important quote in this paper. It needs to be remembered throughout the entire reading.
Terror Management and the Threat of Pluralism
In the 2005 documentary film, Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality, filmmakers Shen and Bennick revisit the ground-breaking work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1974 book, Denial of Death, advocated for a “science of humankind” (Shen & Bennick, 2005). To introduce Becker they interview several prominent researchers on the topic of death and dying, one of whom was Sheldon Solomon, a professor of psychology at Skidmore College, who states that:
“[Becker] said, ‘I want to understand very broad questions about what it is that underlies human behavior.’ Becker’s position was that if you take that quest seriously, then you can’t confine your inquiry to any particular discipline. He said that big questions require wide ranging scrutiny, and that no discipline should be disqualified from active consideration. What he insists is that the human species solve the existential problem of death by utilizing the same intellectual skills that, in an odd way, created the problem in the first place – and that’s our vast intelligence and ability to think in abstract and symbolic ways in the service of maintaining and constructing what he calls culture (Shen & Bennick, 2005; fifteen minutes into film).
The narrator in the film goes on to remind the viewer that, “For Becker, culture is a collective fabrication – a shared set of beliefs about the nature of reality; developed to help us deal with our death anxiety. Culture provides meaning, and helps us to maintain a sense of security in an unsure world” (Shen & Bennick, 2005). Central to the film is the mechanism that every culture develops in order to assign “meaning” to a person’s life. Central to this was the development of a narrative that defined the origin of the world and man, which also necessarily dealt with death. When Darwin came alone after the Enlightenment period and published The Origin of Species in 1859 he became the first serious challenger to the thinking that there was, by default, going to be some kind of life after death. Generally speaking, and on a large scale, mainstream thinkers were forced to face the question, “What if this life is all there is?”
As discussed in the documentary, one coping mechanism that culture provided to individuals as they faced the inevitability of their own death was to have those individuals self-affiliate with institutions that were immortal. These are the institutions that have become the sustaining institutions for narrative communities, and they will only survive if they defend themselves from every possible threat. One of the most dangerous threats to the “immortality” of these institutions is pluralism, or as Hugh Miller would describe it, the adoption of a performative view of the narrative. Culturally defined institutions can only be “immortal” if the narrative communities that define them see their narratives through an ostensive lens.
When the threat to the narrative is internal to the cultural institution, it is important there be a powerful hierarchical structure that has the ability to swiftly and effectively “close structural holes,” and preserve the homogeneity of community (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008). Terror management theory, which relies upon this life-after-death cultural narrative being pervasive within the community, is arguably the most effective way to do this (Davis, Juhl, & Routledge, 2011). If the costs of shunning or excommunication were strictly financial, or if the losses were only to be calculated through the value of material goods, it would be easier to compensate those who change their worldview and learn to embrace diversity in order to stop the harm to a vulnerable or marginalized class of people, but when the cost is calculated in terms of “eternal death,” how does society compensate that person?
Leveraging a Worldview Threat with Illegitimate Power
In this research it will be difficult to separate X1 and X2 primarily because they are used in tandem, as was illustrated by several studies that were highlighted in the documentary, Flight from Death. At about 55 minutes into the film, results from three studies are described, with the most alarming a study that was done to explore whether a person would willfully impose harm upon another human being after a religious worldview had been threatened. By asking study participants to prescribe a dose of extremely potent hot sauce as a proxy for their intent to harm another person, the study found that after being reminded of their own death, and also after exposing the participant to a threat to their own worldview, a person was shown to prescribe twice the dose of hot sauce over a control population (Shen & Bennick, 2005).
This paper only seeks to point out this topic as one of those interdisciplinary arenas that will play a central role in the research that will need to be done in tandem with the other research prescribed by this dissertation. This is, after all, a call to return to what Becker advocated with his book in 1974 in his call to develop a “science of human nature.” Again, 1974 is a year that is not to be overlooked for its significance when examined with the other pivotal works being cited in this dissertation.
One problem that will be at the core of future research, as it relates to X2 and proxy X2 as an intervening variable in the current research model is captured in a single sentence spoken by professor Sheldon Solomon toward the end of Flight from Death, where he says, “Psychologically speaking, we don’t have a set of values in place that renders it acceptable to just be a person of integrity” (Shen & Bennick, 2005).
The Black Male and White Terror
In mid-February 2014, just a couple of days following the declaration of a mistrial in the first-degree murder charge against Michael Dunn for killing Jordan Davis, a Black male teen, Brittney Cooper wrote a scathing indictment of Florida’s legal system and the uneven application of the notorious Stand Your Ground law. The backstory to Cooper’s article is that Dunn was easily convicted on three counts of attempted murder for firing three ‘unjustified’ bullets into a fleeing vehicle after he had already fired a previous volley of seven bullets that were justifiable due to a fear of suffering “great bodily harm” (Campos, 2014). Three bullets out of those first seven ‘justified’ bullets hit and killed Davis.
Cooper wrote specifically about the kind of “fear” that has been pervasive in American narratives from when the first slaves were brought onto this soil, and her words (as well as Campos’, who is a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder) apply across the board, in all 50 states. This socially constructed fear strikes at the heart of the structural racism that marginalizes every Black male in America.
Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, opened her article with a quote by another professor, Angela Ards, who wrote, “The chilling social logic of this illogical legal verdict is that Dunn has been found guilty of missing the other black boys in the car, of failing to kill them all.” One is tempted to dismiss this as hyperbole, but Ards’ logic is jarring precisely because of what it means to be a Black male in a country where a feeling of fear alone – a very subjective and relative term if there ever was one – can be justification for killing somebody. By itself, the kinds of events that might materialize out of such a ridiculous law could be expected to wreak havoc across the broad spectrum of society, but Cooper clarifies where the problem in America is very specific to how fear has always been the primary mechanism of mobilizing bias against the Black male. This is how Cooper painted the scenario in the case of the Jordan Davis shooting.
This case, like the case of Trayvon Martin, hinges on whether white fear legally outweighs and is therefore more legally defensible than black life. […] Despite a belief in progress [by the college students I teach], this moment suggests that young black men’s audacity to exist is a capital offense punishable by murder. […] But white racial anxiety – and in particular the alleged legitimacy of it – is a foregone conclusion searching for facts. In this era, those “facts” seem to be readily available in endless media depictions of violent black males. […] During the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, those “facts” could be found in the audacity of black people’s desire to vote, share equal space on sidewalks, be paid fair wages, and eat at the same lunch counters. Black being is the problem. Not black thuggery. Black boys officially exist in a state of social death, because the law continues to tell us that their lives, when taken by white men, are legally indefensible. They have been rendered by the law dead men walking. It’s no wonder then that in so many places they act like it. White thuggery, meanwhile, marches on, mowing down black folks at every turn, white sheets, sight unseen. Many white folks believe that black criminality has produced white fear and that white fear in the presence of black masculinity is therefore always justified. But the opposite is true. White anxiety and fear and racism have produced the myth of pervasive black criminality. Interracial black violence is a problem, but white racism has produced the concentrated structures of poverty and lack of access to education that gtive rise to violent behaviors. Our national inability to tell the truth about this will only lead to more black victims (Cooper, 2014).
University of Colorado at Boulder professor, Paul Campos puts it in slightly different words.
Because the “stand your ground’ law creates an affirmative defense for criminal defendants, the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Dunn’s claim that he had a reasonable fear he was about to suffer great bodily harm was false. Such laws, in effect, put the victim rather than the killer on trial, which is exactly what happened in this case. […] And because this is America, the fact that Dunn is white and the teenage boys are black – black boys playing loud “thug” music, to use Dunn’s description – makes it seem “reasonable” to him that the confrontation he started is about to escalate to a point where he will suffer great bodily harm. […] As a practical matter, Florida’s laws give people like Dunn a license to kill anyone they are “reasonably” afraid of. This means that, since the prosecution could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jordan Davis was not guilty of the crime of being a black teenage boy playing loud music in a convenience store parking lot on a Friday night, Davis’ murder will, at least for now, go unpunished (Campos, 2014).
At the heart of this “wicked problem” is the need to sustain a narrative that has no factual foundation, but somebody needed this narrative, so at some point there was a sustaining institution created to not only invent it, but to protect it over the ages. Brittney Cooper echoes the sentiments of Hortense Spillers in suggesting that “if there were no black male criminals […], they would have to be invented [because t]he presence of black criminals justifies white male rage, white women’s fear and subsequent white male violence” (Cooper, 2014; Spillers, 1987). Spillers’ earned international acclaim for how her 1987 article, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, traced the social construction of this appalling narrative and its sustaining institution back to when the African and European first met; back in a century when anything not Christian was “ugly” to the Christians (Spillers, 1987, 70).
As if it was not enough that over the centuries the Black male became synonymous with ugly, threatening, violent, and angry, the scars of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family, is still casting its long, socially-constructed shadow over the plight of Black male masculinity in America (Moynihan, 1965). Spillers’ account of the narrative legacy from the Moynihan Report recounts how, according to Moynihan, “the ‘Negro Family’ has no Father to speak of – his Name, his Law, his Symbolic function mark the impressive missing agencies in the essential life of the black community […] and it is, surprisingly, the fault of the Daughter, or the female line” (Spillers, 1987, 66). This paper takes the view of psychologist William Ryan, who’s 1971 book, Blaming the Victim, takes Moynihan to task for just being another cog in the giant machine of the quintessential American sustaining institutions of white, male privilege (Ryan, 1971).
Deficiencies in Above Research and Studies
Because of the complicity of millions of white Americans, there is no consequence in many states in the United States when a double standard is manifest in federal and state legislatures.
Narrowing the Scope
As promised in the first chapter, at the end of this section we return to our three questions in order to ascertain how this section stayed within the scope of the paper. As a reminder, the three questions are:
1) Who was marginalized?
2) Which group was made to appear to benefit?
3) Which group really benefited?
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CLASSISM AS BARBARISM
In 1899, with the sentence, “The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture,” Thorstein Veblen opens his first and most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen, 1899/1994, 1). Two words in that opening sentence seem to stand at odds with each other: institution and barbarian. It is important to this work that this connection be explored fully.
Seeing the world primarily through an economic lens, Veblen saw classism as an institution of the aristocracy of the late 19th century, and his life-work was to point to this as the mechanism through which power was exploited in barbaric ways. David Noble described Veblen’s book as “social satire [aimed at destroying] loyalty to an established order that had no rational excuse for existence” (1958, 215). To underscore this, Noble describes how Veblen’s aristocratic institutions dictated “…that women must wear unbearable clothes which proved so plainly that the wearers could not and need not work; or that the male leaders of society should assiduously pursue meaningless games” (216). This power to exploit (in this case, exploiting the labor of others) is what this section will focus on, primarily because of how “Veblen could prove, even to the college student, that all this so-called culture was barbarism in disguise (Noble, 1958, 216).
Before leaving this point on classism and barbarism, it is important to understand Veblen’s distinction between savagery and barbarism, primarily because it underscores how hierarchical institutions will, by their very nature, convert to barbarism simply because of how power will inevitably become concentrated in the hands of a few.
Primitive humanity had lived in simple harmony without the invidious distinction of superior class from inferior class, evidenced by the economic symbols of conspicuous waste and consumption. Gradually, however, the transition was made from homogeneous, peaceful savagery to conflicting, competing, warlike barbarism. The barbarians were the conquerors, those who called themselves nobles, those who lived like parasites on the labor of other men. The full expression of the barbaric stage of social evolution, Veblen continued, was reached in medieval Europe and feudal Japan. It was here that the nonproductive work of the aristocrats was most extensively channeled into warlike activity and the obtruse mysticism of a class of priests (Noble, 1958, 217; emphasis added).
Veblen was not just known for his writing on the power to exploit. Along with John Commons and Westley Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen is recognized as one of the most influential institutional economists (Scott, 2014, 3), leading the field of institutional theory by almost a century before institutionalism would mature. Veblen not only rejected the idea of his time that man was merely “hedonistic” and a “lightning calculator of pleasures and pain,” he ridiculed it (Scott, 2014, 3; Veblen, 1998, 398). Instead, Veblen’s theory was that “…the individual’s conduct [is] edged about and directed by his habitual relations to his fellows in the group, but these relations, being of an institutional character, vary as the institutional scene varies” (Scott, 2014, 3; Veblen, 1909, 245). Veblen continued to refine his views on institutions, later writing that he saw institutions as “settled habits of thought common to the generality of man” (Scott, 2014, 4; Veblen, 1919, 239).
Power and Institutionalization
In the forward to W. Richard Scott’s book, he describes institutionalism as “…the most promising and productive lens for viewing organizations (as well as other aspects of contemporary life) in modern society” (2014, ix). As will be seen, this paper not only embraces W. Richard Scott’s decades of research on institutionalism, but proposes that his book, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities, be endorsed as a required textbook for the proper training of anybody seeking to become a transformational leader in a social equity movement. The book is short, yet surprisingly comprehensive in how it covers the problems that this paper will focus on.
Shortly after Veblen’s important work that described institutions as the principle tool of barbarian rulers, John Commons picked up the economic institutionalism torch and carried it for several decades.
Like Veblen, Commons (1924: 7) challenged the conventional emphasis in neoclassical economics on individual choice behavior, suggesting that a more appropriate unit of economic analysis was the transaction, a concept borrowed from legal analysis. ‘The transaction is two or more wills giving, taking, persuading, coercing, defrauding, commanding, obeying, competing, governing, in a world of scarcity, mechanisms and rules of conduct’ (Commons 1924: 7). The ‘rules of conduct’ to which Commons alludes are social institutions. Institutional rules were necessary to define the limits within which individuals and firms could pursue their objectives (Commons 1950/1970) (Scott, 2014, 4; emphasis in original).
If Commons’ “transaction” is seen as a long-overdue policy change that would be more favorable toward a marginalized or vulnerable class of people, his use of the phrase “persuading, coercing, defrauding, commanding, obeying, competing, [and] governing” takes on a whole new meaning when seen through the lens of a dominant group that wields enough power to mobilize bias against a vulnerable group. When the driving force behind that mobilization of bias is a social institution, as Commons’ suggests, then the focus can shift from the members of the institution (the easy target) onto the institution that determines the “rules of conduct” that Commons speaks of. This is precisely what this paper proposes to do. The unit of analysis when looking at the independent variable “Power to Mobilize Bias” is not on the individuals, but on the sustaining institutions that defend the marginalizing narratives that are blocking much-needed policy changes.
There is an important distinction to be made when talking about institutions in the context of this paper, however. By the end of this paper it will be clear that a new kind of institution will be proposed, and therefore it must be clear at the outset that the institutions proposed in this paper should never be allowed to become hierarchical institutions. If they are, as Veblen so vigorously pointed out, it is almost inevitably that they will become institutions of barbarism, enforcing classism and perpetuating the mobilization of bias. This paper will therefore propose mechanisms that will be embedded in the very structure whereby institutions can avoid the pitfalls of falling into old habits where layers of hierarchy can form.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IN A UNIVERSE OF CAPITALISTS
The theoretical portion of this paper will also examine how power that mobilizes bias can be exposed as illegitimate and how our current form of representative democracy has been frustrated by dominant groups (primarily the elite, and their “empires”) that have been effective in using their tactics to manipulate the agenda setting process, leaving it virtually paralyzed by the kind of incrementalism that does little to effect real change for minority groups, historically marginalized populations, and other vulnerable classes.
Elite theory (Farazmand, 1999)
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The Original Intent
Feudalism, Age of Enlightenment, Revolutions, the American Constitution.
Jefferson and Madison; Jacksonian democracy; the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age; the Keynesians vs. the Monetarists; the “wrong turn for America” in 1968; and most recently, Citizens United.
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Socialism vs. Capitalism
Marx and Hegel
Communitarianism
Collectives
Segue into next section.
The Incompatibility of Hegemony and a Representative Democracy
How we consent to be oppressed.
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Gerrymandering for Extremism
Richard Couto (2010) and the “ignored terror” of the inner-city.
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Deficiencies in Above Research and Studies
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Narrowing the Scope
As promised in the first chapter, at the end of this section we return to our three questions in order to ascertain how this section stayed within the scope of the paper. As a reminder, the three questions are:
1) Who was marginalized?
2) Which group was made to appear to benefit?
3) Which group really benefited?
Body.
EFFECTIVE SOCIAL EQUITY ACTIVISM
Protesters continue to disrupt the status quo because they can’t live with themselves if they don’t (cite a “sociology of mental health” source), but the arc of history shows that so long as they have not found an effective tool to use against the forces of hegemony, they will fail. To his credit, Noam Chomsky’s passion has kept him out in the forefront of social equity and peace activists, but he earns money doing what he does, so he can keep at it long after the winter snows drive the protestors off the public squares. This paper proposes to outline several mechanisms that promise to improve the odds and tip the scale a bit more toward the side of activism while at the same time devolving some of the power away from those who hold onto it through illegitimate means.
Speaking of legitimate action by protestors, Schattschneider wrote, “The most legitimate question to be asked in a democracy is: - how can people get control of the government?” (1948, 22). This paper is only incidently outlining a mechanism through which power is wielded, but at the end of the day, this is not to be construed as a quest for power unless one wants to argue that it is only through power that one takes control of government. This paper would rather argue that the first choice would be to have a powerful institution rather than a powerful leader. This is because the only power that most social equity activists are interested in is the power to steer the agenda setting process and public policy making. In other words, the goal is not to win an election, unless winning an election proves to be the only way in which the agenda setting process can be impacted.
In previous sections of this chapter there has been a lengthy discussion about the independent variable (wielding power), and the two intervening variables (legitimate power and representative democracy), and the impact that each of those variables has on the effectiveness of the social equity activist, street-level bureaucrat, and community organizer. This final section of the literature will now discuss a few other desirable traits of the social equity activist that will make them dramatically more effective as transformational leaders who will ultimately be charged with steering the new institutional form that this paper will be developing through the inductive sequence that follows.
Discourse Structuration
Previous sections of this chapter talked extensively about narrative communities and the importance of the sustaining institutions behind those narratives, but we really have not spent much time discussing how a new emergent narrative can be cultured. As discussed, narratives that marginalize vulnerable populations have, in most cases, been performed for centuries, but somebody, somewhere, had to breathe the breath of life into that narrative. As discussed, narratives should not be examined through an ostensive lens. As discussed by Miller, new narrative are generated through a process called discourse structuration (Hajer, 2005, 303; Miller, 2012, 33-34; Hall, 1973, 1-20).
Needs a couple of more paragraphs.
Compelling Ideographs
The building blocks (bricks) of narratives.
Institutional Memory
News aggregating sites on the Internet have blossomed as a popular way for people to secure easy access to their favorite theme of information, and the author is no exception to this practice. This discussion of institutional memory is informed by reviewing a quick summary of the news headlines that the author selected for his reading late in the evening on March 8, 2014. All of these news stories were aggregated by The Huffington Post and Salon, and why this becomes an important point will be discussed after introducing the five news story.
Gay People are Going to Hell, Says Expert Witness in Michigan Gay Marriage Trial
This story caught the author’s attention because of…
The Search for the Higgs Boson – And Why Science Will Defeat Stupidity
This story caught the author’s attention because of…
The Religious Right’s Five Most Demented Persecution Fantasies
This story caught the author’s attention because of…
Climate Buffoons’ Real Motives: Five Reasons They Still Spout Debunked Garbage
This story caught the author’s attention because of…
Syrian Activist Forced from Hometown Pledges to Keep Publicizing Atrocities
This story caught the author’s attention because of…
Several features of what the author chose to read on the evening of March 8, 2014 need to be explained in the context of this paper. First, and most obvious, is the fact that each of the news stories related to the research the author is doing while in the middle of writing a dissertation. Second is the fact that these news stories reflect the author’s clear bias toward reading news stories about progressive causes where science and religion are in constant conflict, with the author’s bias leaning 100% toward the side of science. Third, and finally, he found all of the stories in a matter of minutes by going to two sites that have a mechanism in place to aggregate the author’s taste in what can best be described as “threads.”
Fragmented and heterogeneous narrative communities.
Why are there 20+ centers for civil discourse across America?
Contact Hypothesis
Need all six elements or the theory fails.
Can one institution engineer all six of those elements?
Media Theory
Earlier in this section, in discussing the discourse structuration process, Stuart Hall’s famous paper, Encoding and Decoding in the Media Discourse, was cited (1973, 1-20). As a self-described neo-Marxist who has been credited with coining the word, Thatcherism, Hall “reminds us that the mass media do not simply reflect ‘reality,’ they are actively involved in constructing it” (Devereux, 2007, 128; emphasis in original). Devereux goes on to underscore how, “Such construction is never neutral, reflecting as it does the ideas of the dominant social class or group” (2007, 128). Before a social equity activist will be successful, she will need to not only understand how media is used against her, but she will also need to understand how to use media to her own advantage.
Because this theoretical institutional model has been engineered as a web-based, high-traffic, cloud-resident, and highly accessible domain, it is anticipated that there will be an enormous “audience.” Media theory looks at an audience as a “commodity” (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), which means that with any successful domain, there will also be a potential revenue stream.
Deficiencies in Above Research and Studies
Need for a new kind of leader; a transformational leader.
Narrowing the Scope
As promised in the first chapter, at the end of this section we return to our three questions in order to ascertain how this section stayed within the scope of the paper. As a reminder, the three questions are:
1) Who was marginalized?
2) Which group was made to appear to benefit?
3) Which group really benefited?
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CONCLUSION OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW
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THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT
Bridge the “how” with the “why” and link back to the four literature review sections of the previous chapter.
With the quiescence of the marginalized to illegitimate power (intervening variable X2 of the original model) now defined as the principal phenomenon of interest for the purpose of this theoretical paper, this research hopes to offer a solution via an institutional approach that focuses primarily on two distinct elements of institutionalism, insofar as organizational behavior theory has something to offer. Those elements are, first, to recognize that everybody carries bias, and as such this aspect becomes an admission that all leaders within our institutions (large and small; formal and informal; religious and secular; government, nonprofit, and private) will require some training in how to reinterpret their own bias, and second, to change the role of leaders (including society’s opinion leaders, activists, street-level bureaucrats, community organizers, and other movement-builders) in how they respond to the mobilization of bias when it is manifest in any of its forms. It starts by seeing bias as a performed narrative, in contrast to taking an ostensive view toward narratives, as was presented in the literature review previously with the contrast between Senator Orrin Hatch’s 1990 support for David Souter and his opposition to Debo Adegbile in 2014. Hatch’s base would traditionally always advocate for an ostensive view of the narratives used to support nominations, until that view no longer works to their benefit. Only then would they argue for a performative view; when it serves their purpose. As the saying goes, “we’ve always done things this way…except for when we didn’t.
THEORETICAL LENS
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Problem-focused Research
If the goal is social equity, then why does each activist group struggling for their own version of equality define their own social inequality as a battle separate from another battle for equal or better treatment? This is precisely why the two research questions were posed in the way they were. Why does an inner-city activist struggling against race-based bigotry consider their battle to be a “different” battle from the PFLAG group in Utah who are struggling against religious-based bigotry? Does it not make sense to teach these two groups how similar their struggles are so that they can work together, instead of seeing each other as competitors for the proverbial microphone?
How about the environmentalist struggling against the science denier narratives? The mobilization of bias in this example is arguably being pushed is global capitalist interests that are striving to maximize their profits, and the best mechanism available to them has always been to rely upon the religious, who are easily provoked by the worldview threat that science has always presented to their interpretive monopolies.
Or how about the feminist movements and their struggle for freedom to choose, and to have wage parity with men? How has bias been used to marginalize them? Or what “threat” to the dominant groups is there in raising taxes on the rich to provide free post-secondary education so that young people can graduate without student loans?
Pluralism and diversity, as narratives, benefit all progressive causes, and this paper promises to demonstrate that the tactics of advancing these narratives is identical, regardless of who is being cast as deviant or undeserving by the structural dynamics of past eras.
One phenomenon that will be examined in this inductive sequence is that of why progressive groups, from every policy campaign, find it so difficult to collaborate more effectively as a heterogeneous network. This inductive sequence hopes to illustrate that with the right technology, in the form of an information communication technology (and through proper training), motivated social equity activists, street-level bureaucrats, and community organizers can easily become the kind of transformational leaders that will feel empowered to lay claim to the power that has, historically, been carefully guarded at the tops of hierarchies by leaders who have been effective at mobilizing bias by carefully framing any policy charge that would have an adverse impact on the elite as a change that would instead erode the privileged status of those in the dominant group. In true “divide and conquer” style, the dominant are made to think that the undeserving and deviant are hell-bent on “taking something away.”
Calling out this kind of behavior and identifying it for what it is can become the single unifying mission of every progressive activist the world over once they recognize a simple truth; that ending how power resides in hierarchies would be the equivalent of finding the Achilles heel of the global elite. Once a hierarchal structure is no longer seen as a legitimate form for a representative democracy, then the formation of a pluralist society becomes more viable.
Transformative-emancipatory Question
Defining a New Kind of Transformational Leader
A new intervening variable in this research can now be introduced as something akin to a certificate program or training regimen aimed at creating a truly transformational leader, which is a natural extension of being a highly effective social equity activist, street-level bureaucrat, or community organizer.
The role of “new media” and “social media.”
INDUCTIVE SEQUENCE
In this section, the six hypotheses will be introduced. By their very nature, they build one upon the other in an inductive sequence that dictates the order in which they are presented. This section will also introduce a framework and sequence for the syllabi that would be compiled in a certificate program for training a new generation of activists.
The Advantage of Proxies in the Research Model
Figure 1 and Figure 4 have been reproduced below side-by-side in order to contrast how different they appear to be. As noted in the introductory chapter, the main purpose for utilizing the proxies was to allow a more easily measured construct to be used for both X1 and X2. As part of the inductive sequence developed through the six hypotheses that will be introduced in this subsection, the hypotheses can be summarized as follows:
The first three hypotheses will plumb the depths of the connections between the broadly-defined research model on the left of Figure (link) and the highly-specific revised model with the more easily measured proxies on the right. This becomes the foundation for the fourth hypothesis, which proposes that with proper training, social equity activists and their allies might be able to dramatically diminish the effectiveness of X1 and X2 and even displace those narratives of bigotry with new narratives that embrace pluralism. The fifth hypothesis suggests that with the proper tools, social equity activists and their allies will be able to germinate an organic development of their own sustaining institutions that will not only formulate emergent narrative communities capable of displacing marginalizing narratives, but also perpetually sustain them in ways that they might more easily transition into actual governing narratives. The sixth hypothesis suggests that in this way, a system oftruly representative democracy might evolve, which is where X3 enters into the model. We are now ready to introduce the hypotheses one-at-a-time.
H1: Bias, Narrative Communities, Sustaining Institutions, and Hierarchies
The power to mobilize bias can be traced to a narrative community (sometimes centuries old) that has created its own sustaining institution around an ostensive view of said narrative that both defines and protects the hierarchical authority of said sustaining institution.
The importance of this hypothesis has been underscored by what was outlined in the first section of the literature review. If supported, H1 suggests that by simply flipping an ostensive view of narratives over to a performative view, the power of the leaders within the sustaining institutions could not only be diminished, but it could feasibly be completely erased. This hypothesis also suggests that the entire narrative community could hold onto their worldview. Nothing would need to be deconstructed, but rather the narrative community would simply have to concede that other worldviews can exist without posing a threat to their worldview. If this happens, the power to mobilize bias simply evaporates. Accomplishing this can be as simple as altering the narrative, “The path to God” to “My path to God.” The key element of H1 is the idea that individuals are not the unit of analysis, but rather the narrative community, and by extension the sustaining institution, becomes the unit of analysis. If it is the narrative that has defined and created the community, and if it is the sustaining institution that is defending that narrative, then the individual members of the community can, to a degree, be “excused” for their bad behavior. The mechanism that this paper will examine is derived from the idea that once you change the ostensive view of the narrative, the members of the narrative community can no longer be manipulated through the use of a worldview threat and they should become contributing members of a pluralistic society.
As an example that is almost too horrific to examine, literally millions of individuals were complicit in holocaust; turning in their neighbors, stealing their possessions and businesses once they had been removed to the ghettos and concentration camps, and yet every citizen of Germany, France, Poland and other countries did not go on trial for the crimes. The reasons are numerous, but not insignificant is the fact that once the narrative of an Aryan race was converted from an ostensive view to a performative view, these millions of people – as perpetrators of oppression – ceased contributing to the oppression.
Research into H1 will initially be operationalized by doing a metaanalysis of existing data on ho the narrative-sustaining institutions of dominant groups react to worldview threats. The goal would be to capture this reactivity in varying degrees and to determine what causes that variability in the reactions to threats. Ultimately this research will require primary research, but for the purpose of this paper there will be no primary research conducted.
The nul of H1 would be that the power to mobilize bias does not reside in a sustaining institution at all. Presumably this would indicate that the power instead is derived from personal narratives rather than institutionalized narratives, and a different approach that sees individuals as the unit of analysis would have to be adopted.
H2: The Cost of Challenging Authority
The perceived legitimacy of the hierarchical authority described by H1 is derived from how it is embedded in the narrative in such a way that any who dare challenge that legitimacy from within the narrative community can be purged by way of an internal mobilization of bias; typically shunning, excommunication, public shaming, or removed from one’s position of authority.
The essential nature of H2 to this inductive sequence is derived from the idea that members of a narrative community willingly render their obedience to leadership inasmuch as they recognize the benefits of belonging to a group which they see as having something to offer them. When that group is the dominant group within a culture or society, membership has its privileges, so the saying goes. As illustrated at the opening of this paper with the example of Anderson Cooper, having been born into the most privileged of circumstances possible – as a white, male, Christian that defaulted to heterosexual so long as he chose not to “out” himself – all Cooper had to do was “show up” in order to reap the privileges of membership. As soon as he violated any of the narratives that dictated membership, however, he understood very clearly that the sustaining institution that defined the various groups that he belonged to would dictate the consequences that must be levied.
The purpose of H2, therefore, is to simply pose the question and ask, “What power does the sustaining institution have once there are no costs associated with violating the narrative?” When, in July 2012, Anderson Cooper finally formalized the fact that he had always been living his personal life as a gay man, there were no significant consequences. He was firmly established near the top of his profession and he was, so to speak, “untouchable” by the sustaining institutions that would have done him harm and incurred both financial and emotional costs for him. But not everybody has Cooper’s kind of privilege and status. Still, Cooper’s story is demonstrative of how even power and fame cannot guarantee one immunity from the harm that sustaining institutions wilfully incur upon their own membership when they go counter to the narratives.
The major point of the above paragraphs that needs to be made is that no one person had to tell Cooper to stay in the closet. We cannot point our finger to one powerful person and say, “If we could just get rid of this person, we can change this narrative.” There are powerful people in these ages-old sustaining institutions, and they almost certainly have power by virtue of a hierarchy, but in most cases these powerful people are not the target of this research. Rather, it is the sustaining institution that bestows a perceived legitimacy to the power defined by the narratives. The perception of legitimacy is the target of H2.
Research into H2 is expected to be operationalized by posing survey questions within target populations to determine what value members of that population place upon those aspects of their life that would be altered by their “failure to perform” the narratives as given to them by their sustaining institutions. The operationalization of this research falls primarily in the fields of social psychology and cultural anthropology, especially as it relates to terror management theory. This was underscored in the introduction section of this paper, and again, the reader is advised to read the work of Ernest Becker (1973), which was neatly summed up in the documentary Flight from Death (Shen & Bennick, 2005).
The nul hypothesis of H2 is that the willful obedience to the performance of group-defining narratives is not derived from the fear that there will be tangible or emotional costs for challenging the narratives of the community and its sustaining institutions.
H3: Hegemony as a Sustaining Institution and Consent to be Oppressed
By interpreting hegemony as a broadly defined sustaining institution, and hegemonic narratives as the mechanism through which the hegemon have retained power over the centuries, it can be shown that marginalized people, in many ways, consent to their own oppression by yielding reluctant obedience to socially constructed narratives, thereby becoming complicit in further legitimizing the perceived authority described by H2.
To not specifically underscore how hegemony is the oldest mechanism known to man for the marginalization of those deemed undeserving or deviant would be a gross mistake. It needs to be understood that pluralism is not a threat to religious institutions as much as it is to the power structures of the elite. One of the many things hegemonic narratives do is convince “the masses” that they were destined to the station in life that they currently inhabit, and that, as bad as it might be, it could be much worse if things were to change. This is the “second face of power” described by Bachrach & Baratz (19
In the case of the narrative that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “took something” from whites, the narrative (especially in the poor rural South) was that the promise of things getting better for these poor people was going to be dramatically diminished if the government adopted what was framed as a “favored” position toward African-Americans. Hegemonic narratives succeed by keeping the marginalized groups at odds with each other in a zero sum game, which serves the very important task of keeping the focus off of the more likely obstacles to social equity, which this paper argues is the failings of representative democracy to properly “represent” the poor with the right kinds of policies that remove all of the barriers to success for vulnerable populations and the already marginalized.
Research into H3 would be operationalized in much the same way as was proposed for H2, but the focus would be highly focused on those hegemonic narratives where research has failed to isolate just what role zero-sum thinking, as “just war” mentality, and complicity play in protecting the hegemonic narratives.
The null of H3 would be that hegemony cannot be represented as having a sustaining institution that is reactive to threats and proactively defends hegemonic narratives.
H4: Dominant Narratives are more Easily Displaced than Deconstructed
Given H1 to H3, and an understanding that sustaining institutions that enforce ostensive views of narratives have been engineered to generate strong reactions to perceived worldview threats, it follows that a given narrative that defines who the “undeserving” and “deviant” are might be displaced far more easily than it could be deconstructed.
This hypothesis is an important bridge between how bias is mobilized, and how the power that mobilizes bias can more easily be exposed as illegitimate. This is a concept that Hugh Miller spends a great deal of time developing in his book, Governing Narratives (2012, pages), and it very much recognizes all of the important parts that were discussed previously when explaining H1 to H3 above.
Research into H4 would be operationalized in tandem with the data collection and meta-analysis proposed for H1. It will require in-depth questioning to determine what shared premises there might be between a narrative community that holds an ostensive view and the narrative communities that advocate for alternatives that will eliminate, or at least minimize, the harm done by the marginalizing narrative.
The null to H4 is that there is no difference in the effectiveness of taking on harmful narratives, whether by deconstructing or displacing them. Either approach would be either equally effective, or equally ineffective.
H5: The Creation of Heterogeneous Consensus-building Narrative Communities
Social equity activists, seeking to improve the human condition for marginalized populations by displacing the narratives that define the out-groups as “undeserving” or “deviant,” will need their own consensus-building narrative communities and sustaining institutions before they can succeed in creating compelling emergent narrative communities that embrace diversity and pluralism.
With H5, the inductive sequence of this paper finally reaches the point where it can begin to support the theory that there can be an institutional solution to some of society’s most “wicked problems.” Up until now, there has been no sustaining institution for either counter-hegemonic narratives or, for that matter, any kind of collaborative network that would bring progressive activists together into a unified campaign for change. Their opponents, who are fighting to preserve the status quo, are a formidable fore by virtue of their position as the narrative communities for the dominant groups. Social equity activists working for minority groups will always be up against this kind of opposition, which, in most cases, has centuries of tradition on its side.
It is the position of this paper that unless the “masses” (or, in the words of the Occupy movement – the 99%) unite behind a single over-arching purpose for solidarity, they will be incapable of generating the kind of momentum that they need in order to take on the global hegemon. Without some kind of institutional support, any effort to accomplish this any other way will likely just be another version of what happened in 2011. Only an institution can provide these activists with some kind of permanence, but if this institution cannot find a way to build consensus among those who choose to affiliate with it, there will be no mechanism whereby it could possibly survive, let alone thrive as a governing institution with any kind of legitimacy.
Research capable of supporting H5 can only be operationalized through the Field of Dreams approach, which is the idea that “if you build it, they will come” (citation). /a complexity model would likely be beneficial for this analysis and would need to be embedded into the technology.
The null to H5 is that social equity activists will either not be able to form a sustaining institution, or if they can form one, they will not be able to sustain it, even if given the right tools and other resources that they need.
H6: Representative Democracy as Heterogeneous and Non-hierarchical
Given H5, and recognizing Schattschneider’s idea that the goal of democracy is to “get control of the government,” if the sustaining institutions for progressive groups were able to form an effective and efficient heterogeneous governing institution capable of both organizing politically and advancing compelling, viable policy proposals, then a model for a truly representative democracy will have been discovered.
As the capstone hypothesis, H6 offers up the idea that, given the right information communication technology, social equity activists, as a diverse mix of progressive-minded individuals, might actually be able to compete in the policymaking arena with the efficiency of the homogeneous networks of historically dominant groups and their sustaining institutions. This hypothesis pivots on the idea that the technology can deliver on its promise in how the consensus-building algorithms are being engineered, and it is upon this hypothesis that this paper proposes an enormous, and very expensive, research project. That investment is what the balance of this paper proposes to defend.
Research into H6 would require the development of a certificate program for training a new corp of social equity activists with the hope of creating a truly transformational leader; one capable of not only understanding the inductive sequence of this paper, but also steering a network of loosely affiliated individuals or groups in a discourse structuration process that incubates and propagates emergent narrative communities that allow for pluralist views. Similar to H5, this can only be operationalized through an “if you build it, they will come” approach with the complexity model embedded into the technology that relates to H6.
The null to H6 is that even with a successful sustaining institution as proposed by H5, the heterogeneous networks would either not work, or continue to be less efficient than the homogeneous networks of the dominant, and historically advantaged classes or groups.
The next section will take the six hypotheses and assemble them into a complete, more easily interpreted theory by seeing how everything up to this point has created a foundation upon which a new kind of institution can be erected.
BUILDING A COMPREHENSIVE INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTION
A great deal of time and space in this chapter has been dedicated to linking the variables in the research models (Figure above) to the literature review and each of the above six hypotheses. The balance of this chapter will be dedicated to a quick summary of the inductive sequence through which that was done in preparation for the final chapter on the methodological approach that will govern the direction of future research. The purpose of this section is to outline how one would undertake the training of this new breed of transformational leader that is capable of steering a new kind of institution.
To aid in how the paper to this point can be quickly summarized in a very short time, each of the above six hypotheses will be examined in easily-digestible bites. Figure ( ) introduces each of those sections and their relationship to this entire dissertation.
In light of the above, the reader can see where the essential elements from the literature review sections come into play as they relate to each of the individual hypotheses. In simple terms, the independent variable X1, or the power to mobilize bias, is most closely associated with the inductive sequence that moves the reader through the breakdown of both H1 and H2. The ability of the social equity activist to decode what it will take to dismantle the perception of legitimate authority (as X2), when that authority is used to defend bias and the marginalization of vulnerable groups, is most closely associated with the inductive sequence that moves the reader through the breakdown of both H3 and H4. The dependent variable, Y, or effectiveness of the social equity activist in her new role as a transformational leader, is most closely associated with the inductive sequence set out in the breakdown of H5, and finally, the plan to make representative democracy (as X3) truly work for the vulnerable and minorities is set out in the inductive sequence associated with H6. Each of these will be briefly examined now in the context of the entire theory coming together as an all-encompassing institutional home for progressive activists, regardless of where they live, what kind of political regime they live under, and what their particular campaign is fighting for. If they are up against a dominant group that depends upon the mobilization of bias to win their battles, this institution is being put together to help them in their pursuit of social equity.
Linking X1 to Proxy X1 through H1 and H2
In the simplest of terms, H1 and H2 had to be advanced in order to justify how a measure of reactivity to a worldview threat could be directly linked to the ability of powerful individuals and institutions to mobilize bias in the social construction of undeserving and deviant populations are. In Figure below, the five-step inductive sequence through H1 unpacks the elements of how hierarchical authority comes to be “unquestioned” in this regard.
In Figure below, H2 picks up from where H1 leaves off and continues in an inductive sequence to underscore precisely how that power is wielded to such great effectiveness when fear can so easily be leveraged by playing off of a worldview threat.
Linking X2 to Proxy X2 through H3 and H4
The importance of H3 and H4 come from how they together expose that when any degree of power is used in conjunction with a threat (whether real or implied) to deny a person access to privileges, no matter how meager those privileges might be, can be exposed as illegitimate power. When done successfully, the person or institution that exposes the tactic automatically attracts legitimacy. Figure is very specific to the mechanisms of hegemony.
In reference to H3, before she can end the complicity, the social equity activist needs to clearly understand the role that hegemonic narratives play in convincing people that it is in their own best interest to “consent” to their own oppression. This was explained in detail in the literature review, so it won’t be covered again here, but it is one of the most important ideas in this paper because of how complicit behavior lends strength to illegitimate power. Just as a reminder, complicity behavior is connected to the degree of effectiveness that power has when it sets out to mobilize bias against a vulnerable population. From the perspective of the hegemon, complicity is wielded as a power when you can convince huge swaths of the dominant group to stand by and do nothing while others engage in unethical, illegal, and questionable activities that are aimed at preserving the power in the hands of the hegemon. In today’s political climate in the United States, closeted Republicans that are in high standing in the party are complicit in the marginalization of their gay brothers and sisters, while simultaneously they are consenting to their own oppression. This is how hegemony works its magic. This was also clearly demonstrated in how Senator Orrin Hatch used a double standard when he voted against Debo Adegbile, President Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights arm of the Justice Department.
Figure shows how H4 takes us through an inductive sequence to not only end complicity, but to also help the social equity activist understand the methods whereby new ideas might be introduced into the narratives of the dominant (oppressive) group. Starting with the incubation of a new discourse, the inductive sequence helps motivated new leaders learn how to build bridges, which, in this this research, are referred to as emergent narratives; new narratives that make no attempt to deconstruct the old damaging narratives, thus leaving old worldviews in place while helping others understand pluralism.
Linking Y to H5
Figure shows the inductive sequence that this research proposes will yield a far more effective social equity activist, street-level bureaucrat, and community organizer. The idea is that by training these individuals to recognize bias as the one thing that they have in common, they can all begin to change things by constructing new narratives capable of diffusing the effects of socially constructed bias. The problem is, though, is that before they can all collaborate effectively they will first need to belong to a single, global, over-arching institution. Not only that, but they will also need access to the products of each other’s creativity, which is where the institutional memory spoken of in H4 enters the picture. Because this new breed of social equity activists will have to “juggle” so many new tasks, once they are properly trained, it seemed appropriate to simply refer to them all as “jugglers” instead of invoking the long phrase, “social equity activist, street-level bureaucrat, and community organizer.” The final point in the inductive sequence of H5 is the idea that this new institution, that promises to span the globe, will never work unless it is self-funding. That aspect will be only briefly discussed in the final chapter.
Linking X3 to H6
In keeping with the Schattschneider quote that “The most legitimate question to be asked in a democracy is: - how can people get control of the government?” (1948, 22), we have left X3, or the effectiveness of a representative democracy, for the last section of this recap.
We can open this discussion by using an example of how H2 is connected to H6. In early March 2014, a majority of federal senators voted to block the confirmation of Debo Adegbile, a top choice of President Obama, to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. As reported by Jennifer Bendery and Ryan J. Reilly in The Huffington Post, “The overriding reason for their opposition was that he once represented Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate convicted 30 years ago of killing a Philadelphia police officer” (Bendery & Reilly, 2014). Adegbile defended Abu-Jamal in his capacity as the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the appeal was already in progress at the time of his appointment.
Particularly disturbing in this event was Senator Orrin Hatch’s (R-Utah) vote to block the nomination. This was because, in October 1990, Hatch had been an ardent defender for then-Supreme Court nominee David Souter, who had defended literacy tests when a lawyer in New Hampshire. Orrin’s exact words in 1990 were:
It is not right to go back in hindsight and say he should not have done that; that that shows something wrong with him. Come on, that is what advocates do. If we are going to start using a nominee’s briefs against him in the confirmation process, we are going to be setting a shocking precedent. It would be a very, very dangerous message to send to lawyers: If you have any ambition to be a judge, you lawyers, do not represent controversial clients and be careful what you say on behalf of a client because you might be held responsible for the fact that the law was as it was at the time you made the statement” (Bendery & Reilly, 2014).
This double-standard on the part of elected officials is symptomatic of what is wrong with representative democracy in Utah, and states like Utah, in 2014. Elected officials from “deep-red” states who do not oppose virtually every bill that is associated with the Obama administration, and virtually every nominee favored by the Democratic majority, are mercilessly disparaged in the popular media back in their home districts. One single “wrong vote” could be all it takes to inspire a revolt from one’s base who are always at-the-ready to put up a primary election challenger in the next election cycle. In this climate, bipartisanship becomes impossible and almost every vote is being split along party lines.
When an elected officially who previously had a reputation as stellar as Orrin Hatch’s feels obligated to behave in such a hypocritical manner as Hatch did when voting down the nomination of Adegbile, it is indicative or a broken system that demonstrates an almost complete disregard for any group except for the dominant one that can ensure a politician’s election, or re-election; integrity or principles be damned.
So, how does this relate to H2? In the case of Orrin Hatch’s vote against the nomination of Adegbile, Hatch felt a higher “duty of care” to his own narrative community than he did to the other 34.7% who did not support him in the 2012 election. In a state where there is such a powerful sustaining institution for extremist rhetoric as Utah has, the institution itself wields sufficient power to “excommunicate” Hatch if he should ever step out of line, or in other words, fail to support the narrative. In Hatch’s case, this “shunning” would come not only with severe financial costs, but it would also tarnish his reputation as one of the longest-serving senators in the history of the state. In short, there are no rewards for any senator in Utah to represent the minority populations, and other deep-red states function in much the same way.
In fact, in the wake of the 2012 federal and state elections, if states with veto-proof Democratic majorities are added to those states with veto-proof Republican majorities, it amounts to 21 states where, potentially, a vulnerable group of people could be marginalized by their elected officials, and there is virtually nothing that can be done to protect them aside from starting a lengthy and expensive legal challenge to the law.
CONCLUSION
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METHODOLOGICAL DESIGN
The next sections will outline, as a whole, the direction of future research that is expected to come out of this dissertation.
These opening paragraphs should introduce all of the upcoming methodology sections.
Returning to the conclusion of the documentary, Flight from Death, Sheldon Solomon proposes a possible path forward to avoid the consequences of the cultural narratives that have driven so much killing of the “othered,” solely because the sustaining institutions of the narrative community kick in with a violent reaction to a worldview threat. Solomon says,
A good culture provides opportunities for people to feel good about themselves, but [it needs to] do that without unduly harming other people; either outside or inside of the culture itself. Another thing that could be done is to think about the development of cultural constructions that have more direct and realistic confrontations with mortality (Shen & Bennick, 2005).
The film concludes by suggesting that an awareness of our mortality is needed in order to deal rationally with the imminent end of our lives. The conclusion of the film is an excellent example of how the discourse structuration process is utilized in creating an emergent narrative community capable of dealing with “death anxiety.” What the film does not recognize is the need to provide that new narrative community with its own sustaining institution that is equally as powerful as a religion. This is what this paper has set out to do by creating a mechanism where this new discourse can have a “home” outside of a church or university campus.
A NEW CLAIM ON LEGITIMACY
Who are the Legitimate Leaders?
Street-level bureaucrats
Social entrepreneurs
Social equity activists
NON-HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE
By having the two research questions defined as they are, this research proposes to generate a broadly generalizable institutional solution that is capable of creating new emergent narrative communities simply by creating fertile ground in which new sustaining institutions for emergent narrative communities can be germinated, thereby empowering new leaders; leaders we have all witnessed come and go as activist movements flair-up and quickly die. The theory for creating this “fertile soil” for sustainable activist and solidarity institutions is derived from Morgan’s metaphor of organizations as brains, specifically where he wrote, “If it is possible to distribute capacities for intelligence and control throughout an enterprise so that the system as a whole can self-organize and evolve along with emerging challenges,” then you can have an institution that is, metaphorically speaking, “a brain” (Morgan, 2006, 72).
The “fertile ground” that will function as “a brain” is institutional memory, which is where Clifford Geertz, and his “thick description,” is introduced into this dissertation (Geertz, 1973). In the same year that Geertz suggested that a “consultable record of what man has said” be compiled (the justification for institutional memory, and associated qualitative methods research), Frederick Thayer was writing about his concept for how hierarchies, coopted as many are by governing elites, were causing governments to be run like de facto oligarchies. In addition to suggesting that, “it is absolutely impossible to assist the change we seek by winning an election” (1973, 78), Thayer also suggested that before any kind of improved democratic system could be created it would require that a consensus-building process be engineered into organizations; Thayer’s intent, of course, being to delegitimize hierarchical structures.
If neighborhood groups and other outsiders are to be brought inside, we must expand what we call the red tape of bureaucracy rather than seek to eliminate it. A theory of extended face-to-face discussion within an almost infinite number of [consensus-building] small groups requires the wherewithal to deal with huge numbers of written documents. This substantial “institutional memory” will be needed if any of us, newly assigned to a policy process, are to bring ourselves up to date (Thayer, 1973, 171).
The author’s research has only just begun to focus on W. Richard Scott’s ideas of institutionalism, and therefore a “best fit” (or inter-weaving, if necessary) from Scott’s work (2014) has not been selected yet..
Cooptation and illegitimacy.
Segue to legitimacy.
INSTITUTIONALIZED BIAS
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Spiritual Prisons as Structural Institutions
Another metaphor needs to be introduced before the full depth of the meaning behind the second research question will be fully understood.
Imagine a prisoner. This prisoner was just an 11-year-old boy when he first had thoughts that challenged the laws of his land. When he was 12 he shared those thoughts with the “authority” of his land, and because of that he was put into prison, at the tender age of 12. It was not a prison with walls and a locked door. This boy prisoner was only “free” so long as he never again challenged the authority. It was his own parents, and his 5 older brothers and sisters, who reported him for challenging the laws, and his school and friends were all told to be alert to whether or not that young teenager was ever heard challenging the laws again.
This boy endured his years in school under the oppression of the authority. He soon grows up, gets married to a woman who may also be inclined to report him to the authorities if he challenges the laws, and has children. He does not love the person who he marries, but she is the best friend he ever had, and that is why he married her. He secretly thinks that maybe she is not as subdued by the authorities as all of his other friends, which is how he grew to like her as a friend, but he still wonders if she would report him to the authorities if she knew he really hated the laws, and the authority. For the next 30 years, this teenager grows into a man, but he is still surrounded by those who have the authority to take away his career, his children, and the connections he has to his five older siblings. By this time he also has over 30 nieces and nephews that he loves as well, and in spite of their purported love for him, this entire extended family is always a threat because they could report him to the authorities if they knew he was capable of denouncing the laws. He lives under constant threat of being found out, and to add to that fear, he witnesses over and over again what happens to others who challenge the laws in the way that he would like to. Because of what he sees happen to these other, he cannot bring himself to stand up and challenge the laws because of his own inability to deal with the consequences of being convicted under the laws of the authority. Without exception, everybody who has challenged the laws has been convicted.
After 34 years, this now grown man is finally living in a different place where neither his family nor his career are in danger. His children are old enough that he thinks they might understand how the laws that are hurting him are also hurting other people in innumerable way. He finally speaks out against the laws, and within two weeks the authorities call him in and convict him of breaking the laws. Within 90 minutes the court is over and the jury has made their decision. The court sentences him to serve the rest of eternity in prison, but he is outside of their grasp now. They can no longer arrest him and put him behind walls and a locked door, and his four children are also outside of the grasp of the authorities, so life is very good. Unfortunately, his five siblings and all but one of his many nieces and nephews have all sided with the authorities, and if he ever tries to restore contact with them they are bound to grab him and turn him over to the authorities so that he can be locked in the prison cell that has been reserved with his name on it.
So what is the law that this teenager broke when he was 11 years old? He had learned how to masturbate, but his sexual thoughts when he masturbated were of sharing that experience with another person, and that other person was always a male person. Not only was masturbation against “the law,” but “the law” was written in a way that suggested that masturbation was the very thing that caused the thoughts of wanting to experience sex with another man instead of a woman. Both sins would result in a prison sentence for eternity, but the “eternal prison” for wanting to be intimate with another man was a far worse “prison” than the one the boy would be sent to for masturbating.
LEGITIMIZING NEW AND TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP
What makes this proposed new institutional structure so transformational?
Who is it that “teaches” social equity as a legitimate purpose?
METHODOLOGY: ACTION RESEARCH
Speak toward a Compendium Conference idea.
Qualitative Methods: Transformational
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Epistomology
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John Lewis Gaddis (all variables are dependent variables)
Complexity Theory
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Phenomenological
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SECONDARY DATA
Availability of appropriate data sets.
Data Set Name
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PRIMARY DATA
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Survey
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Delimitations of the Survey
Weaknesses
Significance of the Survey
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Expected Outcomes
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WINNING ELECTIONS
Looking far down the track. This is where the novel, The Collectives, will prove invaluable. In the same way that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (year) and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (year) were invaluable. What made them so compelling is the freedom that they had from adhering to scientific rigor in making bold forecasts of “what might be.”
DEVOLVING STATE FUNCTIONS TO LOCAL
This “shrinking” of government (Heclo, 2008), spoken of in the literature review, if seen as viable through this research, would have its greatest impact on state legislatures in the United States because of how the transfer of power would devolve and diffuse downward to the local level, actually delegitimizing state power while leaving federal power intact. This is especially important in state legislatures where the Dillon Rule has traditionally been enforced (where the “paternalistic” state can reach into local governments to plug any “structural holes” that threaten the dominant narrative). This is important to this research because, historically, most of the government-supported marginalization of vulnerable populations in the United States has taken place in Dillon Rule state legislatures, where the “mobilization of bias” on the part of privileged classes finds most of its support.
This research paper will also reinterpret the findings in ways that they will apply to international settings, primarily those that experienced “Arab Spring” uprisings in 2011.
Leave state government in the US to the role of regulatory agency.
Take away all social equity functions from the state. Have not proven that it is in the best interests of marginalized and vulnerable populations to allow 50% +1 vote to determine outcomes for minorities.
The Pragmatic Libertarian
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Formalizing Community Networks
The devolution of government to local functions.
Institutionalizing Networks
An organic process that is very “libertarian” in the foundations that give it purpose and reason to exist.
Why libertarians should distance themselves from hierarchical government. Don’t get into dissolving state governments in this chapter! Defer to the “Future Research” chapter.
MAXWELL’S NINE QUESTIONS FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP PURPOSE
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What do we now better understand about power to mobilize bias?
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What do we still know very little about as it relates to this research?
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Exactly what needs to be studied next?
Reference the upcoming section on “Audience Revisted” and the need for global solidarity movements to have that all-important institutional memory.
In what setting, and which people will be studied?
Once again, this can be deferred to the next section, but don’t get trapped into thinking this is about rowdy, and sometimes violent protests that are aimed at disrupting establishment (and hierarchical) institutions. As indicated by the two research questions, it is about the tiny PFLAG Group that gathers around the dining room table of a parent who has a gay child, and it is about the community centers located along the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevards all across the United States, and similar communities around the world.
What methods will be used to secure any needed data?
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How will the data be analyzed?
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How will the findings be validated?
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What ethical issues will the research present?
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What is anticipated about the practicability and value of the proposed research?
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AUDIENCE REVISITED
Return to who the audience is for this research and why it is of critical importance to them, and the people that those leaders serve.
Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!)
When nonagenarian and French Resistance veteran Stéphane Hessel wrote this 35 page book in late 2010, little did he know that it would sell 3 million copies in 30 languages, and eventually inspire a global protest movement (Kuper, 2011) that would culminate with “The Protestor” being named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2011 (Andersen, 2012).
Is it possible to separate the “audience” into the social equity leaders and the beneficiaries of those who lead the activism efforts? Remind the reader of the importance of “the collectives” ideal, where the leaders are organic to the process of assembling the beneficiaries of public services.
Movimento Passe Livre
In Brazil, based on a movement that traces its origins to the 2005 World Social Forum that was held in Porto Alegre.
Kiev’s Independence Square
What was missing?
Pedagogical Applications
The novel as a companion to a textbook.
As a classic example of where the novel would gain better traction than an online course, look at the New Economy Coalition that has been building momentum in the United States since 2013. The movement is targeting young people, and the access to those young people is expected to be through university students.
CONCLUSION
Reclaiming “representative” from “representative democracy” as the purpose of community organizations.
APPENDIX
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
How to be formatted? Line spacing? Font? Paragraph style?