Almost all political analysts are unwitting structuralists, because they define social power primarily in relational terms. Power is not a property or attribute that is inherent in an individual or group in the way that an electrical battery stores so many volts of energy. Rather, power is an aspect of the actual or potential interaction between two or more social actors. (Actor is a generic term for a unitary social entity, whether an individual person or a larger collectivity, such as a corporation or a nation state.) Most formal definitions of social power explicitly indicate this relational dimension. For example, Bertrand Russell wrote of power as “the production of intended effects” (Russell, 1938: 25), which Wrong modified to “the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effects on others” (Wrong, 1979: 2). Similarly, Max Weber's two famous definitions of power (Macht) underscored the coercive aspect of relationships between two or more actors:

By the end of the 1980s, Third World nations owed more than $1.2 trillion to the banks and governments of the industrialized nations. Amassed in the wake of the 1970s oil shocks, many loans were squandered on ill-advised development schemes ranging from dams in Brazil to cattle ranches in Botswana. Interest payments on these foreign debts annually divert tens of billions of dollars in scarce capital resources away from productive development. The debt mountain generates stagnant economies, rampant inflation, food shortages, environmental destruction, and wage-price austerity controls. Both leftist insurgents and military mutinies threaten the stability of newly created democracies from Argentina to the Philippines. Mexican and Yugoslav workers shouting antigovernment slogans have stormed their countries' parliaments, demanding pay hikes. The United Nations Children's Fund warned that 18 million children might die of malnutrition by the end of the century. Faced with the prospect of huge losses and potential collapse of the domestic and international banking systems, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Group of Seven major industrial creditors balk at forgiving or reducing the borrowing nations' debts. Yet they continue to carry bad debts on their books and to roll over new loans that add to the red ink. Postponing some payments is only grudgingly granted under threats of unilateral moratoria. This international game of chicken holds industrial and developing nations mutually hostage.

The intractable debt crisis is just the latest in a centuries-long history of troubled relations among the world's nations.

During the 1980s, corporate America endured another of its periodic merger manias. Billion-dollar companies snatched up multimillion-dollar firms, and were bought out in turn by still larger corporations. Some famous household names changed ownership and their operations were broken apart to pay off mountains of debt. Concentration within several industries increased substantially. A junk bond salesman became one of the nation's richest men, but was indicted for trading on insider information. Despite a historic stock market crash in 1987, the following year saw the biggest leveraged buyout of all time; RJR Nabisco, recently formed by merging a tobacco giant with a food conglomerate, became the target of a takeover bid by its president. The board of directors angrily rejected his initial bid as undervalued and sought outside offers. After frantic weeks of stock auctions by four groups, the board turned control of the company over to a Wall Street leveraged-buyout specialist for $25 billion in cash and securities. “Oreos will still be in children's lunch boxes,” promised the winner (Time, December 12, 1988: 56). But with RJR Nabisco's stock price doubling in just six weeks, analysts predicted that as much as one quarter of the firm would have to be sold to pay off its debt.

The RJR Nabisco fight dramatically depicted the interweaving of political and economic power in modern organizations; the internal clash of opposing strategies, the massive amounts of resources, the alliances formed among organizations, the fates of thousands of employees and shareholders hanging in the balance.

During the past half century, research on community power structures increasingly embraced the structural perspective. The earliest case studies of small towns and cities tried to find people and groups that wielded disproportionate power over public decisions. Who controlled spending on schools, sewers, parks, sports arenas, and other public works? Who decided zoning regulations, pollution controls, and urban renewal programs? What determined private investments in homes, businesses, new plants, and employment? Several studies revealed wealthy local business elites at the core of leadership cliques that dominated municipal politics to the exclusion of the larger populace. Pluralists challenged this monolithic image, arguing that power was broadly dispersed among many competing political groups that resolved controversies by negotiation, accommodation, and compromise. Unfortunately, the initial structural insights were soon obscured by a sterile debate over reputational and decisional methodologies alleged to produce foregone conclusions about power distributions. By 1970, political scientists had largely abandoned community power research (Ricci, 1980: 462; but see Bulmer [1985] who argues that neighborhood research is being revived with a network emphasis).

The early structural analyses of community power were further eclipsed by a diffusion of multivariate methods from status attainment research to the ecological analysis of urban phenomena. Using data on entire cities as units of analysis, researchers tried to explain taxing, spending, and municipal policies as linear functions of such variables as formal government, urban populations, growth rate, racial composition, poverty, city age, and absentee-owned corporations.

Structural analysis in its contemporary form is less than two decades old. In that time it has matured from an intellectual social movement to an established specialty spanning several traditional disciplines. Steadily expanding literatures employing the network perspective on social behavior have accumulated. A set of interdisciplinary journals and regular professional meetings in the United States and Europe provide the critical mass to sustain this collective enterprise. Several generations of scholars are concurrently consolidating the oretical and empirical research advances using sophisticated structural analysis concepts, data, and principles. The aim of this book is to enhance the appreciation of structural analysis for improving our knowledge of political phenomena at all levels from primary groups to the world system. The primary audience is other serious scholars who study power with various intellectual tools. We do not assume a great familiarity with sophisticated mathematical techniques, although a brief appendix of technical terms is provided. Rather, we seek to convince our readers at the conceptual level of comprehension and leave to their own discretion how much quantitative depth they wish to acquire from numerous network methodology primers. By making detailed examinations of the roots of structural analysis, its ties to and divergences from alternative theoretical and methodological perspectives, and its contributions to political research, my coauthors and I hope to persuade the members of a wider intellectual community that the network approach to power has much to offer them.

The most important steps in any social network analysis are to delineate a concrete population of social objects and one or more types of relationships connecting them (Fararo and Skvoretz, 1986). The population may be all Fortune 500 corporations and the relations may be their interlocking directors and their product purchases from one another. Or the population is all capitalist industrial nations, with their trade ties and military alliances as the two relations of primary interest. Or the people in a social movement may comprise the population, with their coordinated participation in protests and demonstrations as the focal relation.

Analytic boundary specification of any social system is a crucial but poorly understood process (Laumann, Marsden and Prensky, 1983; Pappi, 1984). The realist assumption is that all member entities are consciously aware of who belongs and who does not. Inclusion may be based on a face-to-face primary relationship, such as friendship circle, or on a formal entrance qualification, as in joining a ward political organization. Alternatively, the nominalist assumption is that network closure can be imposed by the analyst's own requirements, with this specification conforming to reality. For example, a Marxist nominalist may define as working class all employees who do not own the means of production. Frequently, researchers combine subjective and objective criteria to stipulate network boundaries.

Springtime 1989 brought reports of numerous collective actions from around the world. Following a decade of underground struggle, the trade union Solidarity swept almost all the parliamentary seats from Poland's bankrupt Communist Party in the first free elections since the end of World War II. In Beijing's Tiananmen Square, tanks crushed students and workers who were peacefully demanding democratic freedoms and an end to corruption in China's Communist Party. In West Germany, masked rioters injured hundreds of police in Berlin's squatter district, while rallies of resurgent right-wing political parties increasingly erupted in bloody fights with leftist hecklers. In Israel's occupied territories, the intifada entered its second year, the rock-throwing Arab youths buoyed by the declaration of Palestinian independence and the United States' agreement to talk with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abortion foes and advocates in the United States stepped up their mass marches, clinic sit-ins, and political agitation, galvanized by the Supreme Court's restrictions on women's freedom of choice.

As these highly visible collective actions attest, social movements take a diversity of forms and seek a variety of objectives. What they share are coordinated efforts by people holding a common interest in social change who resort to nonconventional political means to reach their goals. Whenever such collective efforts fall outside the framework of institutional political systems, we define them as social movements.

The debates over community power structures also raged at the national level. Pluralist, elitist, and Marxist class theorists argued about the nature of the nation state and the extent to which a cohesive capitalist class dominated the decisions of government officials. Their initial objective was to identify the most powerful actors involved in state policies. Each conjectured about various mechanisms for creating unified collective actions by state managers, political parties, corporate organizations, interest groups, social movements, class segments, and other social formations. As with most approaches examined in this book, few researchers worked from an explicitly structural perspective. However, several recent studies used network methodologies to examine interactions among national policy elites. These analyses yielded new insights into the formation of coalitions and their ability to influence and dominate state policies. This chapter extends the discussion of interorganizational relations, begun in Chapter 4 and continued in Chapter 5, to consider policymaking networks in the nation state.

The state as an object of inquiry

Today, few scholars believe that the state is subject to “relatively clear-cut empirical identification and delineation” (Nordlinger, 1981). Conceptually, a state is a specialized institution of a society that exercises sovereignty, that is, the capacity to make and implement laws for a population (Eckstein and Gurr, 1975: 4).

The world and the nation are in the midst of fantastic and bewildering social, economic, and political changes. Structural analysis is indispensable for documenting and explaining these upheavals. The network perspective on power relations among social actors, traced in the preceding chapters, can contribute important insights at every level of analysis. Table 8.1 summarizes these basic components in a rough hierarchy from the individual to the international system of nation states. Without recapitulating the table in detail, we can appreciate the vast range of influence and domination relations that appear in many guises. As exchanges of informative communications, influence relations span the dyadic persuasions among friends to the cultural imperialism of modern science and business. Domination relations, based on positive and negative resource sanctions, likewise range from the gift giving and mutual supports that generate reciprocal obligations among persons to the coercive trade and military interventions of nations. Comprehending the complexities of these manifold power dynamics within any single type of social formation is fraught with the difficult tasks of conceptualization, measurement, and interpretation. Consequently, most network theorists and researchers still confine their efforts to the characteristic nodes and ties within one level of analysis. Yet the central challenge for the coming years will be to extend the structural approach to networks crossing multiple levels, showing how they simultaneously condition and constrain one another.