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Social Stratification, Nondecision-Making, and the Study of Community Power

University of Maryland

The nondecision process can best be studied by viewing power as having a strategic dimension and as operating at three levels. A nonpluralist approach treats the public and private sectors as highly interdependent and assumes that a wide range of social resources and community activities are politically relevant, though not always manifestly so. Given that social resources are unequally distributed among different social strata, we have good cause to consider how behavior in the power arena might be affected by the distribution of resources and the structure of the situation. We can hypothesize that the scope and extent of efforts made by various strata are influenced by the amounts of resources possessed, opportunity costs, likelihoods of success, and immediacy of costs and benefits at stake. Thus, while those who are disadvantaged might in the abstract be motivated to work for system change, we can see that their concrete circumstances could dictate otherwise. We can therefore hypothesize further that imbalances in social resources contribute to sets of arrangements through which those imbalances are protected rather than challenged politically. These arrangements can be categorized and analyzed as elements in a nondecision process.

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