situated social power

[REGINA SEWELL]

I’ve been prepping for the family section in my intro to sociology class and in the process came across the concept of “situated social power” when reviewing some of Stephanie Coontz's work.  It reminded me of a discussion on grouptalk a number of months ago about personal responsibility and will  and the legacy of oppression.  I thought this concept added some insight into the impact of social inequality on social interaction and relationships in many settings.

According to Coontz, "Situated power means that various groups in society have unequal access to economic resources, political power, and social status, and these social differences limit how fair or equal a personal relationship between two individuals from different groups can really be.  Such social imbalances affect personal behavior regardless of sincere intentions of both parties to ‘not let it make a difference.'" 

Coontz points out that situated social power operates in the classroom (and other training situations and I would add supervision situations) in that it makes students reluctant to speak their minds in class, even when the professor or teacher encourages them to do so.  She notes how easy it is to get frustrated at students for not speaking up.  The catch is that it’s easy for the party with the most power to assume that those with less power can act totally free of outside constraints.  She goes on to point out that when a person with power pretends that that power imbalance doesn’t exist, the less powerful people in the relationship tend to feel doubly vulnerable because not only are they operating in a situation where they have less power, they are also expected to pretend like that power imbalance doesn’t exist and to put aside psychological defenses they constructed against that inequality.  The end result, according to Coontz, is tension because the less powerful peopl
e tend to clam up or get sore and the more powerful people tend to feel like their “big hearted gestures are being rebuffed.”

Coontz also explains how the principal of “situated social power” applies to the tension between men and women regarding division of household labor in heterosexual relationships.   She notes that many women resent their male partners for not helping out more with domestic chores while male partners feel frustrated because they are less concerned about having a super tidy house or fabulous meals and resentful that they feel pressured to help create a super clean house when they would be ok with having socks on the floor and frozen pizza or mac n cheese and poptarts for dinner. Bring the concept of situated social power helps understand the roots of the tension.  The catch is that the wife may feel that she can’t give up the domestic services she performs because if her husband does get dissatisfied, she has fewer options than he does in the work world and would be far worse off after a divorce.  (The fact that all one has to do is look at the lifestyles and bank accounts of 
divorced men relative to divorced women to see how this works…. Or as Gloria Steinem used to say (before welfare basically got obliterated), “Most women are a divorce away from welfare.”)

This notion of “situated social power” is of course a problem in all social relationships that are impacted by social inequality.  It seems to me that to ignore that inequality and its impact and focusing instead on the individual or on the dynamics of the relationship as if inequality didn't matter is a huge disservice.