Peter Emmerson PhD

Traditionally, sociological discussions of power reference Marx’s formulation that in
capitalist societies power resides with the ruling class through their ownership of the
means of production (Giddens and Held, 1982). However, probably the most influential
model of power is that of Weber which is a critique of Marxian economic determinism –
he described it as follows:

We understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize
their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are
participating in the action. (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1970, p.180)

Thus, for Weber, power can be individual as well as communal, functioning as part of the
increasingly rational process that is capitalism, and the bureaucratic legal framework
which legitimates the use of power to gain compliance. However, Weber was aware that
supernatural irrational ways of thinking and acting such as religious belief, still prevail,
which in its most potent form, charisma, can change the course of history. Charisma is:

An extraordinary quality of person, regardless of whether this quality is actual,
alleged, or presumed. ‘Charismatic authority,’ hence shall refer to a rule over
men, … to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary
quality of the specific person. (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1970, p.295)

This aspect of power is a particularly important critique of Marxist class analysis because
in emphasizing the power of the individual to change history, Weber poses a significant
challenge to the theory of class conflict.

Another analysis of power that develops from these ideas is that of Parsons
(1963a) who defines it as follows:

Power is here conceived as a circulating medium analogous to money, within
what is called the political system, but notably over its boundaries into all three of
the other neighbouring functional subsystems of a society. (Parsons, 1963a,
p.236)

Thus, power is a driving force as part of his generalized model of human experience
structured according to Weberian rationalist principles. It operates as a series of linear
processes within a hierarchy of interdependent functions to connect sociological institutions such as families with more general systems that coordinate these institutions,
as well as influencing the nature of human experience and knowledge.

Parsons, following Weber, believed the liberal economic system to be the most
advanced theoretical and conceptual analysis yet to exist because it empowered people
and provided ‘freedom’ to those who live within it. This belief in the liberating capacity of
a rational economic system oriented his understanding of power to a model similar to
that of the circulation of money. Legitimate power is the currency of the political system
and circulates from there, and if necessary, coerces those who disagree. What is
interesting is that those who are not part of the political system have no power.

Parsons’s unrealistic statement that some people have no power is a good
example of the damage done by the unacknowledged philosophical underpinning that
so many sociologists work with. It is certainly evident in Marx whose attachment to
dialectical materialism meant that he skated over individual power in favour of class. It is
also there in both Weber and Parsons and their belief in the power of rationality to deny
or promote individual freedom. Elias has drawn attention to these three very influential
examples that limit reality congruence and the development of a scientific sociology.

In What is Sociology? Elias rejects all three models, stating:

Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it is a
structural characteristic of human relationships – of all human relationships.
(Elias, 1978, p.74)

He goes on to say:

Power denotes a relationship between two or more people, or perhaps between
people and natural objects, … power is an attribute of relationships, and that the
word is best used in conjunction with a reminder about more or less fluctuating
changes in power. (Elias, 1978. p.116)

Michel Foucault is another influential writer on power. Discipline and Punish
(1991) was a change in tack after his work on the histories of madness, medicine,
science and knowledge, all of which, in attempting to eradicate the continual rewriting of
history, were heavily influenced by a structuralist perspective (Foucault, 1972). However,
the rather dehumanized history that resulted led him to adopt a Nietzschean,
genealogical approach (Foucault in Bouchard, 1977, pp. 139-64) which focusses on the
human body marked by history through war, whether it be literal violence or the use of
words (Nietzsche, 1979). From this viewpoint, history is a process of emergences
(Entstehungs) that speak of subjugation and resistance to the human will to power.

However, Foucault (1991) writes about the exercise of the will to power and how
it changes its modus operandi from the public display of violent punishment on the bodies of those who transgress, to a more pervasive subtle form of control, underpinned by a technology of discourse which drives the exploration of the minutiae of human behaviour to exploit the machine-like power of disciplined, docile human bodies. Knowledge is power, power is knowledge: power-knowledge.

In bringing the ideas of another philosopher, Nietzsche, to bear on the
dehumanizing force of structuralist historical approaches, Foucault (1991) cannot detach
himself sufficiently from philosophical dogma that limits engagement with historical facts
and is resigned to accepting the relativism that structuralist approaches rail against.
Thus, the subject of history prevails – there can only be histories, not a history, which is
an open acknowledgement of the subject-object perspective outlined by Elias (1987)
earlier in this chapter. Accordingly, even though Foucault focuses on the practices
involved in the exercise of a technology of discursive power on human bodies, the actual
people who made the history he describes remain impervious to Foucault’s prodigious
philosophical legerdemain: those who manage the apparatus of power are ominously
absent from his work, indefinable ghosts speaking panoptical power as they stalk the
shadows of his disciplinary system. For a more evidence-based appreciation of power
we turn to Elias.

By identifying power as a universal feature of human relationships Eliasian
sociology dispenses with the problems that haunted Foucault. Using game models, he
argues that power is a matter of comparative strength within and between human
figurations involving people with differing “power chances” (Elias, 1978, p.74). Power
chances relate to a state of dependency, an employee has fewer power chances than a
chief executive. However, this relationship ebbs and flows in time as the “relative
strength” (Elias, 1978, p.75) of participants or whole figurations changes, leading Elias
to speak in terms of ‘power balances’.

At a seminar at the University of Leeds, Elias (1980) presented a model of power
with four dimensions: violent, economic, religious and state. From this perspective a
threat from a mafioso, an employer, a priest or a tax inspector are all acts of power, which can be accommodated by Elias’s model, whether given formal sanction by a legitimate authority or not. The inclusion of violence is obvious and yet is rarely addressed in sociology. This is an indication of the increased reality congruence opened up by his model in which power is omnipresent within or between figurations.

However, in accepting the power of violence, Elias is identifying a source of
individual power and related levels of bodily strength. This draws attention to a crossover
between natural and social scientific models of power which Foucault (1991) accidentally alludes to when speaking of discursive technology. The natural scientific explanation which equates power with time and work done, can be found in any basic physics textbook, and is critical to an understanding of the plethora of physical processes that engineers deal with. An example is a car engine which is fitted to power a vehicle by liberating energy stored in fuel, which when compressed and ignited in a cylinder, forces
a piston to move up and down which in turn is connected to a crank, which, via a gearbox
and differential drives its wheels. A car with a large engine burns more fuel and is more
powerful, enabling the driver to accelerate more quickly; that is, it will do more work per
unit of time. This can be represented mathematically, and the power of an engine
calculated in watts. The same is true of an electrical motor. Power in this natural scientific
sense is a linear concept that can be tracked through a series of cause and effect chains.

Such a model of power can also be useful in calculating the work done by life
forms such as people. Oleksandr Usyk is a physically very powerful man who with
dedicated training became a world champion heavyweight boxer. As with the car engine,
Usyk’s power can be traced back in linear, systematic, causal fashion to his genetics,
heart and other anatomical functions and can be calculated as power output in watts.
This power can be used to explain his success as a boxer because it gives him the bodily
strength to inflict devastating damage on an opponent with just one punch. In this sense
the capacity to inflict violence is a function of bodily power which when used violently
translates into figurational power through interdependency in the form of danger, fear
and anxiety. Should both of these processes, one biological the other sociological, be
referred to as power?

Power defined by the linear systematic analysis is effective as a means of explaining how the human body works which is why Foucault’s (1991) depiction of the body as machine is appropriately described as power. However, power is much less satisfactory when explaining discursive or figurational processes such as what happens during the confrontation that occurs before the fight when Usyk confronts an opponent
at the weigh-in. This situation was famously exploited by Muhammad Ali, who before
winning his world championship fight with Sonny Liston, bombarded his menacing and
more powerful opponent with a constant series of insults. Is this attempt at intimidation
best understood in terms of power? It is reasonable to argue that power plays a part, but
can we interpret and understand Ali’s victory in logical, linear, causal, systematic terms?

Parsons may well have argued ‘yes and no’. Yes, any social process such as
intimidation can be explained in a logical systematic fashion, but this would not be power, it would be ‘influence’ (Parsons, 1963). Any attempts to get another person to comply without being formally politically sanctioned by legitimate authority was for Parsons a matter of ‘persuasion’, because they could not be coerced. However, unlike power which is only available to those in the political system, influence is something that all people can access. For influence to be effective, trust must be established. Trust is easier to obtain in kin relationships because of familiarity, but where strangers are concerned trust must be won using hard facts. Where trust does not develop, mutual obligation can help persuade. However, there is one situation that Parsons does not address that falls into the category of persuasion, the threat of violence. In a famous scene from The Godfather, a Hollywood film producer who has resisted earlier attempts at intimidation is made ‘an offer he can’t refuse’ and is persuaded to change his mind about casting a member of the New York mafia. Threatening violence in this situation is in Parsons’ terms an act of influence rather than power. How viable is this approach?

Social psychologists apparently have little problem with using influence rather
than power to explain compliance, conformity and obedience. Asch carried out some
famous experiments to assess the effects of group pressure or influence on the ability to
judge the length of a line on a piece of paper (Asch in Pennington, 1986). Even more
famously, Milgram explored the capacity of a high-status professional to persuade
participants to give people electric shocks (Milgram in Pennington, 1986). Whilst these
experiments have been criticized for their lack of ecological validity it is interesting that
social psychologists refrain from using power, and instead prefer the term influence.

However, even though Parsons and social psychologists speak of influence in
this technical sense, Elias refers only to power. Whilst it is not appropriate to fully explore
this problem here, it is arguable that power is better understood as a linear, systematic
concept more suited to engineers than sociologists. Can Elias’s figurational model of
power, with all its multidimensional complexities and related processes of human
interdependencies be more adequately explained as influence? Are not human
interdependencies as processes more akin to non-linear chaotic processes (Gleick,
1988) such as weather or water flowing in a stream, for which the linear concept of power
is not appropriate? Would ‘influence’ be a more reality congruent tool for facilitating better engagement with complex sociological processes, which are about the subtleties of human experience rather than physical realities? If so, power could be used to explain work done at a material level such as planting crops, and influence to investigate the much less tangible networks of human interdependency and figurational processes such as retiring.

It is arguable that Elias and Parsons would agree that influence is available to all
people and is from an Eliasian perspective a figurational universal. However, influence
that is not channelled in some direction such as towards survival needs has little value.
In other words, influence implies control. What is known about control and how does it
help us to understand retiring?

References

Bouchard, D. F. (ed) (1977) Language, Counter-memory, Practice: selected essays and
interviews by Michel Foucault. New York: Cornel University Press.

Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson & Co.

Elias, N. (1980) Seminar, the University of Leeds.

Elias, N. (1987) Involvement and Detachment. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.

Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C. (eds) (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Giddens, A., and Held, D. (eds) (1982) Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and
Contemporary Debates. London: Macmillan.

Gleick, J. (1988) Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Cardinal by Sphere Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo. London: Penguin.

Parsons, T. (1963) On the Concept of Influence. The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 27,
No. 1, pp.37-62. Oxford University Press on Behalf of the American Association
for Public Opinion Research.

Parsons, T. (1963a) On the Concept of Political Power. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun. 19, 1963), pp.232-262. American
Philosophical Society

Pennington, D. C. (1986) Essential Social Psychology. London: Edward Arnold.

On the first morning after retiring from full-time work, a moment I had looked forward to for so long, all felt somewhat anticlimactic. I felt quietly lonely as I watched busy people hurry on by through my kitchen window, just as I had done about 24 hours earlier. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I became aware that my life had changed in a big way.  An hour or so later I walked to a nearby supermarket feeling quite elated about my release from work responsibilities and many of the people with whom I had spent so much time. Even so, while doing my shopping I was struck by a rather unsettling observation – that accompanying me were two groups of people – young women with children and old folks, with which until then, I had little connection. This realization accentuated my earlier feelings of estrangement.  Suddenly I no longer felt ‘at home’. I had entered a period of high-speed transition for which I was ill-prepared and over which I had little influence or control. It left me feeling abandoned and insecure: overnight, I had been tipped out like a piece of social scrap. What were these intense feelings of disorientation that someone like me with good influence-chances had stumbled upon? The overriding sensation was one of shame.

Shame was an odd reaction – I had worked more or less non-stop since being thrown out of school at 17 and had a plan to exploit my new pensioned autonomy in a way that Zygmunt Bauman had recommended some years ago when I attended his retiring seminar – there was no obvious reason for feeling ashamed. And yet by engaging with pensioned status, I was signalling my formal withdrawal from adult productive life, a form of ejection, the beginning of a process leading to the final exit, death. Giving up on full-time employment meant relinquishing influence and control, and to some extent gradually returning to a child-like state of dependence and inferiority.  Women at the supermarket checkout start to call you “dear” or “darling”. This was a shameful experience. (2 mins.21 secs)

I had retired from a teaching career in further education, helping adults who like me had underperformed at school. This career was made possible by my graduation in 1979 as a 30-year-old with a degree in sociology from the University of Leeds, where I got to know two inspiring teachers – Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Kilminster. However, it was the latter who fired my interest in the work of Elias and opened up a chance to meet the great man in person when he came to Leeds to give a lecture.

As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, I was immersed in the theoretical devastation that had befallen sociology. The promise of Enlightenment beliefs in the efficacy of science explored so brilliantly by Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons had crumbled giving way to disillusionment and self-doubt. However, there was no self-doubt on display when Anthony Giddens came to Leeds and put on an impromptu and imperious performance backed by serious academic rigour. But I was not convinced. He had recently published his New Rules of Sociological Method which privileged philosophers such as Schutz, Winch, Gadamer, Habermas, Popper and Kuhn. Another significant book of this period was Hermeneutics and Social Science, written by my mentor, Zygmunt Bauman. As the title suggests, the book also focussed on philosophers such as Husserl, Heiddeger and again Schutz. Both Giddens and Bauman referenced the great sociologists but only as way of accessing the philosophical analysis that would cure contemporary sociological problems – it was a back-to-basics exercise. It was as if influential sociological theoreticians had forgotten Marx’s great rant against the idealist philosophers in his Theses on Feuerbach. Even more significantly, they were not giving sufficient and careful consideration to another remarkable book that was published at this time – Norbert Elias’s What is Sociology?. To me Elias seemed to do two things in this book: (1) he diagnosed the sociological malaise and (2) he provided a pathway out of the mire.

From Elias’s position a large part of the problem for sociologists was a lack detachment from their well-established, over-involved influential and controlling rivals, the philosophers. While Elias does refer to philosophers, he does so only with reference to the damage their homo clausus perspective inflicts on the scientific sociological enterprise by systematizing the search for knowledge according to metaphysical logical conventions  which I thought were designed to provide human certainty and control over the fear associated with a universe of perpetual change and pointlessness. Thus, philosophical knowledge is a technique for controlling human anxiety, and is not therefore a method to facilitate scientific engagement with social experiences.

However, if we adopt the more grounded perspective developed by Elias, one that specifies change and interdependency as universal features of social experience, which then become a default position for any sociological research, the perennial problems associated with dichotomies such as subject and object, agency and structure that have stifled sociological understanding since its inception, dissolve. Nevertheless, this is a very radical enterprise that requires a new lexicon of change and connectedness in which power, or what I prefer to call influence, and control are also universals. To facilitate this leap into a sociology of change Elias developed a new set of concepts such as figuration, habitus, we-I balance, detachment and reality congruence, a language that is capable of engaging with the processes that comprise human experiences.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons I was not able to capitalize on my insights when I graduated in 1979, but over my 37 years in teaching I never saw any reason to doubt my belief that Elias’s sociological model was the blueprint for what might be called a second phase of sociological development. However, it was not until 2017 that I was ready to explore my ideas through full-time research. I contacted Stephen Mennell for advice, and he referred me to Jason Hughes and John Goodwin at the University of Leicester who invited me for interview. After an exciting discussion we agreed on an Eliasian approach to retirement as my research topic. I started my project in January 2018 and here I am after nearly seven years of often tortuous struggle, fresh from completing my PhD just over a week ago.

  I grounded my research in the spirit of the Eliasian enterprise, which until then had never been attempted in this subject area. Thus, I did not aim my research at the conventional noun ‘retirement’. Instead I did what Elias would have done and focused on process using the verb ‘retiring’.  This meant carrying out a long-term sociogenetic investigation, in order to discover consistent data on retiring which could be used to identify any connections with Eliasian civilizing processes such as state formation and increased self-regulation. An important feature of these processes is the development of professionalization at both governmental and military levels, which is accompanied by the gradual development of a personal habitus patterned according to the competitive benefits of a more business-like, future oriented approach, that prioritizes calculation and planning over emotional outburst and the threat of violence.

One thing that was very obvious when I began my research was that there was no data on the long-term development of retiring. Accordingly, I spent some time looking at evidence on the changing use of the words retire, retirement and pension. The farthest back I could go was the sixteenth century where the pattern of usage was dominated by references to retiring as withdrawal from scenes of conflict, which fits with Elias’s work on the more violent figurations that pre-date state formation. After augmenting my evidence on word usage with historical data on old age, it became clear that very few UK people retired at that time. Those who did were either landowners or their servants.

A very good example of the latter concerns the group of soldiers known as the beefeaters, who were appointed in 1487 as full-time salaried guards to the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Not only did these men receive a wage for their violent services, but they were also allocated a guaranteed pension.  A direct line of descent can be traced from these men to the formation of the Royal Navy in 1546 and the British Army in 1707. Their pensioned status was given institutional recognition at the end of the seventeenth century by the building of three hospitals for retired sailors and soldiers at Greenwich and Chelsea in London and another in Ireland. Until this time these were the only figurations of men outside the upper tier in receipt of a state pension on which to retire. One explanation for these developments is the influence that accrued to those with specialist skills in violence who were valuable to the developing state.

            However, during the eighteenth century professionalization was expanding beyond state-oriented functionaries such as government officials and soldiers. An example comes from the following quote of 1806 from The Medical and Physical Journal: “Let the surgeons of the former retire upon an annuity”.  Clearly a link is being made between retiring and the procurement of an annuity or pension on withdrawal from full-time work.  Whether annuities were purchased by surgeons or granted as a form of pension is unclear, but it does show that a formal system of payments was emerging to service the needs of high tier professional people who were well-established by the early nineteenth century, and who were reliant on earnings even after retiring. However, such options were still only available to those paid a high salary, or who fulfilled critical security functions such as soldiers or revenue men.  Almost everyone else who relied on paid employment worked till they dropped, because annuities and pensions were either unavailable or unaffordable (Hannah, 1986, Thane, 2000).

During the last 200 years retiring from paid work has gone from being the preserve of a comparatively small group of wealthy professionals and ex-soldiers, to an expectation for everyone that they can retire when they get to a certain age or become unproductive. In accordance with this development, specialists in retiring have emerged whose job is to service the pension needs of those in specialist occupations that have developed since the eighteenth century. It seems that for those without property, patronage or military and clerical pensions, retiring is inextricably linked to industrial production and paid employment, which took-off in Britain around 1760. However, for most nineteenth century employees, who lived from hand to mouth and worked till they dropped, pensions were an irrelevance. It was not until the 1900s that retiring became a viable proposition for people at lower levels of income, unconnected with either national or local government.

As my research progressed it became increasingly obvious that I needed to ground my work on retiring in the experiences of real people. One of the earliest occupational groups of mainly working-class men who were awarded a guaranteed state funded pension were police officers in 1890. This is a marker of their emergence as a profession.  However, unlike lawyers, civil servants or engineers, they are the agents of internal state security, part of the process of pacification that can be traced back to the beefeaters in 1485. 

In my thesis I argue that the development of UK policing can be seen as a four phase process of professionalization beginning in pre-Norman England. This ended with the rise to influence of the gentry who as JPs were designated by royal authority to administer English and Welsh justice until the late eighteenth century. Their decline coincided with the rising influence of traders and manufacturers who were exploiting industrial methods of production which needed large amounts of wage labour, encouraging the mass migration of people to towns and cities. The lawlessness of urban living overwhelmed the traditional JPs and their parish constables and was damaging business prosperity, so urban leaders began pressing government to sanction the establishment of professional police forces. The first city to appoint a full-time police chief was Glasgow in 1800, closely followed by London’s Metropolitan Police which began functioning after the passing of the 1829 Police Act. These changes signal the beginning the third phase of UK policing in which officers become militarized professionals.

 However, there were serious problems all over Britain when it came to finding people with the competence to run the new police forces effectively. For example, in Glasgow there had been a series of disastrous appointments until they gave the job to a retired army officer. This approach to running police forces became commonplace and so it was that in 1829 Colonel Sir Charles Rowan was appointed the first commissioner of the Met. It was not until 1953 that a career police officer attained this rank. This was a landmark change that led me to identify the post Second World War period as transitional to the development of a fourth phase in UK policing in which the external force of military discipline had been superseded by a managerial style that relied on police officers using self-regulation to enforce their discretion.

This implies the emergence of a proper professional occupational habitus for police officers. I have identified three dimensions that comprise this habitus (1) outsider status (2) dangerous work and (3) dirty work. Professional police officers were and are the new kids on the block, working in the shadow of the gentrified established military. Their job is to engage with dangerous, violent people, work that in a comparatively pacified state, most people find repugnant. Their habitus is formed by a training programme that emphasizes the use of self-controlled and measured aggression. However, the dangerous and dirty aspects of their job coupled with their outsider status foster very strong group cohesion, or what I term high we-orientation. From this disparity in experience there emerges a tension which promotes a figurational inertia that hampers the development of a fully professional police force. On one level they are self-controlled professionals, on another they are stigmatized outsiders who deal in dangerous, dirty work that correlates with high emotions and high we-orientation that is very difficult to control. This tension coincides with what I have identified as habitus lag.

This potential for high we-orientation makes police officers interesting as far as retiring is concerned. Retiring is a process that requires a plan, it involves strong future orientation and the careful control of present-time spending. This is a feature of being a professional, a self-regulated person who is rational and calculating because their job has low emotional involvement and low we-orientation. However, for those whose job is high in we-orientation such as front line police officers, retiring is more difficult. I found evidence to suggest that officers at the rank of inspector and above had few problems with retiring. However, this was not always the case for sergeants and constables, both of whom were engaged in front-line policing

In a nutshell, successful retiring in general is about careful planning. However, for those with a habitus high in we-orientation this can be very difficult because it demands a significant reconfiguration of habitus and a greater level of self-control.

Your death still troubles

This verse from A. E. Housman never leaves me:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

No voice, no touch, miss you.

You never let me down, even now in your dying I will always find joy in that music you shared with me.

An old lady I knew died last week, she was 101. You died this very day 56 years ago at 44. I would have loved sharing your 45th birthday but had to celebrate it alone as always since 1966.

I always knew that your dying would wound me irrevocably, how could it not when I learned to be joyous with you, and that living has only one true joy, ‘to love and be loved in return’.  When those you love die, living becomes so much more pointless.

It is, as they say, a savage irony that in making such a fundamental contribution to opening my experience to ultimate joy, love, when you were taken away too soon on this day in 1966, leaving we five bereft of your comforting presence in our similar yet different ways, I was ill-prepared for life’s greatest tragedy, living with a broken heart.

Another freezing, solitary covid morning.  It was about now, 16 years ago, that you could fight no more.  A different type of morning, freezing yes, but I was with you and no pandemic.  We had spoken our bedtime words as always last night, our last conversation, a conversation that spoke of your pain and no ‘sweet dreams’.  Not long afterwards a phone-call got me driving to your hospital bedside in my sky-blue racing car.  I rubbed your cold feet and sang quietly in your ear, our bedtime songs, songs you sang to me as your boy, to make me feel safe.  I sing them now, but quietly to myself, as if.  You’re safe now.