Community Studies and Decision-Taking

In the past, the literature of community power studies has been bedevilled by two interrelated divisions amongst those who have conducted these studies. On the one hand, there has been a complex and bitter dispute about techniques, and on the other there has been a battle between the Sociologists who espoused a stratification theory and saw in all community structures a recurrent pattern of elites, and the Political Scientists who, with almost equal persistence, have found pluralistic structures. In this paper we wish if possible to break with this increasingly barren discussion and to use the study of the town of Ashford in Kent, with which we have been engaged in recent years, in order to illustrate what we hope to be a rather more fruitful approach to the analysis of community power structure. Our contention is that in this field of political science, which has claimed to be extremely scientific in its approach, there has been no real attempt to apply a thorough-going scientific methodology, and, as a result, the discussion has become bogged-down in a dispute about methods, in which the protagonists have become so embroiled that they have lost sight of the basic problem. Important as has been this debate about methods, it has taken attention away from the need to develop a theoretical framework for the study of community power which will enable us to transcend a level of the discussion which has largely been conducted by two ideologically opposed schools of thought, each determined to prove the other wrong.