ective, power is the ability to govern and maintain order within the group. From the conflict perspective, power is typically analyzed in terms of the capacity of a social class to realize its objectives (Hess, Markson, & Stein, 1989). Power is a crucial aspect of relationships between people and among groups, often studied within the context of authority. Specifically, Weber (1958) distinguished the three bases of authority as traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. Traditional authority is based on force of habit and acceptance of group customs and identified further by Weber (1958) as patriarchal and consisting of few restraints on traditional leaders and consequently irrational because it is not grounded in any special talent for a task.
Weber (1958) regarded charismatic authority as irrational and as based on some extraordinary quality of the leader or the leader's ideas. Legal-rational authority, according to Weber (1958), is the least irrational form of power because it is based on an impersonal bond between the ruler and the ruled. Power is limited by laws that apply to all officeholders, regardless of personal quality or social status.
III. The Power-Elite Theory and the Pluralist Model
Two theories of how power is distributed in a mass society where traditional authority has been replaced by distant and formal bureaucracies have been proposed. Mills (1956) proposed the power elite model which assumes that decisionmaking and authority are concentrated in the hands of a small group. The power elite refers to similarity of world views and actions among leaders of business, government, military, and other major spheres of influence and authority. In operation, manipulation of people at the bottom of the group by those at the top tends to occur as does an increasing concentration of power in the hands of a small number of actors.
In the pluralist model proposed by Riesman (1950), it is asserted th...