ABSTRACT
This book is the culmination of a project which started in 1971 and which has occupied my attention, on and off, for the best part of a decade. The project began when I decided to conduct a case study of power and influence at the local level of British politics. The case study itself, which was based in the London Borough of Croydon, took just two years to complete, and in that period I managed to develop a number of insights into the relationship between a local authority and groups such as big business, council tenants and suburban owner-occupiers. Like all case studies, however, this research encountered two related problems. First, it was unclear how far the conclusions that were drawn from it could be generalized to other comparable towns and cities in Britain. Indeed, many of the central findings received little support from existing case study material. Secondly, there was a problem of how the empirical findings related to specific theoretical questions concerning the nature of political power; the relationship between the state and social classes, between class interests and political action and so on. Clearly, taken by itself, the Croydon research was interesting but inadequate.
