Two Faces of Power

The concept of power remains elusive despite the recent and prolific outpourings of case studies on community power. ¹ Its elusiveness is dramatically demonstrated by the regularity of disagreement as to the locus of community power between the sociologists and the political scientists. Sociologically oriented researchers have consistently found that power is highly centralized, while scholars trained in political science have just as regularly concluded that in “their” communities power is widely diffused. ² Presumably, this explains why the latter group styles itself “pluralist,” its counterpart “elitist.”