Structural Functional Approach

Retrieved from http//www. cifas. us/smith/chapters. html Title A geomorphologic come on to comparative politics. Author(s) M. G. Smith Source In Varieties of semi semi governmental Theory. David Easton, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-H only. p. 113-128. Reprinted in Corporations and Society. p. 91-105. FIVE M. G. SMITH University of California, Los Angeles A Structural appeal to Comparative Politics Comparative politics seeks to discover regularities and variations of policy-making government activity by comparative compendium of historical and contemporary systems.Having withdrawd these regularities and variations, it seeks to catch the factors which to a lower placelie them, in suppose to discover the properties and conditions of polities of modifying types. It accordingly(prenominal) seeks to shrivel up these observations to a series of interconnected propositions germane(predicate) to all(prenominal)(a) these systems in two static and changing conditions. Hopefull, peerless muckle then enquire how these governmental goes relate to the wider milieux of which they atomic descend 18 part. It would seem that this comparative enquiry whitethorn be pursued i. various(a) ways that all sh be the alike elementary system, muchover differ in emphases arid sta ing points.Their leafy vegetable strategy is to abstract one aspect of semipolitical significantism and let on it as a frame of reference. With this variable held constant, enquiries pre religious service seek to determine the limits indoors which virtually different dimensions vary as the value of the primary variable is changed, the forms and ad dear of the others, break apartly or unitedly, can to a fault be investigated. Ideally, we should seek to conclude relevant hypotheses from a ecumenical body of theory, and then to check and belt down them by inductive analyses of historical and ethnographic data. ActuaJ procedures vary. 113 114 /A morphological fir e TO relative government activity Initially, we might call anyone of four climbes to be utilitarian in the comparative hold of political systems. These four approaches use respectively the dimensions of process, depicted physical object, manoeuvre, and form as the bases for their conceptual frameworks. In fact, cOlIlparative studies based on process and content face insuperable obstacles due to the enormous variability of political systems. In centralized polities, the institutional processes of government be elaborately differentiated, discrete, and favorable to identify.They be practically the subject, as well as the source, of a much(prenominal) or little complex and precise body of rules which whitethorn necessitate specia arguings to interpret them. In simpler societies, the synonymic processes argon r atomic tot up 18ly differentiated and discrete. They usually occur within the context of institutional activities with multiple functions, and atomic numb er 18 often difficult to abstract and segregate for analysis as self-contained processual systems. originally this is affirmable, we hold independent criteria to distinguish the governmental and nongovernmental dimensions of these institutional forms.The substantive approach rests on the family unit of content. By the con.. tent of a governmental system, I mean its item substantive concerns and resources, whether worldly, human, or typic. As a rule, the more(prenominal) differentiated and complex the governmental processes be, the greater the range and complexity of content. This follows because the content and processes of government vary unneurotic. Since both these frameworks be interdependent and derivative, both say independent criteria for identifying government. The functional approach avoids these limitations.It prep ars government functionally as all those activities which influence the way in which authoritative decisions are formulated and execute for a socie ty. l From this starting point, various refined conceptual schemes can be developed. As requisites or implications of these decisional processes, David Easton identifies five modes of activeness as requisite brokers of all political systems legislation, administration, adjudication, the development of demands, and the development of support and solidarity. They may be conventioned as input and output requisites of governmental systems.According to almond, the universally requisite inputs are political brotherlyization and recruitment, interest articulation, interest aggregation, and political communication. As outputs, he states that rule making, rule diligence, and rule adjudication are all universa1. 2 Neither of these categorical schemes specifies foreign dealings and defense, which are two in truth(prenominal) general governmental concerns nor is it easy to see how these schemes could accommodate political processes in non-societal units. such(prenominal) deductive m odels suffer from legitimate inexplicit assurances with1David Easton, An Approach to the outline of Political Systems, World Politics, IX, no 3 (1957), 384. 2 Gabriel Almond, Introduction to Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1961). A morphological prelude TO COMPARATIVE government / 115 out which the initial liquid ecstasy stress on political functions might be im- . possible. barely despite their universal claims, it trunk to be shown that Bushmen, Pygmies, or Eskimos pick out governments which are functionally homologous with those of the unify States and the Soviet Union.Legislation, rule adjudication, and interest articulation are categories appropriate to the sermon of complex, modern polities kinda than simple, naif ones. But the business which faces the student of comparative politics is to develop a conceptual framework useful and applicable to all. To impute the features and conditions of modern polities to the less differentiated primitive systems is virtually to waive the central problem of comparative politics. The functional approach, as usually donationed, suffers from a further defect It assumes a rather special ensemble of geomorphologic conditions.When authoritative decisions are formulated and executed for a society, this unit must be territorially delimited and politically centralized. The mode of centralization should similarly endow government with more-or-Iess legitimate physical compulsion. 3 In short, the reality to which the model refers is the modern nation-state. By much(prenominal) criteria, ethnography shows that the boundaries of many societies are fluctuating and obscure, and that the authoritative stipulation of decisions made in and for them are redden more so.Clearly bounded societies with centralized authority systems are perhaps a small minority of the polities with which we induct to deal. A geomorphological approach unthaw of t hese functional presumptions may thus be useful, tho only if it can accommodate the full range of political systems and elucidate the principles which underlie their variety. In this paper, I shall only intimate the broad outlines of this approach. I hope to present it more fully in the future. Government is the decree of macrocosm affairs.This prescript is a set of processes which defines government functionally, and which also identifies its content as the affairs which are define, and the resources used to define them. It does non seem useful or necessary to lead astray a comparative weigh of governmental systems by deductive theories which predicate their minimum universal content, requisites, or features. The critical element in government is its state-supported shell. Without a public, there can be neither public affairs nor processes to rate them.Moreover, while all governments speculate publics, all publics cave in governments for the management of their affa irs. The nature of these publics is therefore the first object of study. Publics vary in scale, composition, and character, and it is reasonable to suppose that their public affairs and restrictive arrangements lead vary correspondingly. The first task of a morphologic approach to comparative politics is thus to identify the properties of a public and to indicate the principal varieties and bases of publics. 3 Almond, Introduction, p. . 116 / A geomorphologic apostrophize TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS As I use the term, public does not include mobs, crowds, unremarkable assemblies, or mass-communication audiences. It does not refer to much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) categories as resident aliens, the ill, aged, or unwed, or to those tender segments which drop coarse affairs and organized procedures to cast them-for example, hard workers, roughly clans, and unenfranchised strata such as the medieval serfs or the harijans of India. Such categories are part of one or mo re publics they are not separate publics of their own.For example, in an Indian crossroads, a medieval manor, or a slave plantation, members of the disprivileged categories realize a public only if they form an enduring group having current plebeian affairs and the administration and autonomy necessary to regulate them plainly the existence of such local publics is not in itself commensurate for the strata from which their rank and files are drawn to have the circumstance of publics. For this to be the case, these local publics must be organized into a single group co-extensive with the stratum. With such organization, we shall deport to find a set of ballpark affairs and procedures to regulate them.The organization is itself an important familiar affair and a system of institutional procedures. By a public, then, I mean an enduring, presumably perpetual group with fixed boundaries and membership, having an subjective organization and a unitary set of orthogonal relat ions, an unshared body of common affairs, and autonomy and procedures adequate to regulate them. It exit be evident that a public can neither come into creation nor of importtain its existence without some set of procedures by which it regulates its inwrought and orthogonal affairs. These procedures together form the governmental process of the public.Mobs, crowds, and audiences are not publics, because they lack presumptive continuity, interior(a) organization, common affairs, procedures, and autonomy. For this reason, they also lack the determinate boundaries and membership which are essential for a durable group. While the categories mentioned above are fixed and durable, they also lack the native organization and procedures which constitute a group. When groups are be so that their continuity, identity, autonomy, organization, and exclusive affairs are not disturbed by the entrance or exit of their individual members, they have the character of a public.The city of Sant a Monica shares these properties with the United States, the Roman Catholic Church, Bushman bands, the predominate coterie of an Indian village, the Mende Pora, an African line, a Nahuatl or Slavonic village comm maven, Galla and Kikuyu age-sets, societies among the Crow and Hidatsa Indians, universities, medieval guilds, chartered companies, regiments, and such voluntary associations as the Yoruba Ogboni, the Yako lkpungkara, and the American Medical Association. The units just listed are all publics and all are in corporald groups the governmental process inherent in publics is a feature of all in in mergedd groups.Corporate groups-Maines tums aggregate-are one species of perfect or fully-fledged corporation, the other world the corporation A geomorphological APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS / 117 bushel exemplified by such positions as the American Presidency, the British Crown, the Papacy, governorships, chieftaincies, and university chancellorships. Corporations touc h on and merged groups share the following characteristics, all of which are necessary for perfect or full in somatic status identity, presumed perpetuity, closure and membership, autonomy within a achieven sphere, exclusive common affairs, set procedures, and organization.The first four of these qualities are formal and primarily external in their reference they define the unit in relation to its context. The last four conditions are processual and functional, and primarily internal in their reference. The of import contrasts in the midst of corporations sole and in collectived groups are geomorphologic, though developmental differences are also important. Corporate groups are pluralities to which an unchanging unity is ascribed construeed externally, from each one forms one person, as Fortes characterized the Ashanti matrilineages. This external indivisibility of the collective group is not merely a juristic postulate. It inevitably presumes and involves governmental processes within the group. In contrast with a unified group, an space is a unique status having only one incumbent at any stipulation time. Nonetheless, consequent holders of a common office are often conceived of and addressed as a group. The present incumbent is merely one link in a chain of indefinite extent, the temporary custodian of all the properties, precedents, and privileges which constitute the office.As such, incumbents may legitimately seek to aggrandize their offices at the expense of identical units or of the publics to which these offices relate but they are not ainly classic to alienate or abridge the rights and abilitys of the status temporarily entrusted to them. The distinction between the capital of an enterprise and the personalty of its owners is similar to the distinction between the office and its incumbent. It is this distinction that enables us to distinguish ffices from other personal statuses most easily. It is very possible that in kindly ev olution the corporate group preceded the corporation sole. However, once authority is adequately centralized, offices tend to become dominant and then we often find that offices are instituted in advance of the publics they will regulate or represent, as, for example, when autocrats ordain the establishment of new towns, settlements, or colonies under officials designated to set up and administer them.There are many instances in which corporate groups and offices egress and develop in harmony and congruence, and both may often snuff it at once as, for example, when a given(p) public is conquered and assimilated. These developmental relations are merely one aspect of the very variable but rudimentary relation between offices and corporate groups. Despite Weber, there are a wide range of corporate groups which lack stable leaders, 4 Meyer Fortes, Kinship and Marriage among the Ashanti, in African Sys- tems of Kinship and Marriage, eds. A. R.Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde (Londo n Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 254-61. 118 / A structural APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS much less official heads. Others may have precedential members whose authority is at outmatch advisory and congresswoman yet others have a definite council or an official head, or both. In many cases, we have to deal with a public constituted by a number of coordinate corporate groups of similar type. The senior members of these groups may form a collegial body to administer the common affairs of the public, with variable effects.Ibo and Indian village communities illustrate this well. In such contexts, where superordinate offices emerge, they often have a primarily sacred symbolic quality, as do the divine kingships of the Ngonde and Shilluk, but lack useful blasphemous control. Between this extreme and an absolute despotism, there are a number of differing arrangements which only a comparative structural analysis may reduce to a single general order. Different writers stress di fferent features of corporate organization, and sometimes employ these to explain these societal forms.Weber, who recognizes the central role of corporate groups in political systems, fails to distinguish them adequately from offices (or administrative organs, as he calls them). 5 For Weber, corporate groups are defined by coordinated action under leaders who work de facto powers of command over them. The inadequacy of this view is patent when Barth employs it as the basis for denying to lineages and certain other units the corporate status they normally have, while reserving the term corporate for factions of a heterogeneous and dependent on(p) character. Maine, on the other hand, stresses the perpetuity of the corporation and its inalienable bundle of rights and obligations, the kingdom with which it is indentified. 7 For Gierke,s Durkheim,9 and Davis,10 corporate groups are identified by their common will, corporal conscienc, and group personality. For Goody, only named grou ps holding material retention in common are corporate. 1 These definitions all suffer from overemphasis on some elements, and corresponding inattention to others. The common action characteristic of corporate groups rarely embraces the application of violence which both Weber and Barth seem to stress.Mass violence often harvest-home independ5 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. R. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (London Wm. Hodge & Co. , 1947), pp. 133-37, 302-5. 6 Fredrik Barth, Political lead among hit Pathans. Monographs in Social Anthropology, London School of Economics, No. 19 (London University of London Press, 1959). 7 H. S. Maine, Ancient police force (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. , 1904), p. 155. S Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, trans. Ernest Barker (Boston Beacon Press, 1957). Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. George E. Simpson (New York renounce Press of Glencoe, Inc. , 1933). 10 John P. Davis, Corporations (New York Capricorn Books, 1961), p. 34. 11 Jack Goody, The sort of Double Descent Systems, Current Anthropology II, No. 1 (1961), 5, 22-3. A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS / 119 ently of corporate groups. Corporate action is typically action to regulate corporate affairs-that is, to cause and protect corporate rights, to carry out corporate obligations, and to allocate corporate responsibilities and privileges.When a group holds a common acres, this tenure and its exercise inevitably involve corporate action, as does any rite in which the members or representatives of the group engage as a unit. Even the maintenance of the groups identity and closure entails modes of corporate action, the complexity and implications of which vary with the situation. It is thus quite fallacious to identify corporate action only if with coordinated physical movements. A chorus is not a corporate group.The presumed perpetuity, boundedness, determ inate membership, and identity of a corporation, all more or less garnerly entail one another, as do its requisite features of autonomy, organization, procedure, and common affairs. It is largely because of this interdependence and circularity among their elements that corporations die so hard but by the same(p) token, none of these elements alone can constitute or maintain a corporation. An office persists as a unit compensateing if it is not occupied, providing that the corpus of rights, responsibilities, and powers which constitute it dormant persists.To modify or guide the office, it is necessary to modify. or eliminate its content. Among Kung bushmen, bands persist as corporate groups even when they have no members or heads12 these bands are units holding an inalienable estate of water holes, veldkos areas, etc. , and constitute the fixed points of Kung geography and society. The Bushmans world beingness constituted by corporate bands, the reconstitution of these bands is unavoidable, whenever their dissolution makes this necessary.As units which are each defined by an exclusive universitas juris, corporations provide the frameworks of law and authoritative regulation for the societies that they constitute. The corporate estate includes rights in the persons of its members as well as in material or incorporeal goods. In simpler societies, the bulk of substantive law consists in these systems of corporate right and obligation, and includes the conditions and correlates of membership in corporate groups of differing type. In such societies, adjectival law consists in the usual modes of corporate procedure. To a much greater extent than is commonly ealized, this is also the case with modern societies. The persistence, internal autonomy, and structural uniformity of the corporations which constitute the society ensure corresponding uniformity in its jural rules and their regular application over space and time. As modal units of loving process and structure, corporations provide the framework in which the jural aspects of fond relations are defined and enforced. Tribunals are merely functionally particular(prenominal) corporations charged with handling issues of certain kinds. Neither tribunals nor the systematic ap12 Lorna Marshall, Kung Bushmen Bands, A/rica, XXX (1960), 325- 5). 120 / A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS plication of the force of politically organized society13 are necessary or commensurate for the establishment of law. The law of a primitive society consists in its conventional procedures and modes of corporate action, and is implicit in the traditional rights, obligations, and conditions of corporate membership. In such societies, units which hold the same type of corporate estate are structurally homologous, and are generally announced in such a way that each depends on the tacit acquaintance or active support of its fellows to maintain and please its estate.Thus, in these simpler syste ms, social order consists in the regulation of relations between the constitutive corporations as well as within them. In societies which lack central political organs, societal boundaries coincide with the maximum range of an identical corporate constitution, on the articulation of which the social order depends. though the component corporations are all discrete, they are also interdependent. But they may be linked together in a number of different ways, with consequent differences in their social systems.In some cases, functionally distinct corporations may be classified together in purely formal categories, such as moieties, clans, or castes. The Kagoro of Yankee Nigeria illustrate this. 14 In other cases, corporations which are formally and functionally distinct may form a wider public having certain common interests and affairs. The LoDagaba of northern Ghana and Upper Volta are an example. 15 In still other cases, corporations are linked individually to one another in a comp lex series of alliances and associations, with lapping margins in such a way that they all are related, this instant or indirectly, in the same network.Fortes has given us a very detailed analysis of such a system among the Tallensi. 16 However they are articulated in societies which lack central institutions, it is the extensive breeding of these corporate forms which defines the unit as a separate system. Institutional uniformities, which include similarities of organization, ideology, and procedure, are quite sufficient to give these acephalous societies systemic unity, even where, as among the Kachins of Burma, competing institutional forms catchment area the allegiance of their members. 7 To say that corporations provide the frameworks of primitive law, and that the tribunals of modem societies are also corporate forms, is simply to say that corporations are the central agencies for the regulation of public affairs, being themselves each a separate public or organ, administ ering certain affairs, and together constituting wider publics or associations of publics 13 Roscoe Pound, Readings on the History and System 0/ the Common Law, 2nd ed. (Boston Dunster House Bookshop, 1913), p. 4. 14 M. G.Smith, Kagoro Political Development, Human Organization, XIX, No. 3 (1960), 37-49. 15 Jack Goody, Fields of Social Control among the LoDagaba, daybook of the Royal Anthropological Institute, LXXXVII, Part I (1957),75-104. 16 Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics 0/ Clanship among the Tallensi (London Oxford University Press, 1945). 17 E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. , 1954). A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS / 121 for others. By the same token, they are the sources or frameworks of disorder.In some acephalous societies, disorder seems more or less perennial, and consists mainly in strife within and between corporations. Centralization, despite its merits, does not really avert disorder. In concentrating authority, it concurrently concentrates the vulnerability of the system. Accordingly, in centralized societies, serious betrothals turn out around the central regulative structures, as, for instance, in secessionist or revolutionary struggles, dynastic or religious wars, and religious rites of rebellion. 18 Such conflicts with or for central power normally affect the entire social body.In acephalous societies, on the other hand, conflicts over the regime may proceed in one domain without implicating the others. 19 In both the centralized and decentralized systems, the sources and objects of conflict are generally corporate. Careful study of Barths account of the Swat Pathans shows that this is true for them also, although the aggregates directly contraposed are factions and blocs. 20 Societal differences in the scale, type, and degree of order and coordination, or in the frequency, occasions, and forms of social conflict are important data and problems for political science.To analyze them a dequately, one must use a comparative structural approach. Briefly, recent work suggests that the quality and modes of order in any social system reflect its corporate constitution-that is, the variety of corporate types which constitute it, their characteristic bases and properties, and the way in which they are related to one another. The variability of political systems which derives from this condition is far more complex and interesting than the traditional dichotomy of centralized and noncentralized systems would suggest.I have already indicated some important typological differences within the class of acephalous societies equally significant differences within the centralized form are familiar to all. This traditional dichotomy assumes that centralization has a relatively clear meaning, from which a single, comprehensive scale may be directly derived. This assumption subsumes a range of problems which require careful study but in any event, centralization is merely one aspect of political organization, and not necessarily the most revealing.Given variability in the relations between corporations sole and corporate groups, and in their bases and forms, it seems more useful to distinguish systems according to their structural simplicity or complexity, by reference to the variety of corporate units of differing forms, bases, and functions which they contain, and the principles which serve to articulate them. Patently, such differences in composition imply differences in the relational networks in which these corporations articulate. Such ifferences in structural composition simultaneously name the variety of political forms 18 Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in randomness East Africa (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1954) Introduction to Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London Cohen & West, 1963). 19 Leach, Political Systems 0/ Highland Burma. 20 Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. 122 / A STRUCTURAL APPROACH T O COMPARATIVE POLITICS and processes, and explain differences in the scale, order, and coordination of polities.This is so because corporate organization provides the framework, content, and procedures for the regulation of public affairs. For this reason, the analysis of corporate structure should be the first task in the case study of a political system and in comparative work. For many political scientists, the concept of sovereignty is essential as the foundation of governmental order and autonomy. In my view, this notion is scoop dispensed with. It is a hindrance rather than a help to analysis, an unhappy solution of a very real problem which has been poorly formulated. In a system of sovereign states, no state is sovereign.As etymology shows, the idea of sovereignty derives from the historically antecedent condition of personal dominion such as kingship, and simply generalizes the essential features of this form as an ideology appropriate to legitimate and guide other forms o f centralization. The real problem with which the notion of sovereignty deals is the relation between autonomy and coordination. As the fundamental myth of the modern nation-state, the concept is undoubtedly important in the study of these states its historical or analytical usefulness is otherwise very doubtful.It seems best to formulate the problems of simultaneous coordination and autonomy in neutral terms. As units administering exclusive common affairs, corporations presuppose well-defined spheres and levels of autonomy, which are generally no more nor less than the affairs of these units require for their adequate regulation. Where a corporation fully subsumes all the juridical rights of its members so that their corporate identification is exclusive and lifelong, the tendencies toward autarky are generally greatest, the stress on internal autonomy most pronounced, and relations between corporations most brittle.This seems to be the case with certain types of segmentary linea ge systems, such as the Tallensi. Yet even in these conditions, and perhaps to pick out with them, we usually find institutional bonds of various types such as ritual cooperation, local community, intermarriage, clanship, and kinship which serve to bind the autarchic individual units into a series of wider publics, or a set of dyadic or triadic associations, the members of which give-up the ghost to several such publics simultaneously.Webers classification of corporate groups as heteronomous or autonomous, heterocephalous or autocephalous, touches only those aspects of this problem in which he was directly interested. 21 We need also to analyze and compare differing levels, types, and degrees of autonomy and dependence in differing social spheres and situations. From comparative studies of these problems, we may hope to derive precise hypotheses about the conditions and limits of corporate autonomy and articulation in systems of differing composition and span. These hypotheses sho uld also illuminate the conditions and limits of social disorder.Besides the perfect or fully-fledged corporations, offices and corpo21 Weber, Theory 0/ Social and Economic Organization, pp. 135-36. A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS / 123 rate groups, there are imperfect quasicorporations with must also be studied explicitly. The two main forms here are the corporate category and the commission. A corporate category is a clearly bounded, identifiable, and immutable aggregate which differs from the corporate group in wanting exclusive common affairs, autonomy, procedures adequate for their regulation, and the internal organization which constitutes the group.Viewed externally, acephalous societies may be regarded as corporate categories in their geographical contexts, since each lacks a single inclusive frame of organization. But they are categories of a rather special type, since, as we have seen, their institutional uniformity provides an effective basis for functiona l unity. In medieval Europe, serfs formed a corporate category even though on particular manors they may have formed corporate groups.Among the Turkana22 and Karimojong23 of East Africa, age-sets are corporate categories since they lack internal organization, exclusive affairs, distinctive procedures, and autonomy. Among the nearby Kipsigi24 and Nandi25 clans are categorical units. These clans have call and identifying symbols, a determinate membership recruited by agnatic descent, certain ritual and social prohibitions of which exogamy is most important, and continuity over time but they lack internal organization, common affairs, procedures and autonomy to regulate them.Though they provide a set of categories into which all members of these societies are distributed, they never function as social groups. Not far to the south, in Ruanda, the subject Hutu caste formed a corporate category not so long ago. 26 This caste had a fixed membership, closure, easy identification, and forme d a permanent structural unit in the Tutsi state. Rutu were excluded from the political process, as a category and almost to a man. They lacked any inclusive internal organization, exclusive affairs, autonomy, or procedures to regulate them.Under their Tutsi masters, they held the status of serfs but when universal suffrage was recently introduced, Rutu enrolled in political parties such as the Parmehutu Aprosoma which succeeded in throwing off the Tutsi yoke and expelling the monarchy. 27 In order to become corporate groups, corporate categories need to develop an effective representative organization, such for instance as may instantaneously be emerging among American Negroes. In the American case, this corporate category is seeking to organize itself in order to remove the disprivileges which define it as a category.Some corporate 22 Philip Gulliver, The Turkana Age Organization, American Anthropologist, LX (1958), 900-922. 23 Neville Dyson-Hudson, to author, 1963. 24 J. G. Per istiany, The Social Institutions of the Kipsigis (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. , 1939). 25 G. W. B. Huntingford, The Nandi of Kenya (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. , 1953). 26 J. J. Maquet, The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda (London Oxford University Press, 1960). 27 Marcel dHertefelt, Les Elections Communales et Ie Consensus Politique au Rwanda, Zaire, XIV, Nos. -6 (1960), 403-38. 124 / A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS categories are thus merely formal units absent common functions others are defined by common disabilities and burdens, though lacking common affairs. Under Islam, the dhimmi formed such a category in India, so do the individual castes. The disabilities and prohibitions which define categories are not endlessly directly political they include exogamy and ritual taboos. Commissions differ from offices along lines which recall the differences between corporate categories and corporate groups.Like categories, commissions fall into two main cla sses one class includes ad hoc and normally discontinuous capacities of a vaguely defined character, having diffuse or specific objects. The other class includes go along series of indefinite number, the units of which are all defined in such general terms as to appear structurally and functionally combining weight and interchangeable. Familiar examples of the latter class are military commissions, magistracies, professorships, and priesthoods but the sheiks and saids of Islam endure here also.Examples of the first class, in which the powers exercised are unique but discontinuous and ill-defined, include parliamentary commissions of enquiry or other ad hoc commissions, and plenipotentiaries accredited to negotiate special arrangements. In some societies, such as the Eskimo, Bushman, and Nuer, individuals having certain gifts may exercise informal commissions which derive support and authority from public opinion. The Nuer bull, prophet, and leopard-skin priests are examples. 28 Among the Eskimos, the shaman and the fearless hunter-warrior have similar positions. 9 The persistence of these commissions, despite turnover of personnel and their discontinuous action, is perhaps the best evidence of their importance in these social systems. For their immediate publics, such commissions alter social values of high relevance and provide agencies for ad hoc regulation and guidance of action. In these humble forms, we may perceive the seeds of modern bureaucracy. Commissions are especially important as regulatory agencies in social movements under charismatic leaders, and during periods of popular unrest.The charismatic leadership is itself merely the supreme directing commission. As occasion requires, the charismatic leader creates new commissions by assign authority and power to chosen individuals for special tasks. The careers of Gandhi, Mohammed, Hitler, and Shehu Usumanu dan Fodio in Hausaland illustrate this design well. So does the organization and deve lopment of the various Melanesian cargo cults. 30 But if the commission is to be institutionalized as a unit of permanent administration, its arbitrary 28 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (London Oxford University Press, 940). 29 Kaj Birket-Smith, The Eskimo (London Meuthuen & Co. , Ltd. , 1960) V. Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimo (New York The Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. , 1962). 80 scape Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London McGibbon & Kee, 1957). A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVB POLma / 125 character must be replaced by set rules, procedures, and spheres of action this institutionalization converts the commission into an office in the same way that its organization converts the corporate category into a corporate group.Moreover, in the processes by which corporate categories organize themselves as groups, charismatic leadership and its attached commissions are the critical agencies. The current movement for well-behaved rights among American Negroes illustrates this neatly. some(prenominal) given public may include offices, commissions, corporate categories, and corporate groups of differing bases and type. In studying governmental systems, we must therefore put down by identifying publics and analyzing their internal constitution as well as their external relationships in these terms.It is entirely a matter of convenience whether we choose to begin with the smallest units and work outwards to the limits of their relational systems, or to proceed in the gelid direction. Given equal thoroughness, the results should be the same in both cases. Any governmental unit is corporate, and any public may include, wholly or in part, a number of such corporations. These units and their interrelations together define the internal order and constitution of the public and its network of external relations.Both in the analysis of particular systems and in comparative work, we should therefore begin by find out the corporate composition of the public under study, by distinguishing its corporate groups, offices, commissions, and categories, and by defining their several properties and features. As already mentioned, we may find, in some acephalous societies, a series of linked publics with intercalary corporations and overlapping margins. We may also find that a single corporate form, such as the Mende Para or the Roman Catholic Church, cuts across a number of quite distinct and mutually independent publics.An alternative mode of consolidation depends on the simultaneous membership of individuals in several distinct corporations of differing constitution, interest and kind. Thus, an adult Yako81 simultaneously belongs to a patrilineage, a matrilineage, an age-set in his ward, the ward (which is a distinct corporate group), one or more functionally specific corporate associations at the ward or village level, and the village, which is the widest public. Such patterns of overlapping and dispersed membership may characterize both indivi duals and corporations equally.The corporations will then participate in several discrete publics, each with its exclusive affairs, autonomy, membership, and procedures, just as the individual participates in several corporations. It is this dispersed, multiple membership which is basic to societal unity, whether or not government is centralized. Even though the inclusive public with a centralized authority system is a corporate group, and a culturally distinct population 81Daryll Forde, Yako Studies (London Oxford University Press, 1964) Kenneth Little, The -Mende of Sierra Leone (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1951). 126 / A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS without this remains a corporate category, functionally both aggregates derive their underlying unities from the same mechanism of crosscutting memberships, loyalties, and cleavages. In the structural study of a given political system, we must therefore define its corporate constitution, determine the principles on which these corporate forms are based, and see how they articulate with one another.In comparative study, we seek to determine what differences or uniformities of political process, content, and function correspond with observable differences or uniformities of corporate composition and articulation. For this purpose, we must isolate the structural principles on which the various types of corporations are based in order to determine their requisites and implications, and to assess their congruence or discongruence. To indicate my meaning, it is sufficient to list the various principles on which corporate groups and categories may be based.These include sex, age, locality, ethnicity, descent, common property interests, ritual and belief, occupation, and voluntary association for diffuse or specific pursuits. Ethnographic data show that we shall rarely find corporate groups which are based exclusively on one of these principles. As a rule, their foundations liquify two, three, or more principles, with corresponding complexity and stability in their organization. Thus, lineages are recruited and defined by descent, common property interests, and generally co-residence.Besides equivalence in age, age-sets presume sameness of sex and, for effective incorporation, local co-residence. Guilds typically accent occupation and locality but they were also united by property interests in common market facilities. In India, caste is incorporated on the principles of descent, ritual, and occupation. Clearly, differing combinations of these basic structural principles will give rise to corporations of differing type, complexity, and capacity and these differences will also affect the content, functions, forms, and contextual relations of the units which incorporate them.It follows that differing combinations of these differing corporate forms underlie the observable differences of order and process in political organization. This is the broad scheme to which the compar ative- structural study of political systems leads. It is eminently suited to verification or disproof. By the same token, uniformities in corporate composition and organization between, as well as within, societies should entail virtual identities of political process, content, and form.When, to the various possible forms of corporate group differentiated by the combination of structural principles on which they are based and by the relations to their corporate contexts which these entail, we add the other alternatives of office, commission, and category, themselves variable with respect to the principles which constitute them, we simultaneously itemize the principal elements which give rise to the variety of political forms, and the principles and methods by which we can reasonably hopeA STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS / 127 to reduce them to a single general order. Since corporations are essential regulatory units of variable character, their different combinations en compass the entire range of variability of political systems on the functional, processual, and substantive, as well as on the structural levels. Within this structural framework, we may also analyse the nature of the regulatory process, its constituents, modes, and objectives.The basic elements of regulation are authority and power. Though always interdependent and often combined, they should not be confused. As a regulatory capacity, authority is legitimated and identified by the rules, traditions, and precedents which embody it and which govern its exercise and objects. Power is also regulatory, but is neither fully prescribed nor governed by norms and rules. Whereas authority presumes and expresses normative consensus, power is most evident in conflict and contraposition where dissensus obtains.In systems of public regulation, these conditions of consent and dissent inevitably concur, although they vary in their forms, objects, and proportions. Such systems accordingly depend o n the simultaneous exercise and interrelation of the power and authority with which they are identified. Structural analysis enables us to identify the various contexts in which these values and capacities appear, the forms they may take, the objectives they may pursue, and their typical relations with one another within as well as between corporate units.In a structurally homogeneous system based on replication of a single corporate form, the mode of corporate organization will canalize the authority structure and the issues of conflict. It will simultaneously determine the forms of congruence or incongruence between the separate corporate groups. In a structurally heterogeneous system having a variety of corporate forms, we shall also have to look for congruence or incongruence among corporations of differing types, and for interdependence or competition at the various structural levels.Any corporate group embodies a set of structures and procedures which enjoy authority. By defin ition, all corporations sole are such units. Within, around, and between corporations we shall expect to find recurrent disagreements over alternative courses of action, the interpretation and application of relevant rules, the allocation of positions, privileges and obligations, etc. These issues recurrently develop within the framework of corporate interests, and are settled by direct or indirect exercise of authority and power.Few serious students now attempt to reduce political systems to the style of power alone but many, under Webers influence, seek to analyze governments only in terms of authority. Both alternatives are misleading. Our analysis simultaneously stresses the difference and the interdependence of authority and power. The greater the structural simplicity of a given system, that is, its dependence on replication of a single corporate form, such as the Bushman band or Tallensi lineage, the greater its decen- 28 / A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS tral ization and the narrower the range in which authority and power may apply. The greater the heterogeneity of corporate types in a given system, the greater the number of levels on which authority and power are simultaneously requisite and manifest, and the more critical their congruence for the integration of the system as a whole.