Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposal

Abstract

I propose a theoretical framework that specifies dynamic principles involving the generalized and ubiquitous everyday interaction of society and state actors alternately in upholding and undermining the rules that spell the unequal distribution of power and resources. The framework proposed brings together a historically specific micro-process – contention – with a general macro-principle of permanence and change in the distributive rules – the creation, renegotiation, and occasional destruction of a generally durable yet continuously contested “pact of domination.” Inequality represents simultaneously a central organizing principle of social life and a recurring source of conflict over rights and rules, the latter being the practical rules that govern interaction in specific cases of contention, giving governing agencies the necessary flexibility to act casuistically, giving in here, and throwing its weight there, with new formal rules sometimes following that process, or old ones falling in disuse.

In this scheme, the state is a historically created organizational and coercive agent embodying and enforcing the currently valid pact, mostly through legal/coercive, but also ideological power over its territory of jurisdiction. State forms are specific to each historically constructed pact of domination, so that there is no such thing as a state in general, but a series of historically constructed states, each with its rules of “who should get what” and peculiar ways of maintaining inequality between dominant and dominated.

Citation

Brachet-Márquez, V. (2010), "Domination, contention, and the negotiation of inequality: A theoretical proposal", Dahms, H.F. and Hazelrigg, L. (Ed.) Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 27), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 123-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2010)0000027008