paternalism

paternalism A loosely defined term which is often attached to social relationships within which the dominant partner adopts an attitude and set of practices that suggest provident fostering care for his or her subordinates. The concept carries implications of unwelcome meddling in the lives of the latter by the former. It also alludes to gross inequalities in access to, and exercise of, power.

A wide variety of social relationships have been described and analysed as characteristically paternalist, including those between husbands and wives, master and slave, employer and employee. The relationship between certain factory owners and their employees, for example during the early phase of industrialization in the West, has often been viewed in this way. The former group exerted almost unrestrained power over the latter. However, as a tactic for securing social control, the early mill-owners attempted to convert power relations into moral ones; or, in the terminology of Max Weber, to translate domination into traditional authority. This was to be achieved by the institutionalization of such practices as periodic gift-giving, charitable religious and educational activity, provision of company housing and insurance schemes, and support for company-affiliated voluntary associations and clubs. One of the most systematic studies of this form of paternalism, which examines employer domination and operative responses in the Northern textile mills of Victorian England, is Patrick Joyce's Work, Society and Politics (1980).

The suggestion is often put that paternalism, practised in this way, is a device for managing and legitimating overtly and potentially disruptive hierarchical and exploitative relationships: it serves the interests of men rather than those of women, the ruling class rather than the proletariat, or of White masters as opposed to Black slaves. However, it has proved difficult to demonstrate empirically that the ritualistic (usually deferential) responses of subordinates to the paternalistic strategies of their superiors indicate identification with or approval of the status quo, rather than merely an external and calculated management of impressions (or what has been called ‘the necessary pose of the powerless’).