university, then your prospects for permanent employment will
depend upon the government’s management of the economy. Pros-
pects for continued employment with McDonald’s are dependent on,
among other things, government policy towards foreign companies
and the extent and effectiveness of health education campaigns!
So far we have only considered you and the government. Suppose
on reaching the kitchen your father snaps at you: ‘Can’t you clear up
the beer glasses and pizza cartons you and your friends littered the
place with last night?’ Arguably this is a political situation too.
Within the family, fathers are sometimes thought to have ‘authority’
- some sort of legitimate power over children. As an 18-year-old, you
might react to the speech as an assertion of authority and react back
negatively on the grounds that you are no longer a child to be given
orders. Conversely, your father may merely feel that in a community
all should play their part and clear up their own mess. But in any case
if he wants you to clear up and you do not, this can be seen as a clash
of wills in which only one can prevail.
Similarly when you arrive at McDonald’s it may well be you have
discovered that the assistant manager (who is in charge in the absence
of the manager on holiday) is busy establishing in the eyes of the area
manager that he can do a better job than his boss. Here we have a
struggle for power in which people within the organisation may take
sides (form factions as political scientists might say) – in short,
organisational politics is being practised.
It soon becomes clear that ‘politics’ is used in at least two senses,
both of which are immediately relevant to everyone’s everyday
experience. In the narrowest conventional (dictionary) usage – what
governments do – politics is affecting us intimately, day by day, and
hour by hour. In the wider sense – people exercising power over
others – it is part of all sorts of social relationships, be they kinship,
occupational, religious or cultural.
What is politics?
If we try to define ‘politics’ more formally and precisely, we run into
the sort of problems which will be found to recur again and again in
this book. It is actually quite tricky to define concepts in scientific
disciplines like physics and chemistry, but if you do so, you are not so
likely to be accused immediately of failing to understand the problem,
POLITICS 3