Power: Inequalities in Social Exchange

I went to a lecture presented by Brodwyn Fischer, a professor of history at Northwestern University yesterday, called "Poverty, Social Intimacy, and the Politics of Inequality in Post-Abolition Brazil". The topic focused on urban inequality in Brazill between the 19th century and mid 20th century. It specifically looked at Recife, Brazil as a case study. 

Fischer began the lecture by examining the function of inequality in Brazilian cities, which she claimed to be at the foundations of Brazilian society. In Recife, survival depended partly on social networks. To survive, it was important to make friends with people a few levels higher on a vertical hierarchy.

“Access to any form of power, prestige, and upward mobility depended on vertical power relations,” Fischer said. She also said that people in Recife relied heavily on social networks for survival. Although Fischer didn't elaborate on what survival in Brazil generally meant, she did point to one case study in which a hierarchical relations trumped race and allowed a darker-skinned but better connected man to avoid being condemned in a rape trial. The result of this hierarchy was vertical dependence and increased inequality.

In many ways, this reflect's Blau's theories of social exchange, in which all social exchange is based on imbalances in power.

Strategic alliances were made between the person without much power and the person with greater power in order to survive. As a result, those who had greater social capital and a higher social status held power in society; they were the dominating class. The subordinate class had to depend on this hierarchical system in order to survive. This also reflects Weber's framework of society, because people have a certain amount of power based on their position in society. However, it also incorporates Marx's theory of domination, because the subordinate class depends on the dominant class for survival (like how the worker depends on wages for survival) and get exploited as a result.