BiblioVault - Books about Dominance (Psychology)

Collision of Wills

How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict

Roger V. Gould

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Minor debts, derisive remarks, a fight over a parking space, butting in line—these are the little things that nevertheless account for much of the violence in human society. But why? Roger V. Gould considers this intriguing question in Collision of Wills. He argues that human conflict is more likely to occur in symmetrical relationships—among friends or social equals—than in hierarchical ones, wherein the difference of social rank between the two individuals is already established.

This, he maintains, is because violence most often occurs when someone wants to achieve superiority or dominance over someone else, even if there is no substantive reason for doing so. In making the case for this original idea, Gould explores a diverse range of examples, including murders, blood feuds, vendettas, revolutions, and the everyday disagreements that compel people to act violently. The result is an intelligent and provocative work that restores the study of conflict to the center of social inquiry.

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Colonization Of Psychic Space

A Psychoanalytic Social Theory Of Oppression

Kelly Oliver

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Reveals the psychic and social costs of racial and sexual oppression

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory, whether psychoanalytic, historical, social, or critical, describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the development of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

Oliver’s work shows how existentialist and psychoanalytic notions of alienation cover up specific forms of racist and sexist alienation that serve as the underside of the human condition. She reveals that such notions are actually symptomatic of the subject’s anxiety and guilt over the oppression on which his privileged position rests. Not only does such alienation not embody subjectivity and humanity, it in fact undermines them.Asserting that sublimation and forgiveness—and not alienation—constitute subjectivity, Oliver explores the complex ways in which the alienation unique to oppression leads to depression, shame, anger, or violence; and how these affects, now often misread and misdiagnosed, can be transformed into agency, individuality, solidarity, and community.

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Informatics of Domination

Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.

Contributors. Dalida María Benfield, Zach Blas, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Shu Lea Cheang, Jian Neo Chen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Dinkins, Ricardo Dominguez, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Matthew Fuller, Jacob Gaboury, Jennifer Gabrys, Alexander R. Galloway, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Stefan Helmreich, Kathy High, Leon J. Hilton, Ho Rui An, Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Tung-Hui Hu, Caroline A. Jones, Melody Jue, Homay King, Larissa Lai, Lawrence Lek, Esther Leslie, Alexis Lothian, Isadora Neves Marques, Radha May (Elisa Giardina-Papa, Nupur Mathur, and Bathsheba Okwenje), Shaka McGlotten, Mahan Moalemi, madison moore, Astrida Neimanis, Bahar Noorizadeh, Luciana Parisi, Thao Phan, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Rita Raley, Patricia Reed, Jennifer Rhee, Bassem Saad, Ashkan Sepahvand, Justin Talplacido Shoulder, Lucy Suchman, Ollie Zhang

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The New Chinese America

Class, Economy, and Social Hierarchy

Zhao, Xiaojian

Rutgers University Press, 2010

The 1965 Immigration Act altered the lives and outlook of Chinese Americans in fundamental ways. The New Chinese America explores the historical, economic, and social foundations of the Chinese American community, in order to reveal the emergence of a new social hierarchy after 1965.

In this detailed and comprehensive study of contemporary Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao uses class analysis to illuminate the difficulties of everyday survival for poor and undocumented immigrants and analyzes the process through which social mobility occurs. Through ethnic ties, Chinese Americans have built an economy of their own in which entrepreneurs can maintain a competitive edge given their access to low-cost labor; workers who are shut out of the mainstream job market can find work and make a living; and consumers can enjoy high quality services at a great bargain. While the growth of the ethnic economy enhances ethnic bonds by increasing mutual dependencies among different groups of Chinese Americans, it also determines the limits of possibility for various individuals depending on their socioeconomic and immigration status.

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A Social Theory of Corruption

Notes from the Indian Subcontinent

Sudhir Chella Rajan

Harvard University Press, 2020

A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption.

Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled.

Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.

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Women among Women

Anthropological Perspectives on Female Age Hierarchies

Edited by Jeanette Dickerson-Putman and Judith K. Brown: Foreword by Nancy Foner

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Are the prerogatives of age universal? This first-ever anthropological exploration of relationships between older and younger women suggests that this may be the case. Cross-cultural in nature, the volume looks at relationships between women of different age groups in a village in Taiwan, a town in central Sudan, a rural setting in western Kenya, an Andean peasant community, a horticultural village in Melanesia, and an Aboriginal community in Australia. Adding an interspecies perspective is a study of two age groups of Japanese Macaques. Included is an ethnographic bibliography that lists books with a wealth of information on women in sixty societies. The volume will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to readers interested in women's issues, gender studies, life course studies, gerontology, and intergenerational relations.

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