Emotions in Command: Biology, Bureaucracy, and Cultural Evolution

This book is part of a quest for a general theory of organizations valid in all cultures. Central to Frank Salter's investigation is the question of social power: why people obey their superiors. His approach is to locate the nature of organizational power in the behavioral details of hierarchical interactions in the institutional settings in which they occur.

Salter begins by noting the extensive research that points to hierarchy as being a necessary component of organization and proceeds to an analysis rendered in universals of primary emotions and behaviors of dominance and affiliation. The first five chapters are theoretical, the last seven empirical. He reviews the social science literature showing the place of ethological methods and concepts, then aspects of the evolution and physiology of dominance and affiliation. Salter then introduces the emotional underpinnings of dominance and affiliation, and applies these concepts in a summary of the literature on interpersonal signaling. He describes the methods used, drawing parallels with classical ethology, anthropology, and sociology.

The empirical section begins with a short chapter examining the simple commands given in a military parade. Chapter 7 analyses nightclub doormen's use of dominance in dealing with troublesome patrons. Chapter 8 describes the giving and receiving of commands in artistic rehearsals, and finds generally soft, appeased commands. Chapters 9 and 10 analyze courts and meetings respectively, finding both blunt and softened commands. Chapter 11 reports preliminary observations of command in general government bureaucracy, a setting which combines many organizational techniques in a highly articulated infrastructure. The concluding chapter summarizes the data and adopts a comparative method in searching for relationships between structural variables of institutional dominance and behavioral variables of command aggression, subordinate submission and resistance, and task characteristics.

Provocative and well written, Emotions in Command will appeal to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, and social and organizational-industrial psychology.

Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian political scientist who has been a researcher with the Max Planck Society, Andechs, Germany since 1991 and is author of On Genetic Interests which is published by Transaction.