Davis Global Advisers Inc. is a consulting firm in the US carrying out research in corporate governance across countries. It prepares a score-card for different countries by comparing their record against the following 10 indicators:

A. Board Structure

1. Code of best practices

2. Non-executive directors

3. Separation between positions of Chairman and CEO

4. Board committees

B. Voting Rights

1. 5 Voting procedure

2. 6 Voting rights

3. 7 Voting issues

C. Disclosure

1. 8 Accounting standards

2. 9 Executive pay disclosure

D. Takeover Defenses

1. 10 Takeover barriers

The firm has compared corporate governance practices in France, Germany, the UK and the USA and has consistently given the highest rank to the UK for her more balanced boards and high level of shareholder rights. British managers also experience the greatest difficulty in erecting takeover defenses which is a point in favour of their corporate governance system. The USA ranks second and France, third. France has recorded the highest score on voting rights. Very powerful CEOs and comparatively fewer investor rights are problems of the USA, according to this study. More details of the firm's assessment of German and Japanese corporate governance systems were not available but their comparison with the above countries would not be easy. The systems differ in important respects.

In the USA, shareholders have a big say in the running of the firms which they own and workers who are weakly organized have little influence. In Germany, on the other hand, workers enjoy much greater influence as compared to shareholders. In Japanese corporate governance system, shareholders have had no role beyond providing capital and company executives enjoy a good deal of autonomy.

Anglo-American corporate governance system can be understood only in the context of a competitive capital market. Basic tenets of this system are:

1. Managers are separate from shareholders. So shareholders can easily sell and buy shares in the stock exchange.

2. Shareholders' interference in management is to be avoided provided managers manage firms in the interest of shareholders.

3. Managers will have clear information about shareholders' expectations and shareholders will have enough information to judge whether their expectations are being met or not. This information-exchange will take place primarily in the form of stock prices.

This system is a many-layered arrangement of parts which are both internal and external to a firm. The first part is the Board of Directors which has to be sensitive to the changing circumstances and changing perceptions and expectations of shareholders. Large shareholders usually appoint their representative to the board. Small, dispersed shareholders do not enjoy this facility and so the second part emphasizes adequate disclosure and transparency in communicating with them. The third layer, is occupied by auditors who report to shareholders about firm performance. The fourth layer, provides for the exercise of voting rights of shareholders and for raising their collective voice over contentious issues through proxy fights. This internal arrangement is designed to give ‘voice’ to investors.

Capital market directly supplements this arrangement. Stock prices indicate investors' assessment of firm performance and by disposing off their shares, shareholders can communicate their displeasure to managers. Similarly, investors and entrepreneurs notify management about its under-performance through a takeover bid. The stock exchange gives ‘exit’ option to investors.

Till the 1990s, exit option dominated voice option in Anglo-American corporate governance.

Introduction

A bulk of current corporate governance literature revolves around the Board of Directors and its functioning. Two recurring themes on Board of Directors are – weak boards being responsible for corporate excesses and failures in the 1980s and 1990s, there is a wide divergence between the theory about board's work and its actual functioning.

As regards the first theme, lack of balance due to paucity of appropriate skills, lack of commitment, inadequate information, inadequate systems of financial control, over-dominance of CEOs, their short-term policies designed to increase profits rather than real earnings etc. have been identified as important problems in the working of boards. In theory, shareholders of a company elect the board which nominates managers to carry on work. In reality, top managers often select a team of directors which is approved by shareholders and which often works at the pleasure of managers. (This was truer of the USA than of the UK or India.) Therefore, it came to be strongly believed that the highest internal mechanism of corporate monitoring was not working as it should, principally because there was little distance between managers and directors. So all the working groups and committees on corporate governance have devoted maximum attention to the working of boards and to making suggestions for improvements in them. Every aspect of the board– its election, composition, size, working style and functioning, access to information, effectiveness etc. – has been scrutinized to find out ways for improvement.

In the USA, boards were under the control of powerful CEOs till the 1980s. Now many directors are willing to play a rather proactive role.

This book undertook to critically examine the concept of power in some important theories of the contemporary period. The objective of studying different concepts of power was not to try and iron out differences between them and work towards evolving an all-encompassing and universally acceptable definition of power. The thrust of the argument in the book is that this would be an impossible task. The reason is not that the phenomenon of power in society is so complex, and far-reaching, that no single definition of power would be able to do justice to it but that the very nature of political theory, and the existential problems which it addresses, would make it impossible to conceive of a politically neutral concept of power. The argument is, political theories and concepts themselves constitute a form of political articulation. They embody, explicitly or implicitly, a political perspective and may also constitute an intervention in the political discourse in a society. Hence we can only make sense of the diverse concepts of power which are embodied in different theories by analyzing them in the context of the theories and perspectives which generate them. This is not to argue that theories represent only a refined form of political polemics, or that they are only a cover for special interests. But it does mean that we cannot assume that theories represent objective and scientific statements about social reality which can be ‘proved’ to be universally true by supporting empirical evidence. This was the positivist view about scientific theory which has been challenged in this study.

An alternative view regarding the grounding and function of a critical theory of society can be found in the work of the contemporary German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas. Habermas's work falls clearly into the Enlightenment tradition of critical theory as it was developed by Kant, Hegel, and Marx. He was initially perceived as heir to the legacy of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Like other prominent theorists of the Frankfurt school such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, Habermas also discussed the problems of modern industrialized countries such as the growing rationalization of modern life, issues of culture and the growth of a ‘culture industry’, and the impact of such developments on the relations between theory and political practice. But the trajectory of Habermas's later work has taken him into new areas and he has engaged with many of the important currents of thought of the late twentieth century such as poststructuralism and systems theory. Habermas may be said to have re-articulated the project of critical theory to address contemporary concerns. A discussion of the full range of Habermas's work would be outside the scope of this book. This chapter will briefly examine some key concepts which have continued to guide his thinking over the years to assess his contribution to the understanding of power and domination in the contemporary world.

In his earlier work Habermas developed a concept of ideology, and ideological power, which he claimed was more suited to the problems of the contemporary industrialized world than Marx's theory of ideology. He also attempted to locate his critique of ideology in a new kind of political theory.

The second half of the twentieth century represented something of a watershed in the development of political theory. Political theory was at a relatively low ebb in the 50s and 60s of the last century in the Anglo-American world. The influence of positivism, whether in the form of behaviouralism, or logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, led to the belief that there was no important role left for political theory. Corresponding to the distinction between fact and value, behaviouralists recognized two kinds of theory – normative theory, which was concerned with speculation about values, and empirical theory, the purpose of which was to put forward generalizations derived from the study of ‘facts’ which could serve as a basis for scientific inquiry. This division left no place for the critical study of theories, concepts and values which had been the traditional sphere of political theory. One of the casualties of this approach to political theory was the concept of power. Although there was a continuing preoccupation with power in political theories leading to a proliferation of power studies in the 1950s and 1960s, the attempt to generate empirical theories of power led to an impoverishment of the meaning of the concept which even provoked some political theorists to argue that the concept of power had little to offer for the study of politics. It was such developments which first provoked my interest in the concept of power in political theory.

However, by the last quarter of the century the reaction against positivistic trends gave a new impetus to political theory and there was a resurgence of both Marxist and liberal political theory.

Systems theory constituted one of the most influential new approaches which gained popularity in the social sciences by the mid-20th century. It developed as an alternative to the economic approach although sharing with it a number of assumptions about the individualistic and interest-guided nature of political and social relationships. However, as against the view that society was held together by rational exchanges between individuals, as rational choice theorists had assumed, systems theorists focussed on the ‘macro’ level, on the study of society, or groups, as integrated and functional systems. The nature of social systems was conceptualized by analogy with biological or cybernetic systems. The objective of systems theory was to understand society as a whole by studying the interrelated processes and relationships which contributed towards the continuity and survival of the system. Systems theorists maintained that society is an interdependent whole held together by an elaborate system of exchanges between the system and its environment, and between a system and its subsystems. The political and economic subsystems were important components of modern social systems, each governed by its own set of relationships. For instance, systems theorists like Talcott Parsons, and David Easton, basing their model on the experience of industrialized, capitalist, societies, conceptualized the social system as including political and economic subsystems each with relatively well-defined boundaries and functions. They maintained that the relationships between the political, economic, and social, dimensions of social life, between state and market, and political power and capital, could be described effectively in terms of this model.

In spite of the criticisms which have been leveled against the kind of systems theories which were put forward by liberal social scientists in the post-War years, the concept of system continued to be widely used as a framework for social and political analysis. Indeed the term became part of the accepted vocabulary of social science. This chapter will examine an alternative mode of ‘systemic’ analysis which first gained popularity in France in the 60s and 70s of the last century and has had a significant and continuing influence on studies of power. This is the structuralist-Marxist approach associated with the work of Louis Althusser and his school. It will be argued that although the structuralist-Marxist approach made an important contribution to the study of power, this mode of analysis also came up against serious theoretical problems which it was not able to solve within the limits of the approach. The work of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas will be examined to substantiate the point.

A brief comment on the place of structuralism in French thought after the Second World War, and on the French Communist Party, the PCF, will help to politically locate Althusser's work. The PCF emerged after the Second World War with considerable prestige because of its role in the Resistance. It had the status of a mass workers party. Perry Anderson has written about how leading French intellectuals like Sartre, and Althusser, who had been radicalized by the War and the experience of Fascism, joined the communist movement after the War. In France, an alliance between Marxism and existentialism was formed after the War by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beavoir, among others.

The emergence in recent years of a sub-field of rational choice theory in political science and other social sciences reflects the growing influence of economic modes of analysis in the social sciences. The penetration of economic modes of analysis into the social sciences registered a steady increase in the second half of the twentieth century. A number of different factors contributed to this development. Economics enjoyed a high prestige among the social sciences in the immediate post-War decades, a prestige which was backed by the unprecedented prosperity and high rate of growth experienced by the industrialized, capitalist countries of the west during the 1950s and 1960s. Economists were often consulted by policy makers and they formed an influential group in most countries. This was true even of newly independent countries like India which aspired to industrialize and modernize their societies. It was generally believed that economic analysis would constitute an important input into the processes of planned development which many developing countries like India were undertaking. The formal and abstract models of social processes used by economists seemed to offer the possibility of explaining and predicting social outcomes with a reasonable degree of precision. It is not surprising then that concepts and theories derived from classical and neo-classical economics began to penetrate social sciences like sociology and political science at the time. Concepts like exchange, and rational choice, began to be used by social scientists to explain a wide range of social phenomena. Further, new sub-fields of study such as public choice theory, rational choice theory, and exchange theory, among others, were developed within political science and sociology.

Power constitutes an important aspect of our lives in society. It is a feature of our personal relationships and everyday interactions. It would be difficult to envisage a society from which all forms of power are excluded. It represents a phenomenon which most people intuitively understand but find it difficult to precisely define. However, a systematic study of power is important for social science because the common understanding may not be adequate to enable us to recognize the diverse manifestations of power in society. The challenge for any theory of power would be to provide a perspective within which the complex phenomenon of social and political power can be understood and explained.

The objective of this book is to critically examine the concept of power as it is embodied in some important contemporary political theories. Among the questions addressed are, to what extent can different approaches to the study of power throw light on forms of power in contemporary societies, especially societies in the developing world, and whether, by drawing attention to certain dimensions of power and excluding others, different theories may perform an ideological role.

Although it is often asserted that the concept of power is of central importance for political theory, it is a particularly elusive concept because it refers to a complex set of relationships which are manifested at different levels of social life. The most visible expression of power probably takes place when an individual, or group, or institution like the state, directly imposes its will on others through the use of penal sanctions, or the threat of using sanctions.

If we consider some of the important problems which confront many societies today, such as the problem of poverty and powerlessness existing side by side with affluence, problems of violence and social conflict, ethnic assertions, gender and racial discrimination, or problems consequent to the inequalities of power which may exist between states in the present world system, our attention would be drawn to the different dimensions of power and inequality which may exist in a society and to the complex interrelationships between different levels of power. However, our examination of rational choice and exchange theories, systems theories, and structuralist-Marxist theories in the preceding chapters indicated that each of them tended to focus on certain dimensions of power at the cost of others and to address a limited range of questions regarding power in society. By addressing these questions about power each set of theories drew attention to certain important dimensions of power in society. But they were not able to give sufficient consideration to other related dimensions of power. Neither were they able to offer an adequate conceptualization of the interrelationship between the different dimensions of power nor the role of power in the social system.

Rational choice and exchange theories acknowledge the relative differences of power which may emerge between individuals and groups during the processes of social exchange but their primary model of social processes is of a competitive market in which individual actors enter into strategic transactions with each other. They have paid less attention to the more structured differences in a society which may influence the resources that individuals and groups can bring to the exchange process.

Trisivaperur's Poison Specialist

Trisivaperur is the old name for Trissur—Lord Shiva's home. The combination of four words thru, shiva, per, oor means ‘the place with Lord Shiva's name’. “Pampu kadiyanengil atu manakkel tampurattiyude aduthupoya mati” (If it is a snakebite, go to the tampuratti of mana; that is enough.): this is what a villager, beaming with confidence, said when I asked him about the tradition of treating poisonous bites. He was referring to Vimala Antharjanam.

Vimala Antharjanam, a young housewife of Ullannor mana (the word mana means a Brahmin house) of Venkitangu Panchayat, started her practise as visa vaidya (poison specialist) soon after she got married to the second son of Ullanoor mana. He belonged to a Brahmin farming family. She started when she was barely 16 years old and has been practising successfully for 26 years now. She recollects how she began practising. “Once I was stepping out of the temple, and one of our family friends was coming towards the temple. He requested me to treat his son whom a dog had bitten.”

This friend knew that she had been trained by her father, who was well known for his skill in treating almost all kinds of poisonous bites. He lived in one of the villages of Palakkadu in Kerala. After her marriage, Vimala Antharjanam carried the tradition of visa vaidyam to Trissur district.

Millions of rural households use a large number of herbal home remedies and diets as part of their health care. The contribution of local health traditions (LHTs) to health care is a significant one. Knowledge and use of these by ethnic communities across the 600,000 villages of India today is critically dependent on access to and availability of plant resources across different eco-systems. This continuity needs to be preserved, as about 4,600 Indian ethnic communities know of and depend on about 8,000 out of a total of 15,000 flowering plants for their health care needs. It is therefore an issue that warrants serious national and international attention. Easy access to plants is no longer as common as it used to be and under these circumstances, it is not surprising that local health traditions are being rapidly eroded. Unfortunately, there are hardly any government or non-government institutions working to keep this tradition alive.

Equally important is another issue: during eight five-year plan periods, both the central and state governments in India were able to provide only 3—4 per cent of their annual financial resources to meet the health care needs of the people. Of this, only 0.5 to 3 per cent was allocated to Indian systems of medicine. The government public health services use their resources mostly to meet the salary-related costs of Allopathic doctors and paramedical staff.

A. V. Balasubramaniam obtained his MSc degree in Chemistry from Bangalore University and a post-MSc diploma in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He later studied Physiology and Biophysics at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. From 1982 onwards, his work centred around exploring the current relevance and potential of Traditional Indian Sciences and Technologies, with special emphasis on Yoga and Ayurveda. In 1986, he joined the Lok Swasthya Parampara Samithi (LSPSS) as Editor of Publications. He is currently the Director of Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, an institution devoted to exploring the contemporary relevance and applications of Indian Knowledge Systems.

A. Hafeel graduated in Ayurveda from the Ayurveda College, Coimbatore in 1998, when he joined the Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) as Programme Officer in charge of coordinating the Documentation and Rapid Assessment of Local Health Traditions (DRALHT) project. His professional interests include developing and promoting appropriate methodologies for bridging various medical sciences in the context of primary health care.

G. Hariramamurthy is a Senior Programme Officer in the Exsitu Conservation Unit of the Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions. As a Task Force Leader of Kitchen Herbal Garden Programme, he is currently coordinating the implementation of Community Participation Programmes through the Medicinal Plants Conservation Parks in the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. He is also the HonoraryConvenor of Medicinal Plants Conservation Network and a founder-member of the Paramparika Vaidya Parishat in Karnataka.