Organised Interests, Authority Structures and Political Influence: Danish and Norwegian Patient Groups Compared

Opedal, Ståle ; Rommetvedt, Hilmar ; Vrangbæk, Karsten

Scandinavian Political Studies, 2012, Vol.35(1), pp.1-21 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

thanks sir. now with that theory how can we measure the factor POLITICAL INFLUENCE

One possibility would be to use French and Raven's bases of power as a theoretical framework for examining your question. They describe several forms of power that enable individuals to exert influence over others. One of the advantages of this theory is that it is broad enough to apply to a wide variety of situations (including the influence of external stakeholders on employees). See below for some key references:

Raven, B. H. (1965). Social influence and power. In I.D. Steiner & M. Fishbein (Eds.),Current studies in social psychology (pp. 371–382). New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

Raven, Bertram H. (1992) “A power interaction model on interpersonal influence: French and Raven thirty years later”. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality. Vol. 7, No. 2, 217-244.

Raven, B. H., Schwarzwald, J., & Koslowsky, M. (1998). Conceptualizing and Measuring a Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28(4), 307-332.

Hope that helps

I don't mean to be odd man out here but it seems to me you are missing contextual variables.  As I understood the question you (Maria) are interested in looking at the effects  of membership in or characteristics of political pressure groups (i.e. lobbies, unions, even churches in the US for example).  But over and above those group effects are more personality based psychological effects that are also influenced by things such as Uri Bronfenbrenner's contextual model of human behavior.  So for example, attitudes toward work and job satisfaction would differ from person to person based on a wide variety of characteristics such as gender, familial relations, perhaps personality characteristics such as locus of control.  So for example, I found in a study of 200 women undergraduate students at a competitive Southern US University, that the importance of work to overall job and life satisfaction and commitment was related to the extent to which the student's career choices were traditional or non traditional and influenced by the characteristics of the mother/daughter relationship and the mother's attitudes toward career choice and commitment.  The women who were strongly committed to work across the lifespan had  close, enduring relationships with mother's who shared non-traditional attitudes toward work.  But because of the location of the University and the sociological characteristics and historical background, the women were largely rather traditional in their approach to career vs family goals.  The same characteristics in a Northern US sample produced far more non-traditional results.  But mother daughter relationship strength and warmth also differed so the women were more influenced by their father's.  The methodology was interesting because it was based on a hierarchical multiple regression model.  I controlled for a lot of variables such as type and frequency of religious observance, SES, race, education levels of both parents, reason for working of the mother's (i.e. personal commitment as opposed to financial need exclusively) relationship of parents to one another, cultlural and political conservatism or liberalism, risk taking etc.  Instruments included forced true false, multiple choice and also open ended interview items.  I would have dearly loved to do a longitudinal model or behavioral observation but I already had more complexity than I needed.  So it really matters what your research questions are and what the cohort looks like before you can even start digging into the literature.  My discipline was based on the relationships between behavior, biology and environment and in many situations, forget the biology vs environment dichotomy, behavior is the leading edge of developmental change.  What could be thought of as biology in some circumstances could in fact be environment  in others.  I would love to hear more about what questions you are asking.   What are you trying to find out and what is the culture in which these questions develop.

Alexandra Castle Ph.D. In fact i haven't finalized any research topic yet, i was just wondering to find out whether it would be possible for me to measure what kind of impacts do External politics rather pressure groups exert on employees working in organizations under such pressures.

These pressures can be like, influenced transfers, promotions, hiring’s, terminations or even doing things out of rules and regulations just and purely to because of some external influence.