Ownership as interpersonal dominance

Rudmin, Floyd W.

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Book

Document type:: Book

Collection:: POP - Possession, Ownership, Property

Title:: Ownership as interpersonal dominance: a history and three studies of the social psychology of property

Author:: Rudmin, Floyd W.

Year of publication:: 1988

Language:: English

Subject:: Besitz Eigentum Sozialpsychologie

Topic:: C - Psychology

Shelfmark:: C/R916 O9

Rights of use:: Free access

Access:: Free access

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/pop.AC14489044

) The overall intention of this thesis is to reconfirm, re-assert and hopefully revive social psychological explanations of property and ownership. The focus of this thesis is thus not on the more personal, individualistic, materialistic relationships of owners to their property (e.g. Tournier, 1957; Wallendorf, Belk & Heisley, 1988), but on the interpersonal aspects of owning. As will be shown, this orientation is not new within psychology, and it is perhaps the norm within other of the social sciences. Consider Cairns’ (1935) legal science definition of ownership: The property relation is triadic: “A owns B against C”, where C represents all other individuals; if it is expressed in the form “A owns B” it does not convey, except by implication, the conception of a relation between individuals, which is the essence of legal theory. (Cairns, 1935, p. 59) This is not unlike Jordan's (1922) philosophical analysis of the possession of property: Control implies that | have the power (the right would imply the legal or conventional re-enforcement or limitation of the power) to modify or effect changes in the relations of a thing to other things or persons. The status of the other things or persons may be for me either conscious or unconscious, still | must take account of them in some way, otherwise I could not modify their relations. (Jordan, 1922, p. 374) This is restated again in terms of comparative ethnography and political economic theory by Bloch (1975): The relationship between property, kinship, and stratification is a familiar problem in evolutionary theories of society. On the one hand we have Rousseau’s amazingly bold insight that ‘inequality’ ‘only becomes stable and legitimate as a result of the establishment of property’ (1964, p. 193) and on the other we have the work of Morgan, which was such a seminal influence on Engels and Marx, where types of kinship system were seen as intimately associated with the type of property system and ultimately with the mode of production. Marx and Engels’s views were naturally hampered by the limitations of contemporary knowledge of pre-industrial societies, and the details of their scheme seem hardly worth criticizing. More important, however, is the clear realization throughout their work that property is represented by ideology as a relationship between people and things but is in material terms a social relationship....Maine (1861) had already shown with characteristic clarity how ancient law merged property relations and the law of persons and that it was only in ‘progressive’ society that property relations existed as such. Following such lawyers as Hohfeld [1919], [ethnographers] Gluckman (1 965) and Goody (1962) have also stressed that the notion of property as a relationship between a person and a thing is a contradiction in terms and that there can only be relationships between people. (Bloch, 1975, p.204) The goal of the present thesis is to examine the interpersonal qualities of ownership by means of psychological methods. Although various interpersonal relationships are considered in this thesis, the general hypothesis around which the research is organized is that ownership reflects interpersonal dominance. That is, ownership is essentially the control of resources which are of actual or potential interest to more than one person, and it is through the control of resources that owners control other people and thus dominate them, intentionally or not. At

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