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The decline of patron-client relations in developed societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Robin Theobald
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Extract

An enormous amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of patron-client relations both in the form of conceptual elaboration and to the application of the patronage model to a wide variety of empirical situations. However despite the prodigious amount written on the relationship its analytical status remains equivocal: no one, for example, has been able to say with any degree of precision what patron-clientage is, and especially where patron-clientage ends and the reciprocity which pervades all social relations begins. But a certain lack of clarity has not deterred social scientists from resorting to the patron-client model and few studies of social and political change in the Third World manage to get by entirely without it.

Type
Overt and Covert Politics: clients, factieux, brigands
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , May 1983 , pp. 136 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1983

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References

(1) See, for example, Wolf, Eric R., Kinship, , friendship and patron-client relations in complex societies, in Banton, Michael (ed.), The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London, Tavistock Publications, 1966), pp. 1–20Google Scholar; Kaufman, Robert R., The patron-client concept and macro-politics: prospects and problems, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVI (1974), 284–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Water-Bury, John, An attempt to put patrons and clients in their place, in Gellner, Ernest and Waterbury, John (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, Duck-worth and Co., 1977), pp. 329–342Google Scholar.

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* This note is the outcome of an earlier paper on patrimonialism which was delivered at a meeting of the Political Studies Association Political Change and Underdevelopment Study Group held at the University of London in January 1981. The participants at that meeting are thanked for their comments on that paper. The responsibility for the views expressed here is entirely my own.

(31) Rudolph and Rudolph, op. cit.

(32) Theobald, Robin, Patrimonialism, World Politics, XXXIV (1982) 4, 448–559Google Scholar.