Hunter, Floyd (1912–1992)

Born in Kentucky to a farming family, Floyd Hunter attended the University of Chicago and became a social worker first in Indianapolis and then for the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he worked for a welfare agency in Atlanta, the city he studied in his famous Community Power Structures (1953). He stood for the Progressive Party for Congress in 1948 and was fired by his employer for hosting in the agency an anti-segregation speech by Progressive presidential candidate William Wallace. Following these experiences, he studied sociology in the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina. His dissertation was a study of the power structure of Atlanta that became his famous book.

[Page 330]Community Power Structures has stood the test of time as one of the key books in the study of power in the United States. It is important for two reasons: first, its pioneering reputational methodology, and second, its stark findings of a power elite in a major U.S. city. Hunter's reputational method consisted of several stages, each designed to check on the earlier ones. He first compiled preliminary lists of “leaders” in Atlanta (called “Regional City” in the book) contributed by civic organizations, the chamber of commerce, the League of Women Voters, newspaper editors, and other civic leaders. Then he selected a panel of 14 “experts” or “judges” representative of religious, business, and professional people. He tried to achieve balance between age, color, and gender. These judges reduced the first list from 175 to 40, and there was a great deal of agreement on the top people in this list. Next, Hunter interviewed 27 of the 40 leaders, who added 5 further names to the list. They were also asked to nominate the top 10. He also interviewed 34 leaders from the black community and 14 planners and welfare workers. This reputational method is still conducted in some network approaches and enables researchers to see who are thought to be powerful and to trace the interlinkages within the top elite.

This method led him to conclude that there were only a small number of power wielders, and that most of them were businesspeople, capitalists, or corporate lawyers. They were socially and institutionally interlinked. Hunter saw there were power pyramids; although the same people dominated in different issue areas, different individuals might head each pyramid. He felt that issues emerged in the city from the informal social discussions of the city's elite. In his later (1980) study, he found that black business leaders had penetrated some of these social groups to become influential. Hunter also recognized in his first study that the key issue was growth, an insight that was taken up in the growth machine literature and confirmed by his own and Clarence Stone's later studies of Atlanta. Importantly, although the power elite saw growth as the major issue, it was not the only or most important issue for everyone in the community, as Hunter's wider set of interviews revealed.