One aspect of the well-being of individuals in society is the extent to which they feel that they have the power to affect their well-being within the society. Coleman (1973b) specifies such a feeling of power as a function of the ability to control events in those arenas of action which are of high interest to the individual. In advanced societies, control of resources has shifted into the hands of corporate actors so that those arenas of action which are of interest to corporate actors are dominated by corporate actors rather than individual persons. The following proposition can therefore be deduced: persons interested in the arenas of action of interest to corporate actors will have lower feelings of power over their well-being than will persons predominantly interested in arenas of action of little or no interest to corporate actors. Using a national probability sample of households in the United States, this proposition is assessed both directly and after controlling for confounding influences of exogenous concepts. The proposition can be rejected as erroneous unless respondent differences in socioeconomic states are controlled. Respondent differences in major demographic characteristics do not greatly affect the proposition.
l. INTRODUCTION
You and I live in a society in which we are second-class citizens. Our inferior states is not determined by differences in race or sex. Rather, we are secondclass citizens because you and I are humans. Our role in advanced industrial society is to serve the dominant species -corporate bureaucracies. We serve by working efficiently for them, not complaining too loudly when they force us to waste time in lines waiting to interact with them, and in general by allowing their interests to guide the course of events in society. This paper is a discussion of one of the psychic consequences of persons coping with life in such a society -the loss of a feeling of power over individual well-being.
The conceptualization of the overall well-being of individuals within a society entails the elaboration of three different facets of well-being. One facet -the most widely researched -concerns the levels of satisfaction individuals derive from existing societal conditions. I A second facet concerns the cultural framework, the 'structure of well-being', in terms of which individuals evaluate the satisfaction they derive from existing societal condi-