Reading: Theories of Power

Wednesday 11th August, 2010 - 6:58pm with 0 comments

Subject: Regulating Communication
Reading: Spicer, A. (Unknown year). Theories of Power. In: Encyclopaedia of Activism and Social Justice. London: Sage.
What is power?

• power: collective order compelling people to do something they otherwise would not
  • 1) a contested concept
  • 2) arises from people acting together – some form of power relations will appear when people act in a collective way together
  • 3) power is vested in a collective and not the feature of a particular individual – leaders recognised as powerful by followers
  • 4) power relies on relationships between people in a group – embedded into parent-child, worker-boss, etc.
  • 5) power results in systematic patterns of benefits and depravation

What power is not:

• power is not direct violence – it involves some degree of consent and can work when the powerful have disappeared
• power is not rational self interest – actions undertaken to preserve basic life, health, income, cannot be said to be power
• power shapes the way in which people pursue the basic self interests

Approaches to thinking about power

• 1) how power should be organised – deducing the ideal arrangement of power from ideal criteria eg. fairness, justice, equality
• 2) how power is organised – realist approach of how people gain and maintain power

Views on power

• Dahl: an observable behaviour of one person (powerful) causing the behaviour of another (powerless)
• Bacharach & Baratz: decision making is just one ‘face’ of power; there is another ‘face’ of non-decision making
  • manipulating the values and myths of a community
  • some issues are open for heated debate while others are completely excluded
  • potentially, dangerous issuse are not debated or even raised
  • strong restrictive norms restrict the exercise of power and by whom
• Lukes: role of interests
  • power is the ability to bring about significant outcomes
  • control over political agenda, drawing attention to existing conflicts
  • one way that politics operates is by preventing conflict
  • even though individuals can make a decision, their interests are violated
  • how power involves shaping actor’s preferences in a way contrary to their own interest
• Foucault: conditions of possibility produce interests and decisions

New theories of power

• 1) critical realism – aim of locating underlying generative mechanisms that produce power
• 2) how power relations are the outcome of fragile arrangment of ‘actants’ (technologies, texts and people)
• 3) sociology of practice – how power is an ongoing practical achievement of speech acts, bodily movement, negotiation
• 4) how power is produced through ongoing interplay between dynamics of social struggles/fragile social settlements

Posted on: Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Categories: University
Tags: power · readings · regulating communication · theory
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