Conceptualizing Power in Organizations
Abstract
The question of power, long indispensable to organizational analysis, remains the elusive but essential key to understanding the employment relation within the contemporary capitalist context. Taking up this question, this chapter critically examines two of the more prevalent approaches toward work organizations – neo-institutionalist theory and labor process analysis – and engages a third, less widely utilized approach: Foucault's theory of governmentality. By weighing the strengths and weaknesses of familiar analytical traditions and providing insight into an emergent theoretical approach, we offer some observations and suggestions that might enrich the study of work, power, and organizations in the coming years.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Whenever key actors of an organization negotiate who is authorized to modify the AI system and to what extent modification is to be undertaken, dimensions of power and control are on the table.
“Whenever the key actors of an organization negotiate who is authorized (4.1 & 4.3) to modify the AI system and to what extent modification is to be undertaken, dimensions of power and control are on the table (Kellogg et al. 2020;Ren 2019;Vallas and Hill 2012).”
From Keeping the organization in the loop: a socio-technical extension of human-centered artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as Vallas and Hill 2012
The necessity of dealing with power relationships in organizations is mostly neglected in AI-related discourses.
“The necessity of dealing with power relationships in organizations is mostly neglected in AI-related discourses (Ren 2019;Vallas and Hill 2012).”
From Keeping the organization in the loop: a socio-technical extension of human-centered artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as Vallas and Hill 2012
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Herrmann, T., & Pfeiffer, S. (2023) · AI & SOCIETY · doi:10.1007/s00146-022-01391-5 · Cited by 173 · see citing works
“The necessity of dealing with power relationships in organizations is mostly neglected in AI-related discourses (Ren 2019; Vallas and Hill 2012).”
BackgroundInfluential
- Authors
- Vallas, S. P., & Hill, A.
- ORCID
- Vallas, Steven P.
- Venue
- Research in the Sociology of Organizations
- Publisher
- Emerald Group Publishing Limited
- Published
- 2012-01
- Pages
- 165-197
- ISSN
- 0733-558X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2494416109
- Cited by
- 37
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 3 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 6.19
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Research in the sociology of organizations (publishedVersion)
- University of Washington Tacoma Digital Commons (University of Washington Tacoma) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Foucault, Power, and Ethics
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Labor Movements and Unions
- Keywords
- organizational power, employment relations, new institutionalism, labour process theory, governmentality, Michel Foucault, work organization
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
