Some Dare Call it Power

Abstract

Power has typically been seen as the ability to get others to do what you want them to, if necessary, against their will (Weber 1978). This seemingly simple definition, which presents the negative, rather than the positive, aspects of power has been challenged, amended, critiqued, extended and rebuffed over the years but it, nonetheless, remains the statting point for a remarkably diverse body of literature. Behind it lies a series of important struggles, not just concerning different conceptualizations of power, and different traditions of social science, but also in the interplay between critical and managerialist thought as well as betvveen academic and practitioner discourses. There are, then, a multitude of different voices that speak to and of power and a variety of contradictory conceptualizations result. The two dominant voices the functionalist and the critical (to use simple categorizations) - rarely communicate with each other and refer to quite different lineages of earlier work. The former has adopted a managerialist orientation whose underlying assumptions are rarely articulated, much less critiqued. The result has been an apparently pragmatic concept, easy to use but also easy to abuse. The latter has confronted issues of domination and exploitation head on but, some would argue, in ways that appear to be increasingly less relevant. The aim of this chapter is to explore these different voices and to reflect on the changes that have occurred since the last incarnation of this chapter, 10 years ago. The first section explores the historical development of functionalist and critical voices. It discusses the broader heritage of Marx and Weber concerning power, followed by early management work on power. The second section shows how subsequent developments built on these respective approaches, in many respects, pulling them further apart. An analysis of this work shows how the different voices have continued to follow divergent trajectories. The third section focuses on the insights provided by Foucault, and the supposed end of sovereignty, which had such an impact on this field of study in the late 1980s and early 1990s, radically changing our understanding of power. The fourth section revisits power and resistance in the light of Foucault's influence to discuss some of the developments in this area over the last 10 years, as well as to connect with some previously neglected streams around Goffman's ideas concerning 'total institutions', which we believe are particularly relevant for making sense of some of the events that have shaped our lives in recent years.