POWER: THE KEY CONCEPT IN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY (original) (raw)
An analysis on the variations of the concept of power in the political and social environment
International Journal for Innovation Education and Research, 2019
The concept of power acquires different meanings according to the dimension, the historical cut and the circumstances that are being analyzed. Power has been characterized as the base of state domination over civil society and individuals. However, the concept of power cannot be reduced to a univocal sense, because it also occurs in interpersonal relationships and social micro-structures. This article reviews the literature on the subject from the works of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Arendt, Foucault, Bobbio and Bauman, highlighting the various configurations and manifestations of power, mitigating its centralization at the state instance and extending to other dimensions of society.
Conceptions of Power in Political Science
The concept of power has long been argued within the academic community with many academics not agreeing to any one interpretation or theory. With such varying opinions and ideas it is difficult for a political scientist to decide on which conception of power it most useful to use. By exploring the varying theories and interpretations of power offered by Weber, Lukes, Bachrach and Baratz as well as other prominent academics; the conception of power most suited for political science will be determined, with a focus on western politics. The main problem which is encountered when attempting to determine the type of power that is best suited to the field of political science resides in the varying definitions of power and how they can be applied to the large field of political studies. To show how agenda setting is the most effective form of power, due to the sway it can create, to be used when studying political science. There will be a focus on western governments as examples to show that agenda setting has the ability to influence other factors within politics. This ability to influence another by exercising power over another is the first of Lukes’s concepts of power (Plaw 2007, 489 - 490) and leads into the concept of authority which is vital in explaining legitimate power. Legitimate authority as explained by Weber is given to many governments, primarily western ones, also known as rational legal authority (see Uphoff 1989) and has a direct relationship with power and how it is used to control not only a nation state but the people within the state. In summary the power of agenda setting in political science is most useful as it is present in many forms of power presented by prominent academics and is able to yield the desired outcome consistently.
Power as a capacity for action and social participation
Power is often associated with struggles for power, and therefore with fair competition at best, domination at worst. However, since the ways we think and talk about a subject influence the ways we act in relation to it, it is important to recognize how this conceptualization of power blurs an important mutualistic dimension of power that plays an important role in the conduct of our everyday lives, and needs to play an even more significant role in a still more complex and globalized world. Starting from a notion of power as a capacity for action, this paper attempts to outline an alternative vocabulary for thinking about power. The vocabulary is not meant to replace, but rather situate the adversarial conception of power within a broader framework, encompassing both ‘power over’ and ‘power with’ relations. The framework draws on different inspirations but mainly on German–Danish critical psychology.
Power: Toward a Unifying Analytical Framework
A major cause behind our difficulties in understanding social power has been that there are four approaches in two dichotomies toward power. Each of the four approaches offers a one-sided understanding about power: the four approaches even define power differently. After dissecting the four major approaches and underscoring their inadequacies, I propose an organic synthesis of the foundational paradigms of social sciences as a starting point for understanding power. This new definition avoids key ontological and epistemological fallacies and methodological difficulties that have saddled existing definitions of power, thus facilitating a better understanding about power. I then advance a new framework for understanding (and sometimes measuring) power that centers on three dimensions: institutionalization, penetration, and time. The new framework not only subsumes the useful but ultimately misleading “four faces of power” but also allow us to better understand the relationship between power, institutions, and history. It also advances our understanding of “structural power.”
POWER POLITICS: Comparing Physical & Social Power
The concept of power is a fundamental notion in the human vocabulary. Yet, as old and venerable as it is, common sense and expert opinion alike have great difficulty in coming to grips with its nature or essence. It seems that power is a many splendored thing, depending on the point of view of the beholder.This problem of conceptualization is particularly acute between the natural and social sciences. Although the former has a clear position and rigorous definition of the term, the latter is still fuzzy on the concept and moot in its exact meaning; a situation that creates great difficulties and constant misunderstandings, especially in interdisciplinary discourse.The present study attempts to resolve these semantic issues, thus increasing human comprehension of this phenomenon and improving our ability to deal with it. That is done by extending General Systems Theory into a Sociophysics paradigm. This most recent exploration into scientific integration begins with a metaphoric transposition and ends with a symmetric composition leading towards that distant Grand Unified Theory at the end of the enlightenment tunnel. As a small step towards a general theory of power, this study focuses on power politics as a quintessential example of a natural-cultural metaphor. Consequently the central thesis here is that a rigorous definition of power can be similarly, easily and usefully applied to all three realms of reality: intrapersonal, interpersonal and extrapersonal. As a result of a more exact denotation and more widely shared connotation of the term, one should be in a better position to understand its manifold manifestations and control its multiple applications.This paper will therefore proceed deductively: first by inscribing the nominal definition of general concepts, then describing their actual manifestation in reality, and finally concluding by prescribing some ideal solution to their problems.
Power, Soft or Deep? An Attempt at Constructive Criticism
Las Torres de Lucca, 2017
This paper discusses and criticizes Joseph Nye’s account of soft power. First, we set the stage and make some general remarks about the notion of social power. In the main part of this paper we offer a detailed critical discussion of Nye’s conception of soft power. We conclude that it is too unclear and confused to be of much analytical use. However, despite this failure, Nye is aiming at explaining an important but also neglected form of social power: the power to influence the will and not just the behavior of other agents. In the last part of this paper we briefly discuss Steven Lukes’ alternative view of a “third dimension” of power and end with a sketch of a more promising way to account for this neglected form of power.
On the Concept of Power (APSA 2013)
""Power” is the modal concept of politics; nevertheless, as a concept, it is significantly under-theorized. This may seem an unlikely proposition, given the frequency of discussions of power; however, for decades the debate revolved mainly around empirical and operational questions, while a proper conceptual definition has rarely, if ever, been thematized. The question of what power is has been implicitly reduced to the question of how power works. But the two are not the same, and in fact any hope of solving the latter presupposes a proper answer to the former. I will show how most discussions of power – across political science and philosophy, from Weber to Lukes, including Dahl and Searle amongst others – are not conceptual, even when explicitly presented as such, but rather empirical and operational. In fact, these discussions revolve mainly around factual implications and preconditions of power, while the presupposed concept does not vary much (with few exceptions, which are anyway untenable on their own merits). Commonly employed definitions can be reduced to a single form, which is tautological: “one has power if one can (=has the power to) do such and such”. This circularity is due precisely to the shared presupposition that power is just like a phenomenon or an object, to be empirically observed. To better understand the concept of power we should, instead, examine its categorial form – “power” represents not a thing, but a condition under which certain things may be done and thought – corresponding to possibility, as opposed to necessity. The best way to see this is to turn to Arendt, whose often misunderstood idea of power is the key to a proper comprehension of this basic category of politics. While the link between power and communication has been a staple of Arendtean studies, it has often been reduced to normative or aspirational understandings, which tend to obscure its deeper significance. It is rather the formal aspect of the concept of power which allows us to get right its categorical role in defining politics, including the crucial role of persuasion within it. Some implications of this way of looking at the concept – chiefly the stark distinctions necessity/freedom and society/politics for which Arendt is still notorious – seems to be very unpalatable for current social science and political theory. However, absent an adequate non-circular definition of power, this way deserves at least to be tried."
Rather than offering a survey of different conceptualizations of power, which have been well discussed elsewhere, the chapter shows the crucial importance of conceptual analysis both for the critique and development of theory and as an empirical analysis of the performance nature of power analysis. In doing so, the discussion points to the analytical benefits and limits of taking a concept’s theoretical and political contexts seriously. The chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section will tackle how to understand or define a concept. Far from being a purely semantic exercise or a simple instrumental step in the operationalization of variables, I look at concepts from their context-specific usage, including our theoretical languages. Applied to the concept of power, I look at how the two overarching domains of power analysis, political theory and explanatory theory, can help us map the different concepts of the power family. The second section looks at the role the concept of power plays in our theoretical languages and shows how conceptual analysis can be used for the analysis and critique of theories. It does so by addressing a paradox. On the one hand, concepts derive their specific meaning from the theoretical and meta-theoretical context in which they are embedded. On the other hand, meanings travel across the multitude of theoretical contexts. This can produce situations in which a concept considered central is, however, not best served by keeping it within the theoretical context in which it is predominantly applied. Also, importing conceptualizations from other theoretical contexts may not work because it produces contradictions within receiving theoretical contexts. Applied to the concept of power, I will use the mapping of power concepts of the first section for a theoretical critique of realism, a theory that is often identified with the analysis of power. The third and final section focuses on the role of power in political discourse(s) and shows how the concept of power becomes itself the object of empirical analysis. This is a central issue for conceptual history in its different forms, but also for performative analyses of discursive practices, and hence the ‘political (critical) approach’ outlined in the introduction to this volume. . Power is performative in that it mobilizes ideas of agency and responsibility. It politicizes issues, since action and change are now deemed possible. Moreover, given that we have no objective measure of power, but practitioners need to assume one to attribute status and recognition, a part of international politics can be understood as the ongoing negotiation about who has the right to define and what is part of the definition of power. This struggle over the ‘right’ definition of power, as used by practitioners, is part and parcel of power politics.
Power in World Politics, 2007
This paper reminds that 'power' is an essentially contested concept, with different interpretations held together more by a family resemblance than a core meaning, and that the meaning we choose determines which relations we consider relevant and where we locate political spaces. Suggesting that IR scholars have, exceptions aside, by and large shied away from a structured debate on the meaning of power, the paper reviews debates on 'power' in social and political theory along Steven Lukes' three dimensions and searches for their echoes in IR theory. It takes up Stefano Guzzini's point that every definition of 'power' is embedded in a broader theoretical frame and suggests that, consequently, IR cannot ignore theoretical debates when conceptualizing 'power' because the way we read 'power' into the international affects our understanding of both 'causation' and of 'politics'. A modified version appeared in Power in World Politics, ed. Felix Berenskoetter and M.J. Williams (Routledge, 2007).
The processes of power are pervasive, complex, and often disguised in our society. Accordingly one finds in political science, in sociology, and in social psychology a variety of distinctions among different types of social power or among qualitatively different processes of social influence (1, 7, 14, 20, 23, 29, 30, 38, 40). Our main purpose is to identify the major types of power and to define them systematically so that we may compare them according to the changes which they produce and the other effects which accompany the use of power. The phenomena of power and influence involve a dyadic relation between two agents which may be viewed from two points of view: (o) What determines the behavior of the agent who exerts power? (h) What determines the reactions of the recipient of this behavior? We take this second point of view and formulate our theory in terms of the life space of P, the person upon whom the power is exerted. In this way we hope to define basic concepts of power which will be adequate to explain many of the phenomena of social influence, including some which have been described in other less genotypic terms. Recent empirical work, especially on small groups, has demonstrated the necessity of distinguishing different types of power in order to account for the different effects found In studies of social influence. Yet there is no doubt that more empirical knowledge will be needed to make final decisions concerning the necessary differentiations, but this knowledge will be obtained only by research based on some preliminary theoretical distinctions. We present such preliminary concepts and some of the hypotheses they suggest.
State of the Art: Divided by a Common Language: Political Theory and the Concept of Power
Politics, 1997
Power is probably the most universal and fundamental concept of political analysis. It has been, and continues to be, the subject of extended and heated debate. In this article I critically review the contributions of Bachrach and Baratz, and Lukes to our understanding of the multiple faces of power. I suggest that although the former's two-dimensional approach to power is ultimately compromised by the residues of behaviouralism that it inherits from classic pluralism, the latter's three-dimensional view suggests a potential route out of this pluralist impasse. To seize the opportunity he provides, however, requires that we rethink the concept of power. In the second half of the paper I advance a definition of power as context-shaping and demonstrate how this helps us to disentangle the notions of power, responsibility and culpability that Lukes conflates. In so doing I suggest the we differentiate clearly between analytical questions concerning the identification of power w...
Power and Influence: Assessing the Conceptual Relationship
Koers, 2020
Power and influence are fundamental concepts used in the social sciences. As closely-related concepts it is not easy to distinguish them clearly. There are diverse definitions for power and influence in academic literature. Different views are also held on the relationship between these concepts. The present article revisits these debates. The researcher explains the difficulties to define concepts in general and those of power and influence in particular. This is done by referring to academic attempts to clarify the meaning of the mentioned concepts and thereby their conceptual relationship. It is demonstrated that the debate is complicated and a final answer cannot be found that easily. However, this article explores the differences in meaning between the concepts from the literature. Based on these distinctions, the researcher identifies the concepts' primary meanings as well as the areas where these meanings overlap. This article contributes by providing users of these concepts with conceptual markers that could help them use and integrate the concepts meaningfully.