How to Grasp Power: Notes From the Event

On 29 April 2008, Danny Rye led a Big Ideas event on the idea of “power”. These are his notes, with links to the books he referred to on the night.

Power is a term that we hear used every day, especially in relation to politics. Power is grasped or used, power drains away. It is a term that we understand quite instinctively, but what actually does it mean? How do we define it and operationalise it in order to learn things about the way society is structured and operates?

Power is a central concern for the analysis of politics. My own research in this area comes from the need to develop a conception of power that can be used to study the way in which political organisations discipline their members. A large chunk of this necessarily brief and inadequate overview is taken from the work of Lukes (1974; 2005).

Power, as Lukes argues, is an â€˜essentially contested concept’. There are many different approaches to power in academic debate, each of which asks us to think about social and political phenomena in different ways. It would be impossible to cover them all here. For those that are interested in exploring some of the ideas I will outline here, and a number of those that I will ignore for the moment, there is a list of texts for further reading at the end of this synopsis.

I am going to suggest here that there are four â€˜faces’ of, or dimensions to, power:

Power as an overt force characterised by a direct causal relation between individuals or groups â€“ this represents what might be called a liberal view of power.
Power as an indirect manipulation of organisation or rules in order to secure the interests of one group over another â€“ this is referred to as the reformist view.
Power as socially structured or patterned behaviour that shapes and determines people’s understanding of their interests â€“ this is called here the radical view of power.
Finally, a post-structuralist view of power in which it is regarded as an independent force which produces identities and (certain types of) individuality.

1. The Liberal View

One of the classic approaches to power in political science is the â€˜liberal’ view (often called the pluralist view), which suggests that power essentially exists in the ability of one person to affect the actions of another. The behaviour of one â€˜responsive unit’ (B) depends upon the behaviour of a â€˜controlling unit’ (A). This can be summed up in the phrase:

â€˜A exercises power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (Dahl 1957). Therefore:

a relation of power is a causal relation;
power is apparent in action / activity;
it is apparent to the extent that one (A) can cause another (B) to act against his or her own interests, and
act in the interests of A.

Therefore, in order to examine the operation of power, one simply has to focus on concrete decisions in social or political contexts in which the interests of one group, or person, prevails over another. Using this analysis in my own area of work one might argue that groups of politicians follow the party line because they receive some personal benefit from doing so (or avoid sanctions as a result), whether that be the reward of office or simply the benefit of the party label at election time.

This approach to power makes a range of assumptions in order to work. It assumes that power is only evident in overt conflict between two (sets of) people with different interests in an unequal relationship. It discards what it regards as â€˜unmeasurable’ elements. Whilst this is convenient and parsimonious, it conveniently ignores what cannot immediately be observed and quantified and is therefore, in my view, an inadequate definition.

2. The Reformist View

The â€˜reformist’ view takes account of the fact that a conflict of interest may not always be out in the open. Power (particularly political power) is exercised in a social, institutional, or organisational, context with (formal or informal) rules and structures. The mechanisms of which such things are made can be manipulated by those who control them to ensure, for example, that issues regarded as detrimental to A’s preferences are kept off the agenda altogether. Thus, as Bachrach and Baratz (1970) argue, as much as power can be revealed in concrete decision-making, it can also be demonstrated by â€˜non-decision-making’.

Thus, there is still a conflict of interest between A and B, but A uses her privileged position to limit decisions to those comparatively innocuous to A, by preventing B from bringing to the fore issues that may detrimental to A.

This obviously makes analysis a little more complicated, because we have to dig behind politics out in the open and examine how the system is manipulated in such a way that powerful A’s build in bias in their favour, ensuring the system works for them. To analyse power, therefore, the researcher needs to uncover dominant values, political procedures and rules of the game (whether formal or informal), who gains and who is handicapped by these. Analysts also need to be able to distinguish between key and routine decisions. Leaders may be quite willing to have confrontations on issues they regard as unimportant or relatively minor, and even occasionally suffer defeat, as long as the key decisions go their way.

In this situation, the party line is followed in many cases because no opportunity exists to oppose it, or because a policy might be framed as a â€˜non-political’ question (e.g. a free vote). In parliament, procedural devices may be used to avoid a vote on a particular question, or debates may be â€˜swamped’ (this happened over the question of student grants in recent years, for example), in order to limit expressions of dissent and fragment opposition. Issues are in this way â€˜organised out’ of politics. This might be summed up in the idea of â€˜organisation as the mobilisation of bias’ (Schattschneider, 1960).

3. The Radical View

However, Lukes himself suggests that useful though this added dimension to our understanding of power is, it does not go far enough in its critique of the behaviourism that underpins the first, â€˜liberal’, view. Both the models of power I have described so far rely on actual, observable conflict, the only difference between the two is that the â€˜two-dimensional’ model allows for covert as well as overt conflict.

The assumption inherent in both these approaches therefore is that where there is no conflict there is consensus and thus an absence of power. It further assumes, therefore, that people (particularly the B’s in our frame of reference) know what their interests really are. What this does not take account of, Lukes argues, is how people’s understanding of their interests is actually formed. Surely, he suggests, â€˜the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent â€¦ conflict from arising in the first place’ (Lukes 2005, 27). To â€˜prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things’ because they can see no alternative, or they see it as natural and unchangeable or value it as â€˜divinely ordained’ and beneficial (Ibid., 28).

From this perspective, socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour and institutions actually work to shape and determine people’s wants and desires. People’s wants may themselves, therefore, be a product of a system that works against their real interests. In terms of A and B, this leads us to suggest that A also exercises power by influencing, shaping or determining B’s very wants in the first place.

Thus, sticking with my example, individual politicians follow the party line because they are effectively socialised into doing so. Norms and values of the party and the parliamentary system are things that they have internalised and act upon instinctively. The individual’s understanding of her desires is a product of these altogether more structural, â€˜hidden’ processes. Some may be familiar with this kind of idea as it is expressed by Marx, who suggests that people make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing, which is developed into the theory of â€˜false consciousness’. From a broader cultural and social perspective than Marx’s economic concerns, this is also arguably kind of thing that Gramsci’s concept of â€˜hegemony’ was concerned with.

Where our â€˜liberal’ and â€˜reformist’ views assume people’s wants and desires are the same as their interests (with the latter adding that these may be mobilised against in indirect and sub-political ways), the Radical view suggests that people’s wants may themselves be a product of a system working against them and are not necessarily synonymous with their interests. Of course, an obvious criticism, and a difficulty for the analyst, is that this is â€˜third dimension’ of power is somewhat reliant on the idea that B has â€˜real interests’ of which she is not aware, and who decides what those are? Ultimately, in any case, this idea is still intimately tied up with conflict, but adding what amounts to a latent element. The basic premise is still that A effects B in some way, contrary to the latter’s interests. But is this the only way of looking it power? I would suggest that, although useful, all these approaches are stuck in the idea of power as something that one somehow â€˜possesses’ and â€˜uses’ on another (however indirectly), which greatly limits our field of inquiry.

4. The Post-Structuralist View

It would be wrong to say that there is one, definable post-structuralist view of power, but one of the most prominent theorists of power (and, more to the point, the one that I know something about!) is that of Michel Foucault.

Where the ideas of power that we have discussed up to now are rooted in Thomas Hobbes and the idea of power residing in order and the sovereign individual, Foucault is arguably more closely related to Machiavelli, who sees power as much more contingent, something to be captured through strategy and organisation. Power is regarded as a much more independent force that doesn’t actually belong to anyone.

This is important, because the Hobbesian conception of power as inherent in order, does not fully account for how, in the â€˜modern’ world (and by that I mean more or less from the eighteenth century on), we live in a society increasingly dominated by large, complex organisations rather than by sovereign actors.

In this kind of world power operates in a different way. Order is not so much a matter of â€˜direct control’ but of more mediated, formalised and routinised mechanisms of discipline. Power is not so much owned as operating in practices, techniques and knowledges, that in effect constitute the individual and the subject and her experience and understanding of herself (through, for example, collections of knowledge and ideas of the â€˜self’ that come from psychology). These kinds of practices, according to Foucault, have emerged from the prison, the hospital, the school, the military and spread to the factory, the office and other places. They may be evident in psychology, pedagogy, social work, and perhaps (or so my research will argue), in the practice of party politics too.

This perspective on power requires us to look at it from a completely different angle, in things that we might not, with our Hobbesian bent, often recognise as power. Power is intimately bound up with knowledge that organises, classifies and regulates, through observation, timetables, distributions of people in space.

To (I hope) elucidate, we are required to drop the idea of A doing something to B altogether. Instead of looking for power in big political decisions, conflicts (for example in the House of Commons) and institutions or social structures, we look for evidence of power in the seemingly banal and everyday, routine practices of politics. In politics, researchers might begin to focus on things like dress codes (which may rarely be formally documented), campaigning and marketing techniques, language, and press relations, for example. We look at how the proliferation of such things constructs a particular type of individual or identity that behaves and perceives of herself in a particular way.

This approach to power therefore rejects the zero-sum conflicts of the three other views I have elaborated, rejects the framework of A’s and B’s, and rejects the idea of power as a purely negative, prohibitive force. Instead, power is a positive and productive force that shapes social realties and identities. Thus, and putting it extremely simplistically, Foucault’s approach is in some ways the reverse of the others I have described. Power does not â€˜come out of’ individuals; rather individuals (or the way that we understand them / ourselves) are themselves products of a power that operates through political practice and discourse.

As I have suggested, there are many other views of power circulating in academic discourses on the subject. It is, and no doubt will remain, an ongoing debate within politics and philosophy. My personal view is that each of the approaches I outline above is necessarily incomplete. Each has something to offer to an understanding of how politics and other spheres of social life work.

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