Power: Toward a Unifying Analytical Framework

Sage eBooks, 2009

2014

In the present article, we discuss and compare recent theoretical and empirical contributions to the growing body of research on social power. In the last decade, five different theories on power have been proposed. These theories can be distinguished according to whether they focus on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup or ideological processes. Our analysis leads us to claim that future theoretical contributions would have much to gain by addressing the issue of social power on multiple levels of analysis. The recent empirical work on social power suggests that powerful individuals and members of powerful groups differ from powerless individuals and members of powerless groups with regard to (a) how they perceive and judge others, (b) how they are evaluated as targets, and (c) how they behave. Those who have power perceive others more stereotypically and judge them more negatively. They also tend to take action more frequently and generally behave in a more variable manner. T...

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.

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.

in The Nature of Social Reality, 95-104, 2013

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.

Anthropology differs from other disciplines in the extent to which it emphasizes the indirect and concealed manifestations of power, understood in its simplest terms as the ability to influence the decisions and behavior of others. Power is also commonly understood as influence that is generative of dominant ideas and institutional structures rather than narrowly repressive. A sharp break from ethnographies that were concerned with sources of power in the absence of the state took place in the 1970s as many anthropologists took positions of postcolonial critique. Under these circumstances, anthropology then turned to such concepts as hegemony (Gramsci), cultural capital (Bourdieu), and power-knowledge and governmentality (Foucault) in efforts to come to grips with the ways that power manifests itself through knowledge and everyday practice as much as through more recognizable institutional forms. Expansion of the scope of ethnography is currently producing more refinement of the methods and concepts for identification of its forms and realms of influence.

It is 21st century – a century that is considered the age of technology and the power of tech that has been transforming the entire world. It is exactly the same term that we are using to describe the greatness of anything – power. Experts, scientists, politician and any ordinary person faces the daily shapes of power. But just what is the “power” exactly? Despite the fact that this term is used in everyday talks and communications, many people seem to be unaware of the varying definitions and large-scale implementations of the term. This essay is exploring the term of “power” in the lights of political and social frameworks. The essay will firstly discuss the current definitions of the term provided by philosophers, social scientists and theoreticians. Extending over the basic understanding, the section will be followed by usage, implementation and contextual differences of the referred term. Next, the paper is going to discuss how the term is actually encountering conceptual “stretching” along with the methodological solutions to avoid the same. Lastly, the paper examines existing measurements of the “power”.