1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias In political science, power is the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct of actors.
[1][2][3] Power does not exclusively refer to the threat or use of force (coercion) by one actor against another, but may also be exerted through diffuse means (such as institutions).
[10] Abuse is possible when someone who is likable yet lacks integrity and honesty rises to power, placing them in a situation to gain personal advantage at the cost of the group's position.
When they have knowledge and skills that enable them to understand a situation, suggest solutions, use solid judgment, and generally outperform others, then people tend to listen to them.
Implying or threatening that someone will be fired, demoted, denied privileges, or given undesirable assignments – these are characteristics of using coercive power.
In rational choice theory, human individuals or groups can be modelled as 'actors' who choose from a 'choice set' of possible actions in order to try to achieve desired outcomes.
In this setting, we can differentiate between: This framework can be used to model a wide range of social interactions where actors have the ability to exert power over others.
For example, a threat of violence can change the likely costs and benefits of different actions; so can a financial penalty in a 'voluntarily agreed' contract, or indeed a friendly offer.
In the Marxist tradition, the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci elaborated on the role of ideology in creating a cultural hegemony, which becomes a means of bolstering the power of capitalism and of the nation-state.
Drawing on Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince and trying to understand why there had been no Communist revolution in Western Europe while it was claimed there had been one in Russia, Gramsci conceptualised this hegemony as a centaur, consisting of two halves.
But the capitalist hegemony, he argued, depended even more strongly on the front end, the human face, which projected power through 'consent'.
However, in Western Europe, specifically in Italy, capitalism had succeeded in exercising consensual power, convincing the working classes that their interests were the same as those of capitalists.
Foucault quotes a text reputedly written by political economist Jean Baptiste Antoine Auget de Montyon, entitled Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (1778), but turns out to be written by his secretary Jean-Baptise Moheau (1745–1794), and by emphasizing biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who constantly refers to milieus as a plural adjective and sees into the milieu as an expression as nothing more than water, air, and light confirming the genus within the milieu, in this case the human species, relates to a function of the population and its social and political interaction in which both form an artificial and natural milieu.
The episodic circuit is at the micro level and is constituted of irregular exercise of power as agents address feelings, communication, conflict, and resistance in day-to-day interrelations.
The dispositional circuit is constituted of macro level rules of practice and socially constructed meanings that inform member relations and legitimate authority.
[20] Gene Sharp, an American professor of political science, believes that power ultimately depends on its bases.
By using this distinction, proportions of power can be analyzed in a more sophisticated way, helping to sufficiently reflect on matters of responsibility.
Attending the unmarked category is thought to be a way to analyze linguistic and cultural practices to provide insight into how social differences, including power, are produced and articulated in everyday occurrences.
[32] Feminist linguist Deborah Cameron describes an "unmarked" identity as the default, which requires no explicit acknowledgment.
Heterosexuality, for instance, is unmarked, assumed as the norm, unlike homosexuality, which is "marked" and requires clearer signaling as it differs from the majority.
[33] The term 'counter-power' (sometimes written 'counterpower') is used in a range of situations to describe the countervailing force that can be utilised by the oppressed to counterbalance or erode the power of elites.
A general definition has been provided by the anthropologist David Graeber as 'a collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias'.
[35] Although the term has come to prominence through its use by participants in the global justice/anti-globalization movement of the 1990s onwards,[37] the word has been used for at least 60 years; for instance, Martin Buber's 1949 book 'Paths in Utopia' includes the line 'Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power'.
Researchers have documented the bystander effect: they found that powerful people are three times as likely to first offer help to a "stranger in distress".
[45] A study involving over 50 college students suggested that those primed to feel powerful through stating 'power words' were less susceptible to external pressure, more willing to give honest feedback, and more creative.
[47] When the counterpart recipient is completely powerless, lack of strategy, social responsibility and moral consideration is often observed from the behavior of the proposal given (the one with the power).
Inhibition, on the contrary, is associated with self-protection, avoiding threats or danger, vigilance, loss of motivation and an overall reduction in activity.
It is because these conditions create reactance, individuals strive to reassert their sense of freedom by affirming their agency for their own choices and consequences.
Herbert Kelman[88][89] identified three basic, step-like reactions that people display in response to coercive influence: compliance, identification, and internalization.
At this stage, group members no longer carry out authority orders but perform actions that are congruent with their personal beliefs and opinions.