Power and Power Relations

The concept of power generally refers to societal arrangements of privilege and the ability to prevail or set conditions for prevailing in organized and institutionalized contexts. It also refers to the domination of economic and cultural resources and the ability to deploy them. Power is also linked to interactions and relations in seemingly informal interactions, as power relations, where advantage orients involvement in contemporaneous or historically situated interactions. Critical perspectives often extend the notion of relation deeper, beyond the relative moment into the history or evolution of society. Critical theories of power echo Karl Marx's idea of relation, which directs attention to the productive demands of capitalism that pervade the social sphere. Through inherited allocations of resources and the persistence of dominant cultural practices, the material of history defines contexts and forms of social relations before particular actors arrive on the historical stage. Philip Wexler placed social researchers in the same situation, showing that research reflects capitalist thinking when using marketplace variations of cost-benefit ratios to explain even most intimate spheres of life.

Whether addressed through wide sweeps of history or relatively contemporaneous contexts, critical perspectives approach power and power relations as fruits of historical processes that shape the character of, resources for, and analyses of social relations. Social actors, including researchers, experience power less through consent than through normalized relations that reproduce power. Power relations normalize prevailing distributions of power and resources for power. Whether interactions are communicative is an issue for critical theories, which regard the history of domination, manipulation, and control to have infused social interactions and research about them.