Power

Power is a concept broadly used both in personal and political communication and in scientific discourse. Everybody claims to know what power is. Yet looking at the wealth of meanings given to this concept in everyday life and among social scientists, the confusion is striking. There are several reasons for this confusion. By way of introduction, only two reasons need to be mentioned.

One reason for this confusion is that the use of the concept of power in common and scientific language is highly morally loaded. Power researchers committed to the Weberian epistemological norm of Werturteilsfreiheit (freedom from value judgment) are under extreme pressure both from the members of their own scientific community, who follow the contrary norm of critical analysis, and from the public to take a clear moral position on power. Critical theorists who have committed themselves to fighting power with the means of science, on the other hand, have been accused of normative bias when dealing with power analysis. Ever since power has been on the social scientific research agenda, it has provided one of the most prominent battlegrounds for conflicting epistemological approaches, political interests, and cultural beliefs. What is left after all these battles is not easy to put together again into one picture of social scientific power research.

There is a second reason why power research constitutes a particularly slippery ground for social scientists. Scholars of power are, like laymen in general, prone to being influenced by cultural images and ideologies of power. In Western culture, there are mainly two contrasting images of power that have left their imprint on social scientists' efforts to deal analytically and empirically with this widespread phenomenon. According to the first image, power is a negative phenomenon. It is seen as a social force suppressing the weakest members of society and making them dependent on the power holders. According to this cultural image, power is considered “bad” because it is believed that the concentration of power undermines generally accepted social norms and values of democracy and disturbs the smooth functioning of its institutions. Popular Western culture continually feeds this negative image of power. Western mass media produce and reproduce stereotypes of bad power: The power holders are mainly males, meeting other powerful men in secret sessions and gathering around the top power holder, their boss. Violence is their ultimate power resource. Implicit in this stereotype of bad power are the beliefs that secret power in general is stronger than public power, that power has a gender bias in favor of the males, and that the strongest power resource is violence.

The imprint left by this cultural stereotype on social scientific research is threefold. First, following the first element of the cultural image of power according to which “real” power is invisible, scholars of power have insisted on the imperative to discover hidden power as their main research goal. Second, the gender bias implicit in the cultural image of power is reproduced by power research. Power is mainly a male affair. The overwhelming majority of power researchers are males, and their research subjects, the power holders, as a rule are males as well. There is practically no research on female (political, social, economic, cultural, and religious) power and their peculiarities, if any, as to its exercise. There is a third and contradictory imprint that the popular image of power has left on power research in the social sciences. Although it is generally believed that physical muscular components are the ultimate instruments of power, analyses on violence do not constitute a self-evident part of conventional power research. Leaving aside those cases when force and violence represent the last instance, as in riots, revolutions, and war, conventional power research has usually explored cases in which the exercise of power appears to be a bloodless, largely psychological, and mainly intellectual affair.

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