Haugaard, Mark (1961-)

Mark Haugaard's contribution to the study of power can be organized under two headings. The first concerns his general approach. In contrast to theorists who seek a single definition of power, Haugaard argues that power is best understood, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, as a family resemblance concept. Depending on the context of power's use, it will be appropriate to deploy one or more members of the power family (e.g., consensual power, conflictual power, power “over,” power “to”). The second heading concerns specific approaches to the study of social and political power. Recognizing the validity of a range of theoretical systems and modes of analysis (such as analytical and normative approaches), Haugaard proposes that these can be conceptualized as language games that are suited to specific tasks. His own work, which is primarily in the area of social theory, combines consensual and conflictual power and examines the relation between freedom and constraint in the context of modern social order.

Developing Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, Haugaard shows how goal-directed action is possible because of the existence of social structures, and that structures are reproduced through the pursuit of goals. This is also the basis of social power because social order—the structured and hence predictable flow of social life—allows us to act in concert with others. Much of what we do can be classified as goal-directed action, from embarking on a career, to purchasing the ingredients for a family meal. The knowledge entailed in accomplishing such tasks is largely tacit; we may need to think carefully about what to buy in the grocery store, for example, but rarely do we need to think very deeply about the extensive knowledge entailed in shopping, and this has important consequences for the study of power. For example, the act of shopping helps to reproduce capitalism—a basic sociological truism—but in Haugaard's theory it is also implicated in what Steven Lukes calls the third dimension or “face” of power. Following Lukes, but rejecting the Marxist notion of false [Page 306]consciousness (which is central to Lukes's theory), Haugaard is interested in how the dominated contribute to (and contest) their own domination. In the context of a patriarchal society, for example, our shopper planning the family meal is most likely a woman, a social subject excluded from public and professional life. Although this mode of domination may entail the episodic exercise of coercion, it exists as a social structure because it is carried in tacit consciousness. However, as history attests, this mode of domination is mutable, which raises the question of how three-dimensional power is undermined. Haugaard provides a complex answer that can be summarized in four parts.

• 1.
  The subject of a modern social order is socialized in a particular way. Learning competency in a plurality of spheres (e.g., as a family member, a worker, a consumer, a citizen), the individual acquires a range of interpretative horizons that may be used as a critical resource. When second-wave feminists organized meetings to “raise” consciousness, what they did was pool the interpretative horizons of

  ...