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Power

Power is one of the most important and widely used concepts in the social sciences. Nevertheless, widespread as this concept may be, there is far from general agreement upon its definition. To begin with, there is not one basic concept of power, but two: power to and power over.

Power to may be defined as having the ability to affect things. For example, power to can be understood as what enables individuals to move their arms, to dream, to get out of bed in the morning, and, generally speaking, to proceed through life as unique individuals. It is also worth noting that power to is the wellspring from whence human agency derives. Important as the notion of power to may be, social scientists often gloss over this individual-level instantiation of power in favor of focusing their attention on the phenomenon of power over.

Power over may be defined as occupying a position of dominance or command over others. Thus, power over implies an essential social relationship; this power, no doubt, accounts for the penchant among social scientists to give power to short shrift. Nonetheless, despite the inclinations of social scientists, it is essential to acknowledge that social power (i.e., power over) cannot exist in a vacuum. Human beings must be endowed with intrinsic capabilities to affect things (i.e., power to) or else manifestations of interrelational social power become untenable.

The Three Faces of Power

If the definition of power was not already complicated enough, scholars have also argued that social power is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be exercised simultaneously on three distinct dimensions: the individual, organizational, and cultural dimensions of power. Employing this terminology, or what we might refer to as the three faces of power, we can say that an exercise of power takes place when A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise do. The key indicators that an exercise of power has taken place are as follows:

  • An identifiable (i.e., often, observable) conflict of interests emerges between two or more distinct parties, that is, A versus B. (Whether or not such conflicts are observable in the traditional sense is a matter of additional debate.)
  • As a result of their conflicting interests, the distinct parties engage in a power struggle, that is, they call upon their power to overcome the will of their opponent(s).
  • One of the contestants emerges victorious—or paraphrasing Max Weber, the more powerful succeed in achieving their goals despite opposition. Therefore, the victorious can be described as having power over their opponents.

Individual-Level Power

To identify an exercise of power, one must first specify a relevant counterfactual. A counterfactual is a conditional in which the antecedent is false and the consequent states what would have been the case had the antecedent not been false. For A to have exercised power over B, it must be that case that if A had not exercised power over B, B would have done X (or would not have done X). That is, a relevant counterfactual refers to a situation where one may detect the interruption of an actor's interests by the imposition of another set of interests. According to these criteria, identifying exercises of the first face of power is relatively straightforward. That is, observable conflict (i.e., individuals visibly manipulating the behavior of others) serves as a clear example of a counterfactual. According to this definition, power relationships exist only when A can be observed or identified as getting B to do something B would not otherwise do. Therefore, one may recognize exercises of the first face of power in situations such as boxing matches (i.e., two opponents, fighting each other in a ring), parents sending reluctant children to bed, or police hosing down protestors with water cannons (and thereby forcing the protestors to retreat).

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