The Political Sociology of Power

Full text

Contents
Notes on Contributors ........................................................................... 7
1. Introduction .................................................................................... 11
Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
2. Power in Social and Political Theory ............................................. 23
Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
3. Power in Political Anthropology .................................................... 57
John Gledhill
4. Foundations of Organizational Power ............................................ 91
Stewart Clegg
5. Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches ........................................ 129
Jill Vickers
6. The Political Sociology of Power ................................................... 163
John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
7. Power and International Relations ................................................. 187
Phillip Cerny
8. Concluding Reflections .................................................................. 217
Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
Index ..................................................................................................... 223

Notes on Contributors
Stewart Clegg is Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Manage-
ment and Organization Studies Research at the University of Technology
Business School, Sydney and is also a Visiting Professor at Universidade
Nova, Copenhagen Business School and EM-Lyon. A prolific publisher in
leading academic journals in social science, management and organization
theory, he is also the author and editor of many books, including the follow-
ing volumes: Handbook of Power (with Mark Haugaard 2009), Handbook of
Macro-Organization Behaviour (with Cary Cooper 2009) and Handbook of
Organization Studies (with Cynthia Hardy, Walter Nord and Tom Lawrence,
2006).
Philip G. Cerny is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Global Affairs at the
University of Manchester (U.K.) and Rutgers University (U.S.A.). He has
also taught at Universities of York and Leeds in the U.K. and has been a vis-
iting professor or visiting scholar at Harvard University (Centre for European
Studies), Dartmouth College, New York University, and the Institut d’Études
Politiques (Paris). He is the author and editor of several books, including Re-
thinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (2010), In-
ternalizing Globalization: The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Na-
tional Varieties of Capitalism (ed. with Susanne Soederberg and Georg
Menz, 2005), and numerous articles in a wide range of journals. His current
research interests include the politics of financial regulation, the changing na-
ture political power in a globalising world, and the desecuritisation of world
politics.
John Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Manchester, UK. He is a Vice-President of the International
Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, a member of the Acad-
emy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publica-
tions include Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo,
Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty; Power and Its Dis-

Notes on Contributors
8
guises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics; Cultura y Desafío en Os-
tula: Cuatro Siglos de Autonomía Indígena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Mi-
choacán and, co-edited with Patience Schell, New Perspectives on Resistance
in Brazil and Mexico.
John A. Hall is the James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Soci-
ology at McGill University in Montreal. He is author or editor of more than
twenty books including, most recently, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biog-
raphy (Verso, 2010); Power in the Twenty-First Century: Michael Mann in
Conversation with John Hall (Polity, 2011); and, co-edited with Schroeder,
An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann (CUP, 2006). He
is currently researching on nations, states and empires; nationalism and war;
the economic consequences of the size of nations and sociological theory.
Mark Haugaard is founding editor of the Journal of Political Power (Rout-
ledge), Chair of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Power (RC 36)
and Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has
published numerous books and articles on power and social theory, including
The Sage Handbook of Power (2009), co-edited with Stewart Clegg. Most re-
cently, he has co-edited two four-volume collections, Power and Politics
(Sage) and Power and Organizations, also with Stewart Clegg. Currently he
is working on a new book, provisionally entitled, Reinterpreting Political
Power.
Siniša Malešević is a Professor and Head of School of Sociology at the Uni-
versity College, Dublin. He is also Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His
recent books include The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010, Croatian translation 2011), Identity as Ideology (Palgrave,
2006, Persian translation 2012), The Sociology of Ethnicity (Sage, 2004, Ser-
bian translation 2009, Persian translation 2011), Ideology, Legitimacy and the
New State (Routledge 2002; reprinted in 2008) and co-edited volumes Na-
tionalism and War (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Ernest Gellner
and Contemporary Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He
is currently writing a book for Polity, Nation-States and Nationalisms.
Kevin Ryan is a lecturer in the School of Political Science and Sociology,
National University of Ireland, Galway, and is presently Secretary to IPSA
Research Committee 36 (Political Power). His research to date has focused
on power, exclusion and marginality, while his most recent articles on power
and childhood have been published in the Journal of Political Power, Critical
Sociology, and Childhood. Kevin Ryan is also reviews editor for Journal of
Political Power.

9
Jill Vickers, FRSC, is Emeritus Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished
Research Professor in Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa. She
publishes extensively on gender/power relations in nation-state and race re-
gime formation in Anglo-American federations. Her books include: Politics
As If Women Mattered; Gender, Race and Nation; Reinventing Political Sci-
ence: A Feminist Approach; The Politics of Race: Canada, Australia and the
United States. Among many honours, the Canadian Political Science Asso-
ciation awards the Jill Vickers Prize annually to the best gender and politics
paper. 

Introduction
Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
Arguably power is the core concept that unifies the study of politics. As a
consequence, the study of power takes place within all the sub-disciplines
that constitute political science in general. Therefore, rather than attempt to
describe the analysis of power as if it represented a single discipline which
could be neatly subdivided into past, present and future, or some other singu-
lar state of the art unity, we have broken the various approaches to power into
the most prominent disciplinary approaches, as follows: social and political
theory; political anthropology; organizational studies; feminist research; po-
litical sociology; and international relations.
This multi-perspectival approach not only reflects the breadth of the dis-
ciplines covered by power but also the nature of the concept itself. The com-
plex nature of the concept is particularly evident in the social and political
theory debates, which concerned themselves with the definition of power. For
instance, it has been variously argued that power should be identified with:
its exercise (for instance, Dahl 1957), subject dispositions (Foucault 1982 and
Dean 2010), domination (Lukes 2005), freedom (Morriss 1989) and empow-
erment (Arendt 1970).
In attempting to explain this diversity of usages of the concept of power,
Lukes (1974) and Connelly (1974) both argued that power constitutes an es-
sentially contested concept. Up until 1974, the dominant approach to the mul-
tiplicity of usages was for each theorist to claim that their concept of power
was the singular true one. The result was incommensurable language games,
or discussions of power that tended to talk past each other. As argued at
greater length in Haugaard (2010), in our opinion, Lukes and Connelly’s in-
tervention was a move in the right direction in the sense that it problematized
the idea of a singular essence of power. However, it did not go far enough by
refraining from pluralizing the concept because it was still suggested that
power embodies a singular essence, even if we cannot agree upon it.
The idea of essentially contested concepts was first put forward by Gallie
(1956) to cover concepts about there seemed to be inherent disagreement. In
that article and a couple which followed, he discussed concepts like art,

Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
12
Christian, democracy and legitimacy as essentially contested concepts. These
are concepts around which there is continual disagreement concerning their
essence. One can just imagine Christians, democrats, artists or political ideo-
logues in continual disagreement as to what constitutes true Christianity, de-
mocracy, art or legitimacy. What makes these concepts contested is the fact
they appear as signifiers with empirical referents, while they are actually es-
sentially evaluative concepts. If someone is a true Christian, or an object a
work of art, or a system democratic or legitimate, this constitutes a recom-
mendation, thus it is not simply a statement of empirical fact. If people say
that such-and-such is a chair, the signifier chair, has a relatively undisputed
material referent. However, if people argue about whether a black dot on a
blank canvas is art, or if such-and-such an act is Christian, by in large these
are not simply statements of fact concerning signifier and referent, they con-
stitute normative evaluations.
In Lukes’ usage, power was negatively evaluative. As he defined it: “A
exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s inter-
ests.” (Lukes 1974: 27; 2005: 37 – emphasis added). Hence, if B is the sub-
ject of power this state of affairs is inherently normatively undesirable from
the perspective of B. Thus the statement A exercises power over B is not sim-
ply a statement of empirical fact, although it appears that way. It constitutes
negative normative evaluative judgment concerning the relationship between
A and B. Their relationship should be otherwise to be fair or just. Thus,
Lukes argues power entails moral responsibility (Lukes 2008: 7) and is nega-
tively evaluative.
Due to the fact that essentially contested concepts are loaded terms, they
become inextricably tied to the normative agenda of the user of the word. If
you are a liberal your view of democracy is relatively circumscribed in scope,
entailing a clear public private distinction, while if you are a socialist or
postmodernist, democracy may include every aspect of social life. Thus the
former will tend to an evaluative concept of power that is relatively confined
in scope, while the latter will have a broad use of the word.
The term essentially in “essentially contested concepts” suggests that
these usages are inherent in the words themselves – it is part of their essence.
However, these usages are actually a consequence of using a term in a man-
ner that appears analytic when it is actually evaluative. This usage is part of
a particular language game, which could be otherwise. Legitimacy is often
cited as an essentially contested concept (Gallie 1956), and provides an ex-
cellent illustration of the point we are making. In everyday speech legitimacy
frequently appears as a statement of fact, when it is really a term of commen-
dation. When someone says “such-and-such is legitimate” they are frequently
not simply describing but also endorsing a set of institutional arrangements.
However, in the professional hands of an anthropologist or sociologists the

Introduction
13
same statement frequently constitutes a simple statement of fact. If a sociolo-
gist or anthropologist asserts that in most traditional societies patriarchy is
legitimate, this does not usually constitute an affirmation or critique of patri-
archy, while the same statement would be normative in the hands of a femi-
nist normative political philosopher.
After the publication of Gallie’s article, the number of concepts which
have been described as essentially contested is truly staggering, including, in
alphabetical order as far as the letter c: “alienation, autonomy, author, bank-
ruptcy, boycott, citizenship, civil rights, coherence, community, competition,
the Constitution, corruption, culture…” (Waldron 2002). In fact nearly any
term has the potential to be essentially contested. For instance, take the term
modern. When sociologists use the term modern to describe the changing so-
cial order from the Reformation onwards, the expectation is that they are not
be using the term normatively. Yet, from the early 19th century until the final
decades of the 20th century, modern was frequently used as a term of com-
mendation, suggesting a contrast with backward. Yet, any hypothetical soci-
ologist would be expected to methodologically bracket such usage. American
is usually not an essentially contested concept. However, imagine a couple of
self-proclaimed American patriots getting into an argument concerning what
it is to be a true American. To Senator McCarthy it was clearly not possible
to be an American and be a Communist (with a capital C). To someone who
is well integrated into the values of the Bible belt, maybe American does not
include atheists. American becomes an essentially contested concept when
used in a particular way but it is not inherently so – an anthropologist would
not be expected to use American in this evaluative manner.
While Lukes and Connelly’s interventions take us part of the way to giv-
ing up the search for a singular essence of power, the idea of essentially con-
tested concepts is not the most appropriate one for two reasons. Firstly, it
does not explicitly state that the search for a singular essence of power is
mistaken, rather it constitutes an assertion to the effect that we will never
agree upon what that the essence of power is. It is almost a council of de-
spair, suggesting that the search is valid but the quest will never be accom-
plished. Secondly, a significant aspect of political science, as opposed to
every-day conversation about politics, is precisely about differentiating nor-
mative and analytic usage. Mixing evaluative and normative usage is not a
property of concepts themselves but of careless and un-scientific usage.
While a normative political theorist may wish to use power evaluatively as
part of social critique, a political scientist would be expected to use the con-
cept analytically to refer to a particular relationship between actors that the
academic neither expresses approval or disapproval of in their research.
Malesevic and Hall make this point in their article in this book, when they
argue for an analytic usage of the term ideology, as a system of tacit beliefs

Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
14
that legitimate relations of power, rather than the Marxist-inspired usage as
false consciousness, which constitutes a negative normative evaluation. An-
other instance of the same phenomenon is the debate between Barry (2002)
and Dowding (1991, 2003). Dowding argues there is such a thing as domina-
tion through “systematic luck”, which goes beyond the agency of power.
Barry takes exception to the term “systematic luck”, as it does not have an
evaluative ring to it. However, in a strictly empirical language game this may
be entirely appropriate.
To be clear we are not saying that a normative usage of the term power is
always inappropriate. Explicit social critique presupposes it. However, politi-
cal scientists and theorists must be attentive to the fact that it is but one
among many approaches and, if using concepts evaluatively, they should sig-
nal such usage. The confounding of empirical and normative usage is not in-
herent in the concept of power. Rather, such confounding reflects a particular
(unfortunate) practice. Political scientists should be aware when they are rec-
ommending or critiquing certain practices and/or when they are attempting to
describe such practices in a value-neutral way. Having said that, of course it
is true that no description is ever entirely value-neutral but some are more
neutral than others. The distinction is between approaches that explicitly aim
at value neutrality as an ideal, and those at the other end of the scale, which
do not, because they constitute explicit normative critique.
We would argue that there is no essence of power. The concept covers a
cluster of phenomena, which are broadly related. Wittgenstein used the idea
of family resemblances to use multiple usages of the same word, which do
not share a single essence (Wittgenstein 1967). Take the word game, there is
no essence of game, yet the use of the word covers a multiplicity of overlap-
ping usages – the game of chess; animals playing games; life is but a game;
evolution is really a game of rational choice on a massive scale, and so on.
Power covers a number of interrelated concepts, which are distinct. In
terms of the contrast between the negative and positive perceptions of power
referred to above, Lukes’ negative view of power covers power as domina-
tion and, in many instances, coercion or violence, while the contrasting posi-
tive Arendtian perception is of power as legitimate authority.
The list of family member usages includes power over, whereby A gets B
to do something which B would not otherwise. Analytically, power over may
or may not be in the interests of B. Legitimate authority includes power over
which is in the interests of B. Hence, power over is not inherently norma-
tively reprehensible. Power to refers to the joint capacity for action of A and
B. While it might appear intuitively to be the case that power to always has
positive normative connotations (and does for Arendt (1970)), this is not in-
herently the case. A normative political philosopher may disapprove of the
social structures that are reproduced by A and B, which empowers them. For

Introduction
15
instance, a feminist may wish to argue that while gender roles empower so-
cial actors in the short-term, by giving them power to, the patriarchal social
relations reproduced by such empowerment are normatively reprehensible.
Another significant distinction is between episodic power, which refers
to the exercise of power, and dispositional power, which concerns the inher-
ent capacities of actors (see Clegg 1989, Wrong 1995, and Chapter 4 in this
volume). In the power debates the insistence that one of these is the correct
and only usage of power have become referred to the “exercise” and “vehi-
cle” fallacies – see Morriss (2002) who agrees with the distinction and
Dowding (2008) who disagrees with it. However, with power as a family re-
semblance concept, these are simply two different family members, neither of
which is inherently right or wrong.
We will not continue the list because nothing hinges upon the list itself,
except the understanding that there is no essence of power. Following Witt-
genstein, words are conceptual tools that should be used as is appropriate to
explanation. Conceptual tools enable us to express certain ideas in specific
contexts, defined by local explanatory purpose. Depending upon the ideas in-
volved, local usages evolve, which constitute local language games. Words
do not have meaning singly but relate to each other so that a shift in one word
ties in with another, which entails that each language game is in some re-
spects self-constituting.
Using words as conceptual tools entails being conscious of their lack of
essence. It entails an awareness of their conventional constructed nature. Yet,
this does not mean that we can use words however we like. The worth of
conceptual tools is measured by their usefulness. If a usage obscures meaning
then it is not a good conceptual tool. Spanners and pliers enable a mechanic
to accomplish a mechanical task and, as the engines get more complex, an
imaginative mechanic thinks nothing of creating new tools. Those tools are
considered of value to the extent to which they enable the accomplishment of
specific tasks, and if they are not an improvement then they should be dis-
carded. Distinguishing power to from power over is not a fetish or discovery
of new referents. Rather, it constitutes the construction of signifiers that are
useful for the purposes of explanation of certain social phenomena.
The book opens with an essay upon power in social and political theory writ-
ten by the editors. In this essay we have used the term political theory to refer
to explicitly normative use, while social theory is analytic. We argue that
these two usages are meshed with three contrasting language games. One is
the conflictual view of power, in which power is power over. The second
consensual language game concerns power to, suggesting power as empow-
erment. As there are many explanations and a significant conscious distinc-
tion between normative and analytic approaches within these perspectives,

Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
16
these consensual language games can be different in their form, even if the
referent is broadly similar. For instance, there is the contrast between essen-
tially idealist (Searle 2007) and rational choice approaches (Morriss 2002)
concerning the family member power to. The third cluster of approaches is
the constitutive approach, which generally includes both power to and power
over. The focus here is less upon episodic power, what enables actors to ex-
ercise power, than upon dispositional power. What interests Foucault, and
contemporary deconstructivist approaches, is the constitution of subject posi-
tions, which are presupposed by such episodic exercises of power. Toward
the end of the article these approaches are brought together through the
analysis of the work of theorists who deliberately try to bridge these ap-
proaches. The paper concludes with an analysis of the current difficulties as-
sociated with the debate. Central to this is the problem, identified by Lukes
(2005: 88-107), of defining the normative and analytic borders of power. If
power is constitutive of agency, as is claimed by the followers of Foucault,
how does one distinguish this all-pervasive power from socilialization in
general? This is not simply an analytic question, it is central to constructing
the grounds of normative critique, which necessitates distinguishing identity
creation directed at emancipation, from subjectification which constitutes
domination.
Chapter 3, by John Gledhill on Political Anthropology, opens with the
1988 declaration by the late Eric Wolf that understanding power, including
structural power, represents the key challenge of contemporary political an-
thropology. This is then contrasted with Marshall Sahlins decrying “the cur-
rent Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power” (Shalins
2002: 20), which he argued tended to reduce all forms of culture to the ef-
fects of power. If we understand culture to refer to the tacit interpretative
framework(s) that enables actors to order reality, hence social interaction,
then Shalin’s claim is also a statement of the problematic, identified by
Lukes, concerning the conceptual borders of power, and the dangers of let-
ting it include everything.
The Wolfe observation concerning the centrality of power reflects not
only the intellectual influence of Foucault-inspired research, it is also a mani-
festation of a changed working environment for anthropologists. Unlike pre-
vious generations of anthropologists who tended to avoid any comments
upon power and domination, contemporary anthropologists find themselves
embroiled in the big international conflicts with origins in a global division of
power. These include indigenous claims to rights of self-determination, reac-
tions to imperialism and colonization, and the big ideological conflicts
around religious difference, ethnicity and resources. These entail fundamental
conflicts concerning ontology, or the being-in-the-world, of complex subject
actors leading to difficult normative judgements. For instance, relative to the

Introduction
17
two family members, power as domination and empowerment, how do we in-
terpret the actions of women who resist Western globalization by adopting
what they consider traditional, “modest”, Islamic codes of dress? Are such
women empowered by adopting self-imposed restrictive social practices, as a
strategy of resistance, or are they subjecting themselves to domination? Re-
versing the example, are Muslim women who secretly buy Western cosmet-
ics escaping domination? Foucault rather ambiguously argued that where
there is power, there is resistance, (Foucault 1978: 95-96), which appears to
equally imply that where there is resistance, there is power (Abu-Lughod
1990: 42). However, which in the above examples is resistance and which
power?
In Chapter 4, titled “Foundations of organization power”, Clegg analyses
the changing nature of the constitution of social subjects within organiza-
tions. The term foundations suggests the base of things, which in the power
literature, tends to be interpreted in terms of resources. Echoing the episodic
view of power, agents have power because of the resources available to them.
However, following the post-modernist mode of analysis, Clegg sees these
foundations in terms of the constitution of agency itself: in the shaping of
dispositions that constitute subject positions, through the creation of the well-
tempered body and mind. Early modern power began with the task of remod-
elling the “refuse” of modernisation, and the creation of efficient workers
from the bottom of the social ladder. However, after Taylor the focus slowly
shifted from the margins of society to the core: to the creation of efficient
management. With this there was a move away from the efficient body to the
moral mind. Clegg situates these observations within the contrast between the
modernist agent centred-approach, exemplified by Lukes and conflictual
power analysis, and the postmodernist emphasis upon dispositional power.
Clegg argues that current organizational analyses of power have shifted to-
ward the subtle understanding of how organizations are constituted as sys-
tems which channel and form the dispositions of social agents.
Gender differences constitute a typical example of the creation of subject
positions that are inherently tied to power. In “Gendering power: feminist ap-
proaches” (Chapter 5), Jill Wickers, surveys approaches associated with sec-
ond-wave feminism. This literature conceptualizes power as domination and
as empowerment, and by tacit elision tends to assume that power as domina-
tion constitutes male power, while female power concerns power to and,
what Allen (1999) called, power with. Arguably, the former association in the
majority of modern Western states has made feminists suspicious of state
power as something male and normatively reprehensible. As argued by
Brown, this view of power entails an obsession with domination, and the im-
plicit dream of escape from power. However, once the complex multi-
dimensionality of social identities (gender, class, ethnicity etc) are taken ac-

Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
18
count of, which is implicit in the above examples of women resisting either
globalization or Islam, the same acts can be entail both emancipation and
domination, viewed from different perspectives. In Allen’s work this results
in a multi-dimensional view of power, in which power over, power to and
power with are brought together in the capacity to act collectively to resist
domination.
Following the work of Yeatman (1993) and Mansbridge (1994), the eli-
sion between state power, coercion, power over and maleness is subjected to
critique and reformulation. After all, democratic politics involves legitimate
power over others. In essence, a feminist deepening of democracy entails the
replacement of power over, as domination, with power to or with which is
used to realize collective goals. This more positive view of power, and poten-
tial of political institutions, implicitly informs Scandinavian feminism, which
is unique among Western feminisms, in its orientation toward formal politics,
through deepening political participation and so on. Against this positive
view of political power, the use of rape in war, and the comparatively lower
participation of women in militarized states, suggests that maybe there still
remains a residue inherent in power which is linked to domination.
In their analysis of power in political sociology (Chapter 6), Hall and
Malešević insist upon an irreducibly hard-edged link between power, domi-
nation, coercion and violence. While Foucaldian theory points toward gov-
ernmentality as government through subtle modes of subject formation, Hall
and Malešević argue that the formation of modern power cannot be under-
stood without state monopoly of violence. This is not to reject the idealist as-
pect of power, but signifies the importance of remembering that ideologies
constitute ways of legitimating domination. Patriarchy is an ideology that le-
gitimates male domination, similarly nationalism is the modern ideology that
legitimates state monopoly of violence. Like us, the editors, Hall and Male-
sevic insist upon the distinction between political sociology as an empirical
analysis of what is, which is in contrast to normative positions, which study
what ought to be, therefore they reject the kind of category conflation which
takes place in Lukes’ Marxist inspired account of ideology. The idea of ide-
ology as “false consciousness” is a normative judgement, while their politi-
cal-science/sociological interpretation constitutes a description of facts, of the
manner in which ideas, as ideology, legitimate relations of power and author-
ity.
The focus upon the coercive aspects of power does not drive a concep-
tual wedge between power as based upon violence and power as linked to
organizational authority. Despotic regimes, with high levels of violence, fre-
quently lack the infrastructural power necessary for effective organization.
Even in war effective violence presupposes mobilization. This includes eco-
nomic mobilization – the key to the effectiveness of US power in WWII.

Introduction
19
Capitalism also presupposes highly organized states, in which the means of
violence are contained. In short, what emerges in current political sociology
is a complex interdependent model in which power resources (be they mili-
tary or authoritative political power, economic power or ideological power)
work together in a mutually reinforcing manner. At times one is more im-
portant than the rest, but when viewed in historical time what emerges is a
complex interweaving of the three power sources. This perception is at vari-
ance with contemporary claims concerning the advance of globalization as
an undermining of state power. Economics cannot function without the state,
and the strongest ideology of the 20th century was nationalism. In the 21st
century Islam and the new global ideologies are functionally equivalent to
nationalism reinforcing and challenging relations of domination. Thus the
circle of political power, economic power, and ideology remains unbroken.
The idea that globalization does not undermine the existence of the
state, but rather transforms its relationship to other resources, is also central
to Cerny’s account of power in international politics (Chapter 7). Cerny be-
gins by analysing the traditional realist perspective on power, in which there
is a radical discontinuity in the analysis of power within states and power
between states. As argued by Aristotle, justice and friendship can only exist
within the politeia or political community. According to realists, as there are
few international political institutions similar to those found within sover-
eign states, international politics has little conceptual space for the norma-
tive concerns of Aristotle’s perception of humans as political or social ani-
mals. In essence, the international arena constitutes the closest there is to
Hobbes’ hypothetical state of nature, which is characterized solely by ri-
valry. With the move of the basic unit of analysis from persons to sovereign
states, in IR power over of a coercive kind becomes the main focus of atten-
tion.
Realism has, however, been challenged from a number of perspectives.
Firstly the inside/outside distinction has been challenged by the emergence of
multiple international actors. Due to the globalization of environmental issues
and financial markets we see the emergence of supra-state actors, such as the
WTO and the EU. Simultaneously, companies and social movements have
shed the protection of the sovereign state in a bid to find power for them-
selves in the international arena.
Not only does the unit of analysis become more complex, so has the view
of power. Coercive power has become supplemented by “soft power” and
“smart power”. As argued by Nye (2011), soft power presupposes the power
of attraction, which it could be argued reintroduces the Aristotelian view of
friendship and sociality being central to power relations. In a world of mutual
interdependencies the use of coercive power has greater costs, which stem
from unintended effects, including loss of legitimacy. Therefore, a state per-

Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan
20
ceived to rely on coercion frequently finds that it loses friends and influence
in the newly emergent political arenas.
When used carelessly, without taking account of unintended effects,
‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power exists in an inverse relationship to each other. How-
ever, with a sophisticated understanding of international politics, it should be
possible to combine the two in a positive-sum game. The idea of ‘smart
power’ entails a complex understanding of unintended effects and the use of
coercion not simply for negative purposes but also as a mechanism to rein-
force rules that, over time, make international politics more like the internal
politics of states.
While the development of ‘soft’ and ‘smart power’ fits well with a glob-
alized, pluralized and possibly neo-medievalized international world order,
Cerny argues that the advocates of soft power do not realize the true potential
of their perspective as they are still over reliant upon state-centred views of
international politics and they have not, as yet, provided us with the concep-
tual tools to implement the soft and smart power in policy.
Looking at the power family as a whole, we can think of a number of scalar
perspectives on power. The basic units of power are specific social practices
which are constitutive of agency, or they may be undifferentiated social ac-
tors. Moving up the scale, maybe power concerns structures or systems, col-
lective actors in networks, sovereign states or, at the top end of the scale, a
globally interdependent system. On one end of a normative scale, power ap-
pears as a facility, thus a condition of freedom, while at the other, power con-
stitutes domination. This scalar view also entails a Janus-faced perspective:
power both facilitates freedom and domination; agency constitutes both a
source of autonomy and of subjection; power is both agent-centred and sys-
temic. There is a temptation to take such dualities at face value, and to view
them as mutually exclusive relations of opposition. However, it is the editor’s
view that we should think of these relations in terms of both/and. The real
challenge for power theorists is thus to reconcile these significant dualities,
so that what emerges is a more nuanced view in which we acknowledge that
there is no escape from power, yet we do not concede to a bleak Nietzschean
nihilism. Rather, we end up with a politics closer to the Aristotelian ideal of a
balance of the mean. Thus, for instance, the key to the ideals of a liberal de-
mocratic society is not found in a freedom conceived of as an escape from
domination. Rather, the normative ideal is to balance freedom and domina-
tion.

Introduction
21
References
Abu-Lughod, L., 1990. The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power
through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41-55.
Allen, A., 1999. The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarity.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Arendt, H., 1970. On violence. London: Penguin.
Barry, B., 2002. Capitalists rule OK? Some puzzles about power. Politics, Philosophy
and Economics, 1(2), 155-184.
Clegg, S. R., 1989. Frameworks of power. London: Sage.
Connelly, W., 1983. The terms of political discourse. 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Dahl, R., 1957. The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2, 201-15.
Dean M., 2010. Governmentality: power and rule in modern society. London: Sage.
Dowding, K., 1991. Rational choice and political power. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
Dowding, K., 2003. Resources, power and systematic luck: a response to Barry. Poli-
tics, Philosophy and Economics, 2(3), 305-322.
Dowding, K., 2008. Power, capability and ableness: the fallacy of the vehicle fallacy.
Contemporary Political Theory, 7, 238-58.
Foucault, M., 1978. The history of sexuality Vol. 1. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M., 1982. The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795.
Gallie, W. B., 1956. Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 56, 167-98.
Haugaard, M., 2010. Power: a ‘family resemblance’ concept. European Journal of
Cultural Studies, 13(4), 419-38.
Lukes, S., 1974. Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan.
Lukes, S., 2005. Power: a radical view. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan.
Lukes, S., 2008. In: C. Hayward and S. Lukes. Nobody to shoot? Power structure and
agency: a dialogue. Journal of Power, 1(1), 5-20.
Mansbridge, J., 1994. Using power/fighting power. Constellations 1(1), 53-73.
Morriss, P., 2002. Power: a philosophical analysis. 2nd edition. Manchester: Man-
chester University Press.
Morriss, P., 2009. Power and liberalism. In: S. Clegg and M. Haugaard. The Sage
Handbook of Power. London: Sage.
Nye, J., 2011. The future of power. New York: Public Affairs.
Shalins, M., 2002. Waiting for Foucault, still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Wittgenstein, L., 1967. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wrong, D., 1995. Power: its forms, bases and uses. 2nd edition. London: Transaction.
Yeatman, A., 1994. The personal and the political. In: Nancy Fraser, and Paul James,
eds. Critical politics: from the personal to the global. Melbourne: Arena Publica-
tions.
Waldron, J., 2002. Is the rule of law an essentially contested concept (in Florida)?
Law and Philosophy, 21(2), 137-164.

Chapter 2
Social and Political Power
Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
In the introductory chapter we argued that power is essentially a family re-
semblance concept. Hence, there is no single essence of power, rather differ-
ent family members that have developed out of various language games. The
power literature is dominated by three meta-language games of power analy-
sis: the conflictual, the consensual and the constitutive language games. In
each of these the focus of power is different both in its empirical substance
and in normative evaluative overtones.
In the conflictual language game power is used in a way that compares
most closely with everyday speech. Power constitutes domination and power
over. In a recently posthumously published article in the Journal of Power
[now Journal of Political Power], Norbert Elias began with the following
words: “Power is in bad odour today. Many people believe it ought not to ex-
ist” (Elias 2008: 135) and then goes on to contrast power with civilization,
which has positive connotations. The power family member who Elias informs
us is in bad odour (a negative normative evaluation) is a product of the con-
flictual language game. In contrast, the consensual language game ‘cousin’ is
power to, which has many of the positive normative connotations of civiliza-
tion. Here power is the capacity to act, as empowerment, which people gain
from membership of the social system. The third meta-language game, the con-
stitutive language game, sits both in tension with, and as the logical culmination
of, the other two. In this language game power both exists as power over and
power to, and the main focus is upon how power is created through the consti-
tution of social subjects. In terms of social theory, as empirically conceived, the
constitutive view is a natural development of consensual perspectives. How-
ever, normatively the constitutive tradition shares more with the conflictual
view of power, as a normatively negative phenomenon that must be subject to
critique. The constitutive tradition is primarily ontological in its focus, inter-
ested in our being-in-the-world, while the conflictual is epistemological at its
radical edges, focussing upon how power distorts knowledge. These are, of
course, generalizations made for heuristic purposes, which do not hold in every
case, as will become apparent in the analysis below.

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
24
In the introduction to this book, and implicit in the above, we hold that to
date the power debates were made more complex and confused by failure to
distinguish family members – claiming that one perspective constitutes
Power (with a capital P). This is compounded by failure to distinguish nor-
mative and sociological empirical language games. Consequently we shall be
careful to signal entry and exit from one game to the next and we will distin-
guish the normative from the empirical.
The Conflictual Stream of Power
The conflictual language game is premised upon the Hobbesian world-view,
in which the Sovereign exercises power over their subjects. Within modern
political science and sociology the classic statement of this position is We-
ber’s often quoted definition of power in terms of the ability of one actor to
overcome another despite resistance (Weber 1978: 180). This became crystal-
ized into Dahl’s definition, where “A has power over B to the extent that he
can get B to do something B would not otherwise do” (1957: 202-3), which
Lukes was later to term the first dimension of power.
In the early conflictual power debate, normative concerns, such as those
relating to democracy, freedom, and domination, were refracted through em-
pirical analysis. The main protagonists wanted to be scientific, practicing po-
litical science, yet the driving force was the normative evaluation of Ameri-
can democracy. According to Berendtson (2010), this conflated approach
may have been a reaction to McCarthyism, whereby being ‘scientific’, or
radically empiricist, made political science appear ‘safe’ from the witch-
hunts of that time. Yet, behind this, these political realities raised major nor-
mative questions concerning the practice of democracy. Moving from the fif-
ties to the sixties, these normative concerns became stronger, reinforcing the
prerogative to interrogate the meanings and workings of democracy.
Floyd Hunter (1953) analyzed community level politics and, based upon
interviews with persons of local knowledge, concluded that big business gov-
erned behind the scenes. C. Wright Mills (1956) was highly critical of the
workings of American democracy, arguing that a relatively coherent elite
governed the US through their preponderant access to economic, political and
military resources. Dahl countered these leftwing critics by being more ‘sci-
entific’, interpreted in rigorously empiricist terms, focussing upon actual de-
cision-making, using his strict A versus B definition of power. Dahl argued
that the US approximated to a pluralist model of democracy, where there was
no single elite but many elites in competition. The latter results in relatively
democratic outcomes because the less powerful can influence decision-

Social and Political Power
25
making, if they mobilize and make alliances within this contested field of
politics (Dahl 1961). Key is the perception that power is not the equivalent of
power resources, which is only potential power. One rich man may collect
paintings and the other politicians, only the latter is powerful. The relatively
less powerful have some resources at their disposal, which can be mobilized
with motivation and skill to prevail in decision-making (Dahl 1968). For in-
stance, organized labour can prevail over wealthy capitalists by forming trade
unions.
In response to what was perceived to be a normative endorsement of the
workings of US democracy, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz entered the
debate by arguing that “the pluralists…have not grasped the whole truth of
the matter”, because they had failed to expose power’s insidious second
‘face’, which was not readily accessible to Dahl’s particular methodology
(1962: 947-9). They refocused the debate by asking whether the student of
power could “safely ignore the possibility…that an individual or group in a
community participates more vigorously in supporting the nondecision-
making process than in participating in actual decisions within the process?”
(1962: 949). In the article the quote Schattschneider’s pithy observation:
All forms of political organization have a bias in favour of the exploitation of
some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the
mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are or-
ganized out. (Schattschneider quoted in Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 949 – Italics
original)
Bachrach and Baratz accepted Dahl’s scientific insistence upon behaviour-
ism, whereby a non-decision was still an explicit decision not to make a deci-
sion, which could thus be traced to identifiable actors. Despite the insistence
on behaviourism, the stakes were normative, so that once nondecision-
making was taken into account, it could be asserted that the US was falling
well short of the democratic ideal.
Steven Lukes entered this debate with the publication of his seminal
Power a Radical View in 1974 (second edition 2005). While noting that
Bachrach and Baratz’s second face was a major advance in the study of
power, it was Lukes’ intention to incorporate the two faces of power into a
three-dimensional model. On an empirical level, this entailed a thoroughgo-
ing critique of behaviourism. In adding his third dimension to what now be-
came Dahl’s first dimension and Bachrach and Baratz’s second dimension,
Lukes’ objective was to explain how power is exercised in such a way that
domination is non-coercive, whereby actors become willing accomplices in
their own subjection. Lukes argued that power could shape peoples’ “percep-
tions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in
the existing order of things” (2005: 11). Theorised in three dimensions, the

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
26
concept of power encompassed “the many ways in which potential issues are
kept out of politics, whether through the operation of social forces and insti-
tutional practices or through individual decisions” (Lukes, 2005: 28, original
emphasis). This included, controversially, false consciousness: Lukes asks
rhetorically “is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others
to have desires you want them to have – that is to secure their compliance by
controlling their thoughts and desires?” (Lukes 1974: 23).
Lukes was entirely clear that the power debate was simultaneously nor-
mative and analytic, arguing that the concept of power constituted an essen-
tially contested concept. Following Gallie’s analysis (1956), essentially con-
tested concepts appear analytic, yet are normative with the consequence that
their definition is framed by the normative ideals of the observer. Thus, the
first dimension was premised upon a relatively conservative normative posi-
tion, with the second and third dimension moving progressively to the left.
The idea that power is both analytic and normative introduced a certain con-
tradiction within Lukes’ framework. On the one hand, in his critique of be-
haviourism, Lukes insisted that power is not reducible to a “series of indi-
vidually chosen acts, but also, most importantly, by the socially structured
and culturally patterned behaviour of groups, and practices of institutions,
which may indeed be manifested by individuals’ inaction” (Lukes 1974: 22 –
emphasis added), which makes total sense on an empirical level – it is the
case that the routine reproduction of relations of domination takes place
without specific agency. While specific situations of relative powerlessness,
such as women in traditional societies, ethnic minorities in divided societies,
or the reproduction of class inequalities can be explained as the consequence
of social action, these not entirely reducible to the behaviourist focus
whereby powerful actors A act upon less powerful actors B.
In developing this anti-behaviourist stance, on a normative level, Lukes
argues that power is to be contrasted with structure, whereby power entails
contingency, while structure implies constraint. In the second edition of
Power: A Radical View (2005), Lukes insists that power entails fixing moral
responsibility to agents (Lukes 2005: 66). This agent-centred normative ori-
entation is central to Lukes’ seminal debate with Clarissa Hayward in the
Journal of Power (the Journal changed its name from Journal of Power to
Journal of Political Power in vol 4, 2011) suggestively entitled “Nobody to
shoot? Power structure, and agency” (Hayward and Lukes 2008), in which
Lukes maintains that if there is nobody to shoot, power is absent, while Hay-
ward argues that the most significant forms of power are not reducible to
overt decision-making (Hayward and Lukes 2008). As Haugaard has argued
in the same issue of the Journal of Power (Haugaard 2008), in Lukes’ work
there is a clear tension between Lukes the sociologist and Lukes the norma-
tive political philosopher.

Social and Political Power
27
As an example of what is at stake here can be seen in the work of John
Gaventa (1980), who used Lukes’ concept of three-dimensional power to
analyse the resistance of Appalachian miners to domination. What emerged
was a view of power that reinforced the structural empirical view of three-
dimensional power. In other words, the empirical analysis seemed to be at
odds with the normative view of power as responsibility. Similarly, in De-
facing Power Hayward (2000) used the three-dimensional framework for the
purposes of an empirical analysis of education as a means of socialization
that either reproduced or challenged relations of domination. She compared
two schools, one middle- and the other working-class, and showed how the
socialization of each reinforced relations of domination. Interestingly, the
teachers who were reinforcing working-class social consciousness did not do
so as part of a deliberate exercise of power or strategy of domination. Rather,
quite the contrary, they were equipping their students with what they per-
ceived to be the life-skills appropriate to their social context. Hayward inter-
prets these findings as a critique of the three-dimensional view, hence the ti-
tle of her book De-Facing Power. Yet, it is consistent with Lukes’ empirical
critique of behaviourism.
In Hayward’s debate with Lukes, she argues that domination is fre-
quently reproduced without the explicit intervention of the powerful, through
a process whereby the routine reproduction of social structures create inter-
subjective understandings and meanings which are central to the reproduction
of relations of domination (Hayward and Lukes 2008: 14). As she further ar-
gued in a review of Amy Allen’s Power and Identity, if a woman learns to
dance the Argentine Tango, to be a competent dancer she has to internalize
certain moves, such as responding to the male dancer, who always leads,
which are central to the constitution of a women’s relative powerlessness
(Hayward 2009: 181).
Echoing the agentless view of power, in the years since the publication of
Power and Powerlessness, Gaventa has run a research centre on power (the
Power, Participation and Social Change (PPSC) group at the Institute of De-
velopment Studies in Sussex University), which focuses specifically upon
subtle modes of domination. As part of this project he has recently estab-
lished the ‘power cube’ as an internet resource for researchers, which is a
conceptual tool for framing empirical research on power (Gaventa 2010). In
the power cube Lukes’ three dimensions of power is transformed into visible,
hidden and invisible power – the latter suggesting a lack of responsible
agency.
It might appear that Gaventa and Hayward push the power-debate into
the conceptual territory of the post-structuralist constitutive power theorists,
yet significant differences with these thinkers remain. Speaking generally,
Hayward and Gaventa share with Lukes a commitment to what post-

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
28
structuralists would describe as the Enlightenment project, whereby empirical
analysis is located within the parameters of what might be described as a sci-
entific world-view. This does not necessarily entail a commitment to behav-
iourism, as with Dahl, but they would nonetheless consider their analyses to
be objective, falsifiable, and within the rationalist tradition. Thus, while they
recognize that truth can be used as a tool of domination, they would wish to
maintain a commitment to truth that transcends domination. Also, while
Hayward and Gaventa embrace the idea of invisible forms of power, they
would still agree with Lukes’ critique of Foucault, and the post-structuralists,
that power is not everywhere. The reasons are normative: if power is every-
where, it is meaningless to talk about freedom, as distinct from power and
domination. This distinction between power and freedom is apparent in
Gaventa’s critique of Foucault (http://www.powercube.net) and Hayward’s
critique of Allen’s Foucauldian and Butlerian view of agency (2009).
Unlike Gaventa and Hayward and in more radical opposition to the con-
stitutive view of power, Lukes would appear to hold on to the idea that there
is a subject who is, at least in principle, separable from power. Agency may
be constrained by power; consciousness may be manipulated by power; de-
sires may be manufactured by power; but it is meaningful to maintain an
ideal type normative vision of the subject – whether conceptualised as an in-
dividual or group – only to the extent that the subject has the potential to
transcend the processes, mechanisms and relations through which power is
exercised. For Lukes, the source of the normatively ideal subject is not
power, which has the potential to deform the subject. With a constant eye to
the grounds of normative critique, building upon Spinoza, Lukes holds onto
the idea of an ideal-type subject who can either be deformed through domina-
tion or allowed to flourish through nurturing socialization which allows them
to live an authentic relatively autonomous existence (Lukes 2005: 115). In a
manner reminiscent of Kant, freedom consists in the capacity to use one’s
own reason. As we shall see, within the constitutive view the idea of the sub-
ject pursuing freedom through reason is considered one of the more subtle
ruses of power.
The Consensual Stream of Power
One of the manifest weaknesses of the conflictual school of power analysis is
the over-concentration upon the family member power over, which is con-
ceived of entirely negatively, in terms of domination. As was noted by Peter
Morriss, what is entirely lost from view is the idea of power as power to,
which is one of the conditions of agency – a point that Lukes acknowledges

Social and Political Power
29
in the second edition of Power: A Radical View (p. 64), but one that Lukes
does not substantially rectify (see Morriss 2006). As argued by Morriss,
when power is understood as power to, rather than being associated with
domination and unfreedom, power becomes one of the conditions of freedom
(Morriss 2009).
Lukes, Gaventa and Hayward not only had the same (conflictual) family
member in mind, they also worked within a broadly similar view of social
life. What we term the consensual perspective(s) is not united in this way.
The central convergence is upon power as power to, yet the normative objec-
tives and empirical understanding of these consensual theorists are very dif-
ferent. While it is possible to group them together as one family member,
power to, this particular member of the power family is actually comprised of
many different language games.
The philosophic precursor of the consensual view is Spinoza for whom
potencia represents the constitutive force of political agency. Actors are not
isolated individuals who come together in the way that Hobbes and the con-
flictual school presuppose; rather they are empowered by the power of the
multitude (Saar 2010: 11; Spinoza [1677] 2002: 687). In the 20th century, this
perspective was taken up by Hannah Arendt, who defined power as follows:
“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.
Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and re-
mains in existence only as long as the group keeps together” (Arendt 1970:
44; Haugaard 2002: 137). Arendt famously contrasted power and violence,
arguing that only violence, and not power, comes out of the barrel of a gun:
“In fact, violence destroys power: it is insufficient to say that power and vio-
lence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules
the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to
its own course it ends in power’s disappearance” (1970: 56).
The opposition between power and violence constitutes both an empirical
and normative claim. Empirically it is the case that violence frequently un-
dermines power. If we contrast democratic states operating on the basis of
high levels of legitimacy with totalitarian dictatorships, the tendency of the
latter to use violence is actually a manifestation of strong latent resistance
from the people, while the relative lack of state violence within established
democracies constitutes a testament to collective power. However, the vio-
lence versus power contrast also has much deeper normative meaning for Ar-
endt who, following the Aristotelian tradition, insists that what makes hu-
mans fully human is their capacity for sociability as political beings living
collectively. Biological survival on its own is a means to this higher end. If a
community becomes purely focused upon fulfilling the needs of humans as
biological beings, it is not a true polis and its members are not citizens (1998:
22-28). Following Heidegger, we are beings-in-the-world and if that being is

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
30
only in the private sphere, the human essence of our being as citizens fails to
flourish. Hence, when Arendt is thinking of violence she has in mind both
compliance and capacity for action that are purely physical. In contrast, her
republican theory concerns empowerment through the full development of
humanity through collective action. Nazism and instrumental means-end bu-
reaucracy constitute regimes of violence in the deep metaphorical sense that
Nazism was a politics of racial biology, which owes its origins to theories of
natural selection, while instrumental bureaucracy concerns the administration
of people as if they were things. In that sense they constituted a ‘politics of
physical’, which was an oxymoron in Arendt’s conceptual framework.
In a curious way the premises of Arendtian political theory share much
with the Foucault inspired constitutive perspective, in the sense that both
concern themselves with the politics of ontology. In his Collége de France
lectures (Foucault 2010: 1-25) discussion of Kant’s essay “What is Enlight-
enment?” Foucault observes that there are two ways of answering or inter-
preting this question. One is as an epistemological question concerning
knowledge and the other is as an ontological one concerning the type of be-
ing-in-the-world who is enlightened. Arguably, there is a convergence be-
tween Foucault and Arendt, in their strong link between power and ontology.
Where Arendt and Foucault differ is the latter’s insistence that all subjection
entails domination, while Arendt has a more optimistic reading of the poten-
tialities of the human condition, which makes conceptual space for a positive
constitutive bio-politics in which domination is absent (see Haugaard and
Cooke 2010).
Working within the English analytic tradition (a different language game
than Arendt’s), Peter Morriss is also interested in power as condition of pos-
sibility of human agency. While Arendt tended to critique liberal freedom
due to its emphasis upon the private, which to her mind excluded power,
Morriss has recently argued that power to constitutes a condition of possibil-
ity for liberal societies (Morriss 2009). As argued in Power: A Philosophical
Analysis (2002), for Morriss power constitutes an ability or disposition for
action (2002: 19). The fact that some actors choose to use that capacity “to
kick others around”, to exercise power over them, is not fundamental to the
disposition itself. Rather, that particular use is a subset of their capacity for
action or power to.
In liberal political philosophy freedom is usually considered the driving
conceptual force. However, Morriss argues that this emphasis upon freedom
is over-rated (Morriss 2009). A liberal society that, in principle, permits
many possible actions, but deprives its citizens of the capacity, the power to,
to realize these legally permitted actions, still stands condemned. Freedom is
not an absolute good, meaningful freedom concerns the freedom to do some-
thing. Thus, freedom constitutes a means to an end. While unfreedom can be

Social and Political Power
31
humiliating and is justly condemned by liberals, it does not follow that free-
dom in itself is worthwhile without the capacity to realize the objects of those
freedoms; that is, to have the power to pursue those goods. Freedom is a nec-
essary but not a sufficient condition for a liberal society. The second neces-
sary condition is meaningful levels of power to.
These normative claims concerning the centrality of power to, raises the
fundamental issue, what is this capacity? Obviously, material resources con-
stitute a source of power to but, beyond these allocative resources, politics
works upon authoritative resources1.
The first systematic attempt to theorize authoritative power was by Tal-
cott Parsons (Parsons, 1963) in an article which, while flawed in many ways,
not least for its overriding teleological functionalism, had the virtue of high-
lighting the fact that power is not zero-sum and is not reducible to coercion2.
While we need not concern ourselves with the details of his argument, his
suggestive analogy between money and power is worth recounting. Imagine
the invention of money. First we have a primitive economy in which the ex-
change of goods takes place through barter. However, this is primitive and
inconvenient, so money is invented. The early money is equal to its worth in
metal value, thus is a commodity in its own right. Over time the economy ex-
pands so paper money is invented. Early paper money was a promissory note,
with direct reference to the metal base. However, over time, the value of
money becomes purely conventional and, in so doing, self-validating based
upon confidence in the economy and banking system. Similarly, in an early
tribal society the main base for positions of power is based upon violence.
However, as societies become more complex positions of authority are cre-
ated. In complex modern democracies those in authority may still have re-
course to violence in the case of recalcitrance but the authoritative power re-
sources they have at the disposal vastly outstrips these coercive resources. In
complex modern democracies the use of violence, for instance to quell a riot
or protest, actually represents the failure of power. As in Arendt, violence
and power are opposites. However, while the analogy is suggestive, Parsons’
account does not give us an adequate account of the sources of authority. He
suggests that authority is based upon shared system goals, which may explain
some power, but is not a plausible source of authority when dealing with
complex modern societies. Furthermore, the account would appear to pre-
clude the task of theorizing power over as domination (Giddens 1968).
The next systematic attempt to theorize this problem was by Barry Bar-
nes who replaced the consensus upon system goals with consent upon tacit
1 The terms allocative and authoritative resources were coined by Giddens (1979: 100)
2 Giddens criticized Parsons in an influential article (Giddens) but latter suggested that
maybe he was too harsh, not crediting Parsons with the originality of his approach (Giddens
1984).

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
32
interpretative frameworks. The money/power analogy is replaced by the idea
of self-validating social knowledge. Using a target as an example (i.e. as used
in archery or a rifle range), Barnes argues that “in coming to believe that an
object is a target, we constitute it as a target. Our believing self-validates: we
validate what we believe by referring to what we believe” (1988: 49). In a
culture without bullets, arrows, and other similar projectiles, the object that
we call a target would either have a different context or lack a context alto-
gether, thus falling outside of the paradigm of knowledge which orders inter-
action among its members. The same can be said of social positions of au-
thority and subordination, and the example Barnes uses is the leader of a fic-
tional gang called John (1988: 51). John may be physically stronger than his
subordinates, and he may use his subordinates to dispense violence on his
behalf. But it is unlikely that John is stronger than all of his subordinates
combined, and they will dispense violence in his name only is they recognise
him as the leader. In other words John’s physical power is less effective than
the social power created within the context of his leadership. If John is the
leader of the gang, this is because his leadership is acknowledged and af-
firmed by others through acts of obedience, deference and so on. These af-
firming actions constitute a local field of interaction that circumscribes
John’s leadership and create its context, and though John’s authority may be
shored up and enforced through occasional acts of violence, his authority
does not exist independently of context. The basic insight then is that John
and his gang make up a local sphere of self-validating social knowledge
which intersects and interacts with other spheres, together creating social or-
der.
The substitution of tacit knowledge for system goals is a clear improve-
ment upon Parsonian telelogical functionalism and points towards a conver-
gence between this consensual view of power and Lukes’ third-dimension of
power and Foucault’s work, which is a convergence that points towards
bringing power to and power over together. However, while Barnes was con-
scious of the fact that Parsons failed to provide conceptual space for domina-
tion, he did not extend his own account of self-validating knowledge to in-
clude contested power over. Instead he theorizes this in terms of rational
choice games, which was an inelegant solution as it was an ad hoc solution
that passed up the opportunity to engage with current debates on power
within the conflictual and constitutive perspectives.
More recently in a highly suggestive essay “Social Ontology and Politi-
cal Power” (2007) and forthcoming work (personal correspondence), Searle
sketches the outline of a consensual theory of power which can be interpreted
as compatible with Barnes’ understanding of self-validating social knowledge
– Searle does not actually refer to Barnes’ work however. Building upon
Austin’s (1975) account of performatives, Searle contrasts observer depend-

Social and Political Power
33
ent and independent social knowledge. As argued in his previous work
(Searle 1995), Mount Everest is whatever we believe about it, while money,
marriage and authority are social institutions that only exist as they do be-
cause of our belief in them. Of course, the concept of Mount Everest would
not exist without human thought, which is a point famously put by Derrida
with his observation that “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida 1974:
158). However, social institutions unlike the physical world are entirely self-
referential. An anthropologist who wishes to know about marriage solely re-
fers to the beliefs of actors, while the geologist moves back and forth be-
tween categories of thought and the referent physical entity. Unlike moun-
tains, social institutions are shaped by constitutive rules of the form X counts
as Y in context C. Thus, for instance, a five Euro note counts as legal tender
in a certain context and, similarly Barrack Obama counts as President of
United States once he has stood for office, won the most votes and been
sworn in. When social beings create political systems they make real institu-
tional facts, whereby actors in certain positions, for specific purposes, gain
status functions (Searle 2007: 91). While the President of the US has im-
mense physical powers at his disposal this physical power comes by way of
his status power. In everyday speech we may think of Obama as powerful but
his real power as an individual lies externally to him (as an X), counting as a
President (Y), in circumstances C (the political system of the US at a specific
point in time).
Searle’s theorization of power through status has strong affinity with
Foucault’s account of subject positions, but Searle does not engage with this
literature or, for that matter, with much of the rest in the power field. As yet,
his analysis remains a singular theory of authority within the wider field.
Again, as with the rest of the consensual theorists, the focus upon power to
seems to exclude an adequate theory of power over, except as legitimate
power over or as violence. Power over in its more subtle forms, as theorized
by Lukes’ third-dimension and Foucault’s work is not engaged with.
Integrating the performative view of power with his strong cultural read-
ing of social order, Alexander (2009 and 2010) has shown how power is con-
stituted through felicitous acts of structuration which find resonance with au-
diences. Focussing upon the Obama nomination and election campaign,
Alexander constructs a robust sociological account, containing a thick con-
cept of agents, who are communicative interpretative beings inhabiting a so-
cial world of meaning and ritual. Candidates construct their self-image in a
complex ritual of meaning projection, which becomes felicitous if it accords
with the meanings of their audience, or becomes infelicitous if the electors
deem it inappropriate. While this entails acts of social construction, in which
actors create themselves as carriers of meaning, this act of creation must not
be too apparent to their audience or it is deemed ‘fake’ or ‘insincere’. Simul-

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
34
taneously, while social life is actually arbitrary and constructed, it must ap-
pear otherwise, which entails a complex process of play between sacred and
profane.
Alexander’s perspective constitutes a significant theoretical contribution
to our understanding of power, which is frequently seen as given and zero-
sum. Alexander demonstrates that political power does not reside externally
to either the powerful or less powerful but is constructed in a complex inter-
weaving of communicative intent and reception. His account builds upon the
work the work of Clifford Geertz (1983) and Robert Ballah (1967), who ana-
lyze the signficance of ritual and power, in the constitution of symbolic posi-
tions of authority.
Speaking generally, while the empirical consensual theories of power are
hugely suggestive, they are, as yet, self-contained language games. This, de-
spite the fact that their epistemic orientation is hugely suggestive for the other
perspectives and that power to, as a disposition, points toward constitutive
power.
The Constitutive Stream of Power
While the constitutive conception of power can also be traced back to
Spinoza (Saar 2010), as well as to Machiavelli (Clegg 1989) and Nietzsche
(see Lemm 2010), Foucault is the key progenitor of contemporary constitu-
tive power debates. Foucault’s view of power has commonalities with both
the conflictual and consensual perspectives. As with Lukes, power is norma-
tively reprehensible: something to be critiqued, and similar to Hayward and
Gaventa, it is systemic. As in the consensual perspective, Foucault insists that
power does not simply say no, but is positive. However, unlike Arendt and
Morriss this is not a normative positivity but rather an empirical claim.
According to Foucault, the whole question of power had been stymied by
the tendency to equate power with the sovereign power of the state and asso-
ciated questions of power over (Foucault 2000a: 117), which overlooks the
ways in which the most effective power is power that constitutes social real-
ity, and in particular social subjects. Power is constituted through relations of
knowledge, which sounds like three-dimensional power, except that in Fou-
cault there is no truth – as a normative ideal – without power. Power consti-
tutes agents as beings-in-the-world, whose ontology is inseparable from their
tacit social knowledge, or what Elias and Bourdieu called habitus, and its rei-
fication through truth-claims.
As in Barnes and Searle, the interpretation of social institutions is en-
tirely self-referential. We exist in systems of knowledge, which in Foucault’s

Social and Political Power
35
archaeological work he called epistemes (Foucault 1994a). Unlike in Barnes
and Searle however, with Foucault there is a clear sense that these systems of
meaning are continually contested. In Foucault can be found the consensual
perception that the tacit interpretative horizons, as used by actors to make
sense of the world, legitimate certain relations of empowerment, with the
added conflictual dimension that these regimes are produced through deep
epistemic conflicts. Unlike Searle, Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus was to
be modelled not on language (the structure of communication), nor on the
dialectic (the logic of contradictions), but on war and battle (2000a: 116).
Consequently he adopted a vocabulary of battle in developing his approach to
the study of power, using words such as combat, struggle, and strategy. In
this sense Foucault would seem to have much in common with the conflictual
stream, but as will see in due course, in the constitutive stream we find a very
different relationship between power and freedom, and between power and
truth. In posing the question of power and knowledge, Foucault’s focus be-
came fixed on the politics of truth – the formation and institution of regimes
of truth – and it was this approach that was invested in the concept of ‘dis-
course’, marking a distinction from ideology critique and related concepts
such as false consciousness or three dimensional power, which holds out the
promise of unmediated access to things as they ‘really are’.
Against the idea of knowledge following a linear trajectory – that human
history takes the form of a process of cumulative cognitive development –
Foucault was interested in ruptures that transform the order of things. These
events, or moments of discontinuity, could help to make intelligible the “in-
ternal regimes of power” through which the human sciences had been consti-
tuted: the conditions of possibility, rules of formation, the procedures and
mechanisms through which scientific statements “govern each other so as to
constitute a set of propositions that are scientifically acceptable and…capable
of being verified or falsified by scientific procedures” (2000a: 115). When he
suggested that truth ‘is a thing of this world’, Foucault meant that:
Truth…is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces
regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’
of truth – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; its
mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements;
the means by which each is structured; the techniques and procedures accorded
value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying
what counts as true (2000a: 131).
Foucault arrived at this conception of ‘truth’ through his archaeological
works, which posed a series of research questions that began with the power
effects of psychiatry (Madness and Civilization 1988 [1961]) and the political
functions of medicine (The Birth of the Clinic 1994b [1963]), and which con-
tinued in his analysis of the prison (Discipline and Punish 1977 [1975]); a

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
36
study that marks the beginning of his genealogical approach to power.
Though posing what appear to be distinct questions, these studies can in fact
be mapped onto each other, and together they assembled a diagram of power
that connects specific discourses and institutional domains in the form of a
disciplinary net. In his own words, Foucault was examining “the problem of
internment” (2000a: 113).
The case of Pierre Rivière (Foucault 1975), who was convicted of parri-
cide in 1835, provides an example of how psychiatry, the clinic, and the pe-
nal system intermix. At that time the fledgling science of psychiatry was or-
ganised around two competing discourses: one anchored in the concept of
alienism (associated with Philippe Pinel), and the other in the theory of
monomania (associated with Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, who had
studied under Pinel). Rivière was in fact deemed to be suffering from neither
illness, yet the doctors who were called upon to give testimony at his trial
drew on the authority of both discourses. From the point of the view of the
law – or the power of the state – Rivière was an abomination: a murderer
without an identifiable motive, and a clear case for capital punishment. From
the perspective of science however Rivière was something else entirely. His
innate ‘dangerousness’ meant that he was capable of striking anywhere and
anytime, and this was his social and historical significance: if his ‘soul’ could
be known, then it might be possible to detect other such ‘dangerous individu-
als’ among the general population and thus ensure the safety of society.
Rivière was subject to disciplinary powers that were brought to bear on his
body, but in embodying the problem of dangerousness he also helped to con-
stitute biopower, the aim of which is to regulate a population.
The case of Pierre Rivière articulated a struggle between the sovereign
power to take life or let live, and the ‘positive’ power emerging in the form of
the human sciences, and it is in this sense that power is positive, because it
produces or constitutes (as in consensual power)3. Though convicted of a
capital crime, Rivière’s sentence was commuted following an intervention by
a number of prominent doctors, and he was subsequently placed in an asylum
for an indeterminate period of time. Judged both by science and the law,
Rivière was neither entirely a prisoner nor a patient. He was a hybrid entity, a
new social subject, formed through a struggle within the field of medicine
and between science and law. Unlike a prisoner, his legal rights were largely
irrelevant, because it wasn’t his actions that were being judged. His guilt,
which marked the threshold of law, was beyond doubt, but this was not the
3 By subjecting this ‘positive’ power to critique Foucault would also appear to have one foot
in the conflictual language game, so that power is ‘negative’ in the normative sense. How-
ever, Foucault was extremely elusive concerning the question of normative analysis, and
we will address this issue towards the end of this section and again at the end of the chap-
ter.

Social and Political Power
37
object of this particular game of truth. At least nor for the doctors, who were
not judging the act so much as examining the actor, and their objective was to
turn Rivière inside-out so that his soul would be laid bare before the gaze of
science. Rivière was more than a prisoner, but he was also something other
than a patient. His was the trap of novelty, and in what might be interpreted
as a final act of defiance, or perhaps autonomy would be a better choice of
word, he took his own life and became the tragic master of his destiny4.
As we read about the fate of people such as Pierre Rivière, it is perhaps
easy to overlook the fact that, although Foucault’s analyses emphasised rela-
tions of domination, he also theorised regimes of truth as sites of struggle, for
just as power is constituted by and constitutive of such regimes, so it is also
implicated in those counter-forces generally associated with ‘resistance’.
Though offering no possibility of escape from power, Foucault’s approach
does not necessarily lead to a version of structural determinacy, because a re-
gime of truth coheres through the very struggles that may lead to its unravel-
ling and transformation. The whole question of struggle becomes clearer
when we consider how Foucault examined the concept of ‘government’.
We can approach this through the question of sex, because for Foucault
the politics of sexual reproduction is as central to the process of modern
state-formation as is industrial production and the growth of bureaucracy.
Sex has acute political significance, because it is “located at the point of in-
tersection of the discipline of the [individual] body and the control of the
population” (Foucault 2000a: 124-5). An example is the 18th century cam-
paign against masturbation. In refuting the ‘repressive hypothesis’, or the
idea that bourgeois society “repressed infantile sexuality to the point where it
refused even to speak of it or acknowledge its existence”, Foucault argued
that child sexuality was in fact spoken about constantly, which had the effect
of “sexually exciting the bodies of children”. Parents were coached on how to
exercise vigilance over their children, while children were trained to exercise
control over their own body, with the consequence that the child’s body, the
parent-child relation, and the space of the family were all ‘sexualised’ (Fou-
cault 2000a: 121). In the realm of sexuality we see how power is not a repres-
sive force so much as a ‘positive mechanism’ that combines specific forms of
knowledge, techniques and disciplinary practices in producing the body –
both the individual body and the social body (Foucault 1998). This coming
together of discipline and examination of individuals and populations made
possible a regime of biopolitics (Macmillan 2009). Within a regime of bio-
politics individuals become part of a population that has to be managed as an
4 On Foucault’s perception of sucide as freedom, see James Miller’s controversial intellectual
biography of Foucault (Miller 1993).

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
38
object of knowledge, which can be quantified in a new discourse of power/
knowledge – statistics, which ground the social sciences, as sciences.
This empirically positive mode of power – power that ‘individualises and
totalises’ – is what Foucault has in mind when he writes of ‘pastoral power’
and ‘government’, and here again, as with the question of power and truth,
the focus is on ontology. In his genealogy of pastoral power, and we should
remember that his concern was to write a history of the present – an ‘histori-
cal ontology of ourselves’; or a critical inquiry into “what we are saying,
thinking and doing” (2010) – Foucault examined the origins of Christian in-
stitutions, and he contrasted what he called the ‘shepherd-flock game’ with
the ‘city-citizen game’. By ‘game’ is meant specific strategies and mentalities
of rule (i.e. mentalities of government, or governmentalities), and in recon-
structing the present, Foucault was interested in the ‘demonic’ way in which
these games have become folded into each other in the context of liberal de-
mocratic state-formation (2000b: 311). The city-citizen game is an inheri-
tance of the Greek polis, and it concerns the rights and duties of free citizens
in a political community. Pastoral power emerges through the shepherd-flock
game, and it has two main characteristics. Firstly, it is a form of power that
cares for and controls not just the entire flock, but also each individual for the
duration of his or her life. Secondly, it cannot be exercised without knowl-
edge of the mind or ‘soul’; i.e. it seeks to know about the individual’s private
desires and secrets – it entails knowledge of the conscience (2000c: 332-3).
By acquiring knowledge of the flock, each and all would be cared for and
guided by the pastor for the duration of their life. Pastoral power is thus coex-
tensive with life (and we might note how this maps onto Lukes’ assessment
of Foucault as a theorist of socialization); it is linked to the production of
truth and is exercised through the truth that it possesses. Foucault called this
mode of power ‘government’, and as with Arendt’s approach to the study of
power (though Foucault does not follow Arendt in granting politics a positive
normative role), he distinguished it from violence, which forces, bends,
breaks, destroys, and consequently “closes off all possibilities” (2000c: 340).
In contrast to violence, Foucault invokes the ‘equivocal’ term ‘conduct’
to clarify what he means by government. To conduct is to lead or direct (as in
the conductor of an orchestra). But ‘conduct’ is also a way of describing the
actions or behaviour of an individual or group within a field of possibilities
which is more or less open. Government then concerns ‘the conduct of con-
duct’ and the ‘management of possibilities’ – the rationalities, the forms of
knowledge, the techniques and practices through which the conduct of indi-
viduals and populations is directed, such as “the government of children, of
souls, of communities, of families, of the sick” (2000c: 341).
Since the early 1990s, this set of concerns has developed as a distinct re-
search paradigm on governmentality, driven in particular by Nikolas Rose,

Social and Political Power
39
Peter Miller, and Mitchell Dean. Much of the resulting literature has focused
on the forms and modes of power which have been organised into the social
and administrative fabric of the modern liberal-democratic state. Focusing in
particular on the concept of freedom (Rose 2009), the governmentality ap-
proach examines the precise ways in which the subjects of liberal rule are
governed through their capacity for action. By examining the ways in which
power “structures the field of possible action” (Foucault 2000c: 341), the
analyst is interested in how power constrains the scope of freedom and directs
the actions of free subjects. With an emphasis on explanation over normative
evaluation, this literature is for the most part framed by ‘how’ type questions.
However, in attempting to problematise the very language of ‘politics’ and
‘power’, as well as the analytical tools deployed by political philosophers and
sociologists – such as the assumed or posited opposition between state and
civil society, between domination and emancipation, or between the public
and the private (Miller and Rose 2008: 199) – the governmentality analyst in-
evitably opens out a set of questions which are saturated with normative con-
cerns. Some contributors have addressed these concerns directly, such as
Marianne Valverde’s (1996) critical inquiry into liberal ‘despotism’, but it is
arguably Dean (1999, 2010) who has gone furthest in addressing the ‘illiber-
ality of liberal government’, as well as extending the approach to the study of
‘authoritarian governmentality’, such as Nazi Germany and contemporary
China. In doing so Dean identifies biopower and sovereignty as two elements
common to liberal, social, and authoritarian governmentalities.
As noted already, the governmentality approach pivots around the rela-
tionship between power and freedom, which are conceptualised as being mu-
tually constitutive, so that power is simultaneously power to and power over,
while the subject of power is at once empowered and subjected (see Cruik-
shank 1999). It is this perplexing question of the subject – situated within a
grid of freedoms and constraints – that saw Foucault coin the term ‘subjecti-
vation’, which concerns the subject’s relation to his or her self. Foucault
notes that there are two ways of using the word ‘subject’. One way is explic-
itly related to the idea of power over, such as Dahl’s actor A and actor B sce-
nario: one person is subject to another either through coercion, control or de-
pendence. The other way of using the word is closer to ‘subjectivity’, or the
idea of a subject in possession of an identity, a conscience, and self-
knowledge (Gordon 1980: 239; Foucault 2000c: 331). For Lukes this ‘moral’
subject, endowed with a potential for autonomy through reflexivity, has the
potential to transcend power in the third dimension. For Foucauldians how-
ever the human subject is not substance but form (Foucault 1997a: 290), and
hence there is no prior-existing realm of consciousness or reason or self-
knowledge which can be equated with freedom and opposed to power. On the
contrary, the exercise of power presupposes freedom, or in Foucault’s own

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
40
words: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they
are free” (2000c: 342). By ‘freedom’ is meant a practice, and the practice of
freedom is formed, shaped, and directed by the regimes of truth and tech-
nologies discussed above. It is through the practice of freedom that the sub-
ject comes to be.
Subjectivation concerns the ways in which people “are invited or incited
to recognise their moral obligations” (Foucault 1997b: 264). An example,
mentioned above, is the 18th century bourgeois campaign against masturba-
tion, which entails coaching children in techniques to master their desires and
their bodies. It should be noted that these sorts of programmes and techniques
do not always succeed, and Foucault occasionally made reference to the con-
tingent effects of power, though he could be ambiguous as to what exactly he
had in mind. For example, he often insisted that freedom is a condition of the
exercise of power, but he also argued, though far less frequently, that there is
an ineradicable recalcitrance in “freedom’s refusal to submit” (2000c: 343). It
is left to the reader to think of examples of what this ‘refusal to submit’
would look like in practice. One that comes to mind is the case of Pierre
Rivière. The freedom practised by Rivière was the wrong kind of freedom,
and consequently he was deemed incapable of living as a free subject. He
was either unable or unwilling to subject himself in accordance with the de-
mands of power. But his recalcitrance – his ‘resistance’ if we can call it that –
did not impede so much as incite the discourse of dangerousness, and we get
a sense of how difficult it can be – within this stream of power analysis – to
separate power over, power to and power with (Allen 1999), or to draw a line
of distinction between power and resistance.
At the time of his death in 1984, Foucault had immersed himself in the
question of subjectivation, or technologies of the self, but it is his work on
governmentality that has proven to be most fruitful to the study of power. In-
terestingly, the ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de
France, particularly his lectures on Security, Territory, Population (2007);
The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and The Government of Self and Others
(2010) has seen Foucault posthumously continuing to contribute to the devel-
opment of governmentality theory, and several recent studies have drawn on
these lectures to conduct a critical analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism
(Donzelot, 2008; McNay, 2009; Macmillan 2009), to re-evaluate Foucault’s
genealogy of social orthopaedics – and in so doing, to bring disciplinary
power back into the governmentality frame (Macmillan, 2009), and to steer a
path between Foucauldian analytics and the concerns of critical theory – spe-
cifically, by attending to the pervasive mechanisms of power identified by
Foucault, but without abandoning the possibility of transformative critique
(Allen, 2008a). It remains to be seen however whether the governmentality
approach will move further in the direction of what Dean (2007) calls ‘diag-

Social and Political Power
41
nostic’ critique, and thus combine the explanatory concerns of social theory
with the evaluative concerns of political theory (see van Munster 2010).
Constitutive power and hegemony
Following Foucault’s death, his account of power, subjection and discourse
has provided an inspiration for the European left. In 1985 Laclau and Mouffe
published their post-Marxist manifesto, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,
which is widely regarded as the key text marking this post-Marxist departure.
In a subsequent debate instigated by Norman Geras and published in the New
Left Review (Geras 1987; Laclau and Mouffe 1987), Laclau and Mouffe in-
sisted that both the ‘post’ and the ‘Marxist’ were crucial to the position they
were developing. On the one hand, as post-Marxists, they remain true to the
normative concerns of the Marxist tradition, and in this sense there is clear
convergence with Lukes’ use of Gramsci to theorize power in the third di-
mension (Lukes 2005: 49-50 and 144-5). On the other hand, as post-Marxists,
they rework Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony by developing a
post-structuralist theory of discourse, and here they draw extensively on the
constitutive perception of power. Recently, Saul Newman has joined this de-
bate by making the case that this form of constitutive power analysis is more
appropriately characterized as post-anarchist. He argues convincingly that,
from its inception, anarchism has always been concerned with the critique of
power, and was always implicitly sceptical of essentialist categories like
class (see Newman 2010a, 2010b).
As used by Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 107) the category ‘discourse’ is an
interpretation rather then a strict application of Foucault’s use of the concept,
particularly in his archaeology where he made a somewhat confusing distinc-
tion between ‘discursive’ and ‘non-discursive’ realms (Foucault 1972: 67-9;
for critique see Habermas 1989). In rejecting this distinction Laclau and
Mouffe argue that while certain aspects of the social may appear to be non-
discursive, this is because socially constructed meanings have become deeply
embedded in social practices. Building on the structural linguistics of Ferdi-
nand de Saussure (1983), Laclau and Mouffe conceptualise discourse as a re-
lational system, the elements of which defer meaning to themselves through
relations of difference. Further to this, as argued by Jacques Derrida, any at-
tempt to halt the play of meaning is doomed to failure because the inscription
of meaning (in a text or discourse) entails the deferral or exclusion of other
possible meanings (Derrida 1982, 1981). The import of this argument con-
cerns the instability or ‘undecidability’ of any sign system. Laclau and
Mouffe incorporate this into their conception of discourse, which goes be-

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
42
yond sign systems and semiotics to include social practices. In this way the
category ‘discourse’ becomes coextensive with the social.
By focusing on how systems of meaning are inscribed into the social
field as knowledge, subjectivities and relations of power, Laclau and Mouffe
orchestrate a shift from within the field of Marxist theory: from the search for
a trans-historical and trans-cultural truth that explains all power asymmetries,
to the study of the contingency of all discursive formations. It is here – the re-
lation between order and the possible or potential dislocation of order – that
the question of power is situated. Though a formation of discourse provision-
ally fixes meaning and stabilises social relations, the impossibility of order
without exclusion means that any given order is intrinsically unstable, and
this is the terrain upon which political struggle is staged. Because hegemony
is constructed through the inclusion and exclusion of possible meanings, so it
is penetrated by a surplus of meaning. And this immanent horizon of contin-
gency is the source of change: order is vulnerable to what it excludes.
Hegemony, or more specifically a hegemonic formation of discourse, is
conceptualised as an ethico-political decision enacted in an undecidable ter-
rain. Moving in the opposite direction, hegemony is also disturbed or dislo-
cated if and when the surplus is discursively articulated. It is within the com-
pass of this moment – the experience of something which is lacking – that a
struggle to fill the void is instigated. Yet this desire for fullness and whole-
ness is an impossible project. Because however it is defined – whether
‘community’, ‘the people’, ‘nation’ or ‘republic’ – the envisioned state of
plenitude is itself a discursive construction, and thus constituted through ex-
clusion (Laclau, 2005).
Political struggle thus erupts between a lacking subject and the desire for
fullness, which creates a political frontier by ordering a plurality of social
identities and subjectivities into a collective will or force (Howarth, Norval
and Stavrakakis, 2000; Torfing, 1999). The idea of frontier-formation frames
Laclau and Mouffe’s answer to the normative problem of social orders char-
acterised by domination: counter-hegemony. What they propose, and here the
connection between Gramsci and Machiavelli, and between Machiavelli and
Foucault becomes explicit, is a purely strategic conception of social power
and political struggle (see Ryan, 2007: 41-4). As noted above, Foucault de-
fined government as the ‘conduct of conduct’, which was a way of analysing
power relations without adopting an explicitly normative position. Somewhat
similar to this, although clearly more concerned with formulating a political
strategy, Gramsci conceptualised hegemony as a directing force. However,
this empirical formulation has normative implications, which underpins La-
clau and Mouffe’s idea of a counter-hegemonic strategy. It should be noted
however that their counter-hegemonic intervention is different from the
Marxist-Gramscian tradition (thus marking out the terrain of post-Marxism as

Social and Political Power
43
different from the conflictual perspective on three-dimensional power) in that
it does not envision emancipation as a possible or even desirable end-state.
Instead, their strategy is to keep the possibility of contestation alive by pre-
venting discursive closure5. Laclau and Mouffe engage in social analysis for
the express purpose of developing an explicitly normative political position,
and this political position is Gramscian while also being anchored in Fou-
cault’s analyses of power, so that emancipation can never be more than par-
tial and provisional.
In contrast to Habermas, for whom the telos of communication (and pub-
lic deliberation) is to reach a consensus (by which he means both a shared
understanding and normative agreement), the normative focus of Laclau and
Mouffe is upon how a given order has been assembled and how it is vulner-
able to excluded possibilities which might disturb the fixity of meaning and
reconfigure power relations. Further to this, and here she is writing explicitly
with Habermas in mind, Mouffe argues that consensus would be the death of
politics (2000). Consistent with the post-Marxist social ontology sketched
above, Mouffe insists that politics entails making a choice between compet-
ing alternatives, so that politics – and democratic politics is no exception – is
about conflict and contestation (2005: 10-19). Undecidability is both the con-
dition of possibility for emancipatory struggle and the impossibility of any
final emancipation, so that a Left political strategy entails the ongoing re-
articulation of power relations (Laclau, 1996, 1990).
This conception of politics poses an important question for the study of
power: if conflict is somehow fundamental to social life then it must exist in
one form or another, which means that to inhabit a democracy is to live with
the possibility of violence. And this is precisely the question that Laclau and
Mouffe have been addressing in their recent writings, and with good reason.
For despite heady predictions of a new world order and the end of history, the
new millennium has by no means inaugurated the end of violence. In analys-
ing this situation Mouffe makes an important distinction between ‘antago-
nism’ and ‘agonism’ (2000). In contrast to antagonistic conflict, which is a
confrontation between enemies, agonistic combat is waged between adversar-
ies who express their grievances and pursue their goals through institutions,
procedures and rules that both (or all) sides recognise as legitimate. Democ-
racy is a particularly effective way of fielding agonistic, or non-violent, con-
flict. If Laclau and Mouffe are correct in their assessment of current trends
(such as the ongoing war on ‘terror’), then repressing agonistic conflict in the
name of unity and consensus in the domestic sphere while at the same time
prosecuting a violent war in the name of freedom and democracy in the inter-
5 Though Laclau and Mouffe’s manifesto is explicitly situated within the socialist political
tradition, their strategy shares this much at least with Rorty’s political liberalism (1989).

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
44
national arena can only increase the likelihood of violent power struggles.
With no possibility of a final emancipation, political struggle entails the on-
going re-articulation of power relations, so that hegemony is met not by truth
but by a counter-hegemonic strategy.
Theoretical problems with the three language games
As presented so far, the three perceptions of power constitute language games
concerning different family members. Methodologically bracketing positions
specifically aimed at synthesis (which we have yet to explore), there is a ten-
dency for these perspectives to talk past each other. The most eloquent state-
ment of this is Morriss insistence that Foucault was “not writing about power
at all” (Morriss 2002: xvii). Similarly, Barnes and Searle do not mention the
theorists of the constitutive stream. Even though the consensual perspective
has much in common with the constitutive perspective, there is no significant
dialogue from either side. With a few exceptions, the followers of the consti-
tutive perspective fail to engage with the conflictual perspective in a substan-
tive way due to their self-perception of transcending the concerns of the lat-
ter. In essence, when Foucault symbolically cut off the sovereign’s head, this
became licence to perceive of conflictual power analysis as obsolete. Hence,
in place of serious engagement with Lukes, Gaventa and Hayward, constitu-
tive theorists engage in generalized (and usually inaccurate straw-man char-
acterizations) critiques of the Enlightenment.
Within the conflictual perspective, Hayward tends to be the most sympa-
thetic to the constitutive perspective. While Lukes’ fundamental criticism of
Foucault has empirical content, the concerns are deeply normative. Empiri-
cally, it may be correct that the constitution of subject positions entail rela-
tions of domination, yet it remains to be theorized how this process differs
from socialization in general. It is a sociological truism that socialization is
intrinsic to the creation of actors with specific dispositions and powers. How-
ever, not all forms of socialization constitute domination (Lukes 2005: 97).
Without distinguishing between socialization and subjectification as domina-
tion, Foucault’s claim that there is no escape from power may simply mean
the sociological truism that there is no escape from socialization. The failure
of post-structuralists to see this problem may be because of their perception
that the Enlightenment tradition presupposes a ‘free subject’, which suggests
a foundational hypothetical subject who transcends socialization. However,
Lukes has written extensively on Durkheim (Lukes 1973), who famously cri-
tiqued Kant’s a priori categories in Elementary Forms of Religious Life by
arguing, much like Foucault, that the categories of meaning which constitute

Social and Political Power
45
the interpretative horizon of the social subject are historically constituted.
Thus for Durkheim, hence for Lukes, there is no meaningful empirical sub-
ject prior to socialization but from a normative perspective there are forms of
subject formation through socialization that can be characterized as domina-
tion because they undermine human flourishing and critical faculty (see
Lukes 2005: 115 and 2008).
Looking from the consensual perspective, the constitutive post-structura-
list emphasis upon subjectification tends to be one dimensional in the sense
that, while acknowledging empirically that power is power to, there is a nor-
mative tendency to ignore that being a social subject also empowers. An in-
teresting instance of the dual domination/empowerment aspect of subjectifi-
cation is given by the sociologist Nanna Mik-Meyer in her analysis of indi-
viduals presenting to the social services with generalized symptoms that are
not physically or psychologically defined (Mik-Meyer 2010). These indi-
viduals are not patients as long as they do not have a specified illness that can
be medically named. On the one hand such naming implies subjectification as
domination, by forcing them into categories of meaning but, on the other, it
also entails empowerment in enabling them to access various entitlements.
Following Foucault, both Dean and Rose make much of the subjectification
implicit in the liberal pursuit of freedom. The free individual of a neo-liberal
society is actually a specific kind of subjected actor, which includes exclu-
sion of many legitimate forms of being-in-the-world. True, but these modes
of being in the world entail many forms of entitlement and authoritative
power to which empowers those actors to realize goals. As emphasized by
Morriss, a truly liberal society is one that confers power to (Morriss 2009).
The weakness of the consensual tradition is that power over is largely ei-
ther theorized differently, as coercion or, in the case of Barnes, rational
choice. This has an add-on, ad hoc quality, which is particularly inelegant
given that the epistemic theorization’s of Barnes and Searle suggests the po-
tential to build upon three-dimensional power and the Foucauldian power/
knowledge hypothesis.
The theorists of the conflictual perspective are stronger than the rest in
their consciousness of other perspectives and, as a consequence, also more
aware of the short-comings of their work. Lukes acknowledges that the prob-
lem of theorizing false consciousness is that it suggests true consciousness,
hence the position has the potential to appear elitist (Lukes 2005: 145). Lukes
distances himself from this by arguing that the issue is not true consciousness
but reflexive autonomy. However, once the constitutive position on subjecti-
fication is taken into account, the concept of autonomy is extremely complex.
It is certainly not an absolute, as agents cannot be autonomous from their so-
cialization. However, Lukes, Gaventa and Hayward are fully aware of this
and would appear to be open to the suggestion that more work has to be done.

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
46
In terms of the failure of the conflictual perspective to make conceptual
space for power to, Luke acknowledges that he did not pay sufficient atten-
tion to this (Lukes 2005: 64; Morriss 2006), yet little progress has been made
in this direction. Any such research would have to firmly distinguish norma-
tive and empirical claims. Empirically the distinction between power to and
power over is purely relational, is B acting the way he or she does in response
to a command by A (power over) or is their response motivated by desired
outcomes (power to). However, normatively the issue concerns interests.
Empirical power over which is in the interests of B qualifies as a form of
consensual power.
Overall, all three ways of looking at power are problematic when taken
singly. However, not all perspective on power fall into these ideal-types and
several of them constitute explicit attempts to bring them together. In what
follows we discuss some of these positions.
Bringing the perspectives together
There have been a number of theorists who have successfully incorporated
two or all three of the language games examined above. However, as with the
consensual perspectives, there is no single language game that unites them.
Stewart Clegg’s Frameworks of Power (1989) is a synthesis of what we
have presented above as the conflictual and constitutive streams of power
(Clegg does not use this terminology), which attempts to absorb the conflict-
ual perspective into the constitutive by providing conceptual space for the
former within the latter. Clegg identifies two traditions in the study of power
represented by Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli. The Hobbesian tra-
dition would be normative in its orientation while the Machiavellian is em-
pirical (Clegg 1989: 3-5, 34-5). Clegg argues that the Hobbesian tradition is
framed within ‘mechanical metaphors’ with a focus on individual actors –
Dahl’s actors A and B. In contrast, Machiavelli uses ‘military metaphors’ of
tactics, strategy and struggle, which are compatible with Foucault’s account
of power/knowledge, as well as Laclau and Mouffe’s re-theorization of the
Gramscian language of hegemony that uses terms like war of position,
earthworks and trenches and so on (Gramsci 1971). While Clegg’s sympa-
thies clearly lie with the Machiavellian constitutive tradition, he suggests that
both describe aspects of social life.
Clegg re-theorizes the two traditions in terms of three circuits of power.
The first concerns episodic power, which is a Hobbesian conflictual circuit.
Here the exercise of power is attributable to actors A and B, and is therefore
“the most visible and easily accessible circuit of power” (1989: 211). The

Social and Political Power
47
Machiavellian, constitutive, perspective is represented by dispositional power.
This concerns social integration, the constitution of agency according to the
rules of the game. The third circuit is that of facilitative power, which pro-
vides the context for the other two and is the basis of system integration.
Episodic agency power is the causal power of A’s getting B’s to do
things they would not otherwise do but, unlike Lukes, Clegg does not allow
this circuit to extend into the realm of consciousness-shaping or the manipu-
lation of free-standing interests (1989: 187). Furthermore, Clegg insists that
this circuit is “neither the foundation of the totality of power in the terms that
Lukes’ dimensional approach suggests nor a free-standing circuit as in the
formal model that Dahl advances” (1989: 211). By restricting the scope of
this circuit, Clegg clears the way for a set of questions concerning the condi-
tions of possibility for the episodic exercise of power, which presupposes
specific ‘standing conditions’ that configure the arenas of struggle within
which causal power relations are staged. Clegg is also at pains to point out
that the category ‘agency’ is not equivalent to intentional individuals. Or-
ganisations are also agents (Clegg 1989: 188). The third circuit – that of sys-
tem integration – is the overall context in which the dispositions of the sec-
ond circuit make sense.
The episodic exercise of power presupposes the social subject who exer-
cises that power. To use the chess analogy, if a queen takes a pawn that is an
exercise of episodic power, which presupposes the being-in-the-world of
queens and pawns (dispositional power). The social subject is reproduced in
that momentary exercise of power, which in turn only makes sense relative to
the game of chess (the third circuit). To take a different example, this time
from Amy Allen’s work (Allen 2010), imagine a girl Elizabeth who is social-
ized by kind and loving parents into social roles which are central to feminin-
ity. Imagine further that they express their love by telling her “you are so
beautiful”, “what a sweet girl you are”, and “how well behaved you are” (Al-
len 2010: 25-6). As a consequence of this Elizabeth comes to associate being
beautiful and compliant with being loved and cared for. Later in life when
confronted with authority she be more likely to be compliant than a male who
was praised for his great competitive spirit in sport and so on. Any individual
episodic exercise of power in Elizabeth’s life is inextricably linked to a mode
of subjectification, which was not created by prohibitions but by love, which
suggested “be like that and we’ll love you”. Both these circuits of episodic
and dispositional power only make sense relative to patriarchy, as a systemic
form – the third circuit of power.
In her future life Elizabeth does not experience her predispositions as the
contingent effect of socialization. She sees them as part of the ‘natural order
of things’. As is argued by Bourdieu, the perception of the conventional as
natural is a kind of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1990). It is what Haugaard

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
48
(2003) argues is a form of reification that is used in the battle of power and
truth. Truth – the truth of sexual difference, nations or other essentialist cate-
gories – makes the symbolic constitution of social life appear as a given, the
way things are, and, as a consequence, beyond critique. As noted above,
Clegg calls these moments obligatory passage points, and Laclau and
Mouffe, quilting points. Once such passage points are in place, this creates a
context of what is reasonable and what is not. This is, of course, all created
locally in a given social context, but this discourse will be made to appear as
other than this. It will be made appear as Reason (with a capital R). The local
will be made transcendental and thus the status quo, with all its inequalities
will be reified.
Echoing this structural view of power, while bringing it together with
agency, Keith Dowding combines the conflictual view of power over others
with power to, within a rational choice perspective (Dowding 1991; 1996). He
argues that a distinction must be drawn between outcome power, which is the
ability of an actor to bring about outcomes, and social power, which is the abil-
ity of an actor to change the incentive structures of another (Dowding 1996).
While insisting upon agency, Dowding provides conceptual space for the sys-
temic aspects of power by identifying structured domination with systematic
luck (Dowding 1991) – a position that resulted in an exchange with Brian Barry
(Barry 2002; Dowding 2003). Dowding argued that in a complex system it is
not only that the powerful have more resources at their disposal. Rather, the
structuring of a system benefits certain forms of agency without those agents
having to do anything, which constitutes their systematic luck. By focusing
upon systematic luck, Dowding suggests a dual aspect to power over and power
to. For Elizabeth as an adult her subjection provides choices, conditions of pos-
sibility, or systematic luck in Dowding’s sense, which gives her certain power
to, if she confirms the rules of the game (Clegg’s second circuit of power),
which are constitutive of femininity. While reproducing her subjection as
domination, Elizabeth will also be empowered through approval. Simultane-
ously, she will reproduce the structures of domination of patriarchy and, thus,
structure the relatively asymmetric standing conditions of systematic luck for
women and men as social subjects (which are generally weighted in favour of
men), while episodically engaging in relations of power to and power over.
In a rich ethnographic account of the local politics of planning in the city
of Aalborg, Denmark, Bent Flyvbjerg describes how within apparently de-
mocratic rules of the game, only certain types of argument resonate
(Flyvbjerg 1998). Arguing against the possibility of unconstrained speech in
the Habermasian sense, only certain arguments are perceived as rational,
which is an argument that Flyvbjerg has developed into a critique of critical
theory in general (Flyvbjerg 2001). Every society creates local conditions of
possibility, of what is (i.e. appears) reasonable and what does not – a kind of

Social and Political Power
49
systematic luck in Dowding’s sense. Similarly, in a study of the police of
New South Wales, Australia, Ray Gordon showed that what counted as valid
was in fact locally constituted within the rules of the game, yet it appeared
transcendental, as the only way things could be done (Gordon 2006). The
point here is not simply that the rules governing appropriate behaviour were
external to the subject; the point is that being a competent police officer en-
tails seeing the world in a certain way, whereby certain behaviours and dis-
positions appear as part of the natural order of things.
Building upon the idea that every subject position both empowers and
constitutes a position of domination, Haugaard would argued that power to,
power over, and constitutive power, are all implicated in every aspect of so-
cial interaction. As a socialized agent Elizabeth has certain systematic luck
and power, which is tied to her being-in-the-world, which constitutes her sub-
ject position. As an agent she is not external to who she is; she is that subject,
with certain choices before her. If she is a critical subject – a feminist for in-
stance – she may distance herself from her socialization, yet she still knows
that there are certain conditions of possibility external to her which define
what is likely to meet with felicitous responses from others. Social subject
positions are essentially performatives (Haugaard 1997). While Austin (the
originator of the term) saw performatives as confined to specific institutional
acts like marriage, Haugaard interprets them as constitutive of all aspects of
social agency. Every action has the potential to reproduce local conditions of
felicity, thus remain within the rules of the game, or to challenge them. The
predicament for social agents, such as Elizabeth, is that the acts of meaning-
reproduction, or structuration, which challenge the order of things, is disem-
powering in the short-term. Until an epistemic community exists, challenging
the order of things disempowers, while reproducing the order of things, by
engaging in felicitous acts of structuration, empowers in the short term, yet
disempowers in the longer term by reproducing existing relations of domina-
tion (Haugaard 2010). As was analysed by Hayward in her account of the
working-class school (Hayward 2000), the teachers who socialized the stu-
dents of the working-class school not to be critical thinkers – unlike those in
the middle-class school – were socializing those student to be competent so-
cial actors, thus empowering them relative to their conditions of possibility,
yet they were also socializing them into a habitus and subject position which
is central to existing relations of domination. As observed by Allen (2008b:
56), domination is frequently the consequence of a series of locally rational
and empowering strategic choices.
In some of his most recent work (Haugaard 2012a and 2012b), Haugaard
has argued that the four dimensions of power (Lukes plus Foucault) are not
only constraining but also enabling. For instance, Bachrach and Baratz’s sec-
ond dimension of power, where, power revolves around the mobilization of

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
50
bias, whereby “[s]ome issues are organized into politics while other are or-
ganized out” (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 949 – also see above), constitutes a
condition of possibility for both justice and domination. If we take Rawl’s
original position (1971: 12), or similar devices (for instance Dworkin 2000),
the whole point is to create a mobilization of power against zero-sum exer-
cises of power. In these devices of structural constraint, the particular inter-
ests of A and B are deliberately excluded. However, as these devices entail
the same empirical processes of exclusion through constraint as domination
(in form, though not substance), it is inevitable that in particular instances
what is intended as fair and just constitutes a form of domination. Thus, nor-
matively, we should always view liberal principles with a critical eye (Hau-
gaard 2012b). Similarly, with regard to power and truth, Haugaard argues
that the reinforcing relationship between the two simultaneously results in
emancipatory and dominating potential (Haugaard 2012a).
When subject positions and conditions of possibility are thought of in
this way, Haugaard argues that the three perspectives on power are not inc-
ommensurable. Yet, one should not underestimate the problems in combining
them, particularly from a normative perspective. The problem identified by
Lukes still remains: if all subject positions entail domination, how does one
practise critique? By what criteria do normative theorists distinguish forms of
socialization that they approve of from those they critique? Obviously, there
is no transcendental point beyond socialization which can serve as a vantage
point on these questions.
In The Politics of Our Selves, Allen frames this problematic with refer-
ence to Foucault and Butler on the one hand, who would appear to deny
autonomy and Habermas and Benhabib on the other, who are accused of be-
ing blind to the complexity and depth of power (Allen 2008a: 172). Follow-
ing Butler’s account of the subject in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), the
point is not simply, as theorized above, that the social subject is disempow-
ered by occupying structuring patriarchal social practices, she actually de-
sires them: the practices give her pleasure because they are associated with
love and esteem. It is for this reason that feminists quite often reproduce pa-
triarchal ideals of feminine beauty (Allen: 2008a: 182; 2010; Allen in Hon-
neth, Allen and Cooke 2010).
In critical theory Axel Honneth has tried to replace Habermas’ (1983)
emphasis upon reason and ideal speech as the foundation for critique with
recognition as foundational (Honneth 1995 and 2007). To simplify: the ar-
gument is that recognition is the foundational moment for successful sociali-
zation. Yet, if we take the example of Elizabeth, recognition of her beauty is
a moment of domination, a domination which gratifies and, yet, must, at
times, also leave the agent feeling guilty – guilty for both betraying principles
and for maybe not capitulating enough (Allen 2010: 182).

Social and Political Power
51
In conclusion, the convergence of these power debates creates a rich
ethnography of power. Power is the property of agency, as in the conflictual
perspective, but at the same time is inseparable from the constitution of sub-
ject positions. From the perspective of situated agents, power to, or local
empowerment, is also inseparable from domination. However, if power is
everywhere and so is empowerment; if constraint also means choice and
power to; if power over is a precondition for power to; then how do we prac-
tice critique? It is not that this kind of complex theorization precludes find-
ing such criteria: it makes it much more complex. If every action is both fa-
cilitative and dominates, if every power over is also power to, then there is
no straightforward right and wrong. Social life becomes a complex set of
shades of gray, without final emancipation. Yet, everything is not the same,
there are normative differences between forms of subjectification and there
are local emancipations. Currently it is these types of questions, created by
the convergence of the three language games of power, which are emerging
as key issues within contemporary power debates in social and political the-
ory.
References
Allen, A., 1999. The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarity.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Allen, A., 2008a. The politics of ourselves: power, autonomy and gender in critical
theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Allen, A., 2008b. Rationalizing oppression. Journal of Power, 1(1), 51-65.
Allen, A., 2010. Recognizing domination: recognition and power in Honneth’s critical
theory. Journal of Power, 3(1), 21-32.
Alexander, J., 2009. The democratic struggle for power: the 2008 Presidential cam-
paign in the USA. Journal of Power, 2(1), 65-88.
Alexander, J., 2010. The performance of politics: Obama’s victory and the democratic
struggle for power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Arendt, H., 1970. On violence. London: Penguin.
Arendt, H., 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M. S., 1962. Two faces of power. American Political Science
Review. 56(4), 947-52.
Ballah, R. N., 1967. Civil religion in America. Daedelus, 96(1), 1-21.
Barnes, B., 1988. The nature of power. Cambridge: Polity.
Berendtson E., 2010. Charles E. Merriam as a theorist of power. Paper presented at
the interim workshop of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Power (RC
36), Soeteerbeck, the Netherlands, April 15th–18th.
Barry, B., 2002. Capitalists rule ok? Some puzzles about power. Politics, Philosophy
and Economics, 1(2), 155-84
Bourdieu, P., 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
52
Butler, J., 1997. The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Clegg, S. R., 1989. Frameworks of power. London: Sage.
Cruikshank. B., 1999. The will to empower: democratic citizens and other subjects.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Dahl, R., 1957. The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2, 201-15.
Dahl, R., 1961. Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press.
Dahl, R., 1968. Power. In: D. L. Sills, ed. International Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences, vol.12. New York: Free Press.
Dean, M., 1999. Governmentality: power and rule in modern society. London:
Sage.
Dean, M., 2007. Governing societies: political perspectives on domestic and interna-
tional rule. Maiden Head, Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
Dean, M., 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd edition.
London: Sage.
Derrida J., 1974. Of gramatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J., 1981. Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J., 1982. Margins of philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Donzelot, J., 2008. Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence. Economy and Society,
37(1), 115-34.
Dowding, K., 1991. Rational choice and political power. Aldershot: Edward Elgar
Dowding, K., 1996. Power (Concepts in Social Thought). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Dowding, K., 2003. Resources, power and systematic luck: a response to Barry. Poli-
tics Philosophy and Economics, 2(3), 305-22.
Elias, N., 2008. Power and Civilization. Journal of Power, 1(2), 135-142.
Flyvbjerg, B., 2001. Making social science matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Flyvbjerg, B., 1999. Rationality and power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M., 1972. The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, M., 1975. I Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my
brother…a case of parricide in the 19th century. Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press.
Foucault, M., 1977. Discipline and punish. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M., 1988. Madness and civilization. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M., 1994a. The order of things. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M., 1994b. The birth of the clinic. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M., 1997a. The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom. In: P.
Rabinow, ed. Essential works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, volume 1: ethics, subjec-
tivity and truth. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M., 1997b. On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress. In:
P. Rabinow, ed. Essential works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, volume 1: ethics, sub-
jectivity and truth. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M., 1998. The history of sexuality volume one: the will to knowledge. Lon-
don: Penguin.

Social and Political Power
53
Foucault, M., 2000a. Truth and power. In: J. D. Faubion, ed. Essential works of Mi-
chel Foucault 1954 – 1984, Volume 3: power. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M., 2000b. Omnes et singulatim: toward a critique of political reason. In: J.
D. Faubion, ed. Essential works of Michel Foucault 1954 – 1984, volume 3:
power. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M., 2000c. The subject and power. In: J. D. Faubion, ed. Essential works of
Michel Foucault 1954 – 1984, volume 3: power. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, M., 2007. Security, territory, population: lectures at the College De France,
1977-1978. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Foucault, M., 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the College De France, 1978-
1979. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Foucault M., 2010. The government of self and others: lectures at the Collége de
France 1982-1983. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Gallie, W. B., 1956. Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 56, 167-98.
Gaventa J. 1980. Power and powerlessness: quiescence and rebellion in an Appala-
chian valley. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gaventa J., 2010. Powercube: understanding power for social change. Institute of De-
velopment Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Online resource: http://www.
powercube.net
Geertz C., 1983. Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
Geras, N., 1987. Post-Marxism? New Left Review, 163, 40-82.
Giddens A., 1979. Central problems in social theory. London: Macmillan.
Giddens A., 1968. ‘Power’ in the recent writings of Talcott Parsons. Sociology, 2,
257-72.
Giddens A., 1984. The Constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity.
Gordon, C., 1980. Afterword. In: C. Gordon, ed. Power/knowledge: selected inter-
views and other writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon.
Gordon, R., 2006. Power, knowledge and domination. Copenhagen: Copenhagen
Business School Press.
Gramsci, A., 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. Quinton Hoare and G. N.
Smith, eds.. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Habermas, J., 1983. The theory of communicative action: reason and society, vol.1.
Cambridge Polity Press.
Habermas, J., 1989. The philosophical discourse of modernity: twelve lectures. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haugaard, M., 1997. The constitution of power. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Haugaard, M., 2002. Power: a reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Haugaard, M., 2003. Reflections on seven ways of creating power. European Journal
of Social Theory, 6(1), 87-113.
Haugaard M., 2008. Sociological Lukes versus moral Lukes: reflections upon the sec-
ond edition of Power: A Radical View by Steven Lukes. Journal of Power, 1(1),
99-106.
Haugaard, M., 2010. Democracy, political power and accountability. Social Research,
77(4), 1049-1075.

Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
54
Haugaard, M., 2012a. Power and truth. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), 73-
92.
Haugaard, M., 2012b. Rethinking the four dimensions of power. Journal of Political
Power 5(1), 35-54.
Haugaard, M. and Cooke, M., 2010. Power and critical theory: editorial. Journal of
Power, 3(1), 1-5.
Hayward, C., 2000. De-facing power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hayward, C., 2009. Power and identity: an essay on Amy Allen’s politics of our-
selves. Journal of Power, 2(1), 173-190.
Hayward, C. and Lukes, S., 2008. Nobody to shoot? Power, Structure and agency: a
dialogue. Journal of Power, 1(1), 5-20.
Hobbes, T., 1996 [1651]. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honneth, A., 1995. The struggle for recognition. Cambridge: Polity.
Honneth, A., 2007. Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory. Cam-
bridge: Polity.
Honneth, A., Allen, A. and Cooke, M., 2010. A conversation between Axel Honneth,
Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfut am Main, 12 April 2010. Journal of
Power, 3(2), 153-170.
Howarth, D., Norval, A. and Stavrakakis, Y., 2000. Discourse theory and political
analysis. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hunter, F., 1953. Community power structure. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press.
Laclau, E., 1990. New reflections on the revolution of our time. London: Verso
Laclau, E., 1996. Emancipations. London: Verso.
Laclau, E., 2005. Populism: what’s in a name? In: F. Panizza, ed. Populism and the
mirror of democracy. Verso: London.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., 1987. Post-Marxism without apologies. New Left Review,
166: 79-106.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., 2001. Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical
democratic politics. 2nd edition. London: Verso.
Lemm, V., 2010. Critical theory and affirmative biopolitics: Nietzsche and the domi-
nation of nature in Adorno/Horkheimer. Journal of Power, 3(1), 75-95.
Lukes, S., 1973. Emile Durkheim: his life and work. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Lukes, S., 1974. Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan.
Lukes, S., 2005. Power: a radical view. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lukes, S., 2008. Moral relativism. London: Profile Books.
Macmillan, A., 2009. Foucault and the examination: a reading of ‘Truth and Juridical
Forms’. Journal of Political Power 2(1), 155-72.
McNay, L., 2009. Self as enterprise: dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s
‘The Birth of Biopolitics’. Theory, Culture and Society 26(6), 55-77.
Mik-Meyer, N., 2010. An illness of one’s own: power and the negotiation of identity
among social workers, doctors and patients without a bio-medical diagnosis.
Journal of Power 3(2), 171-87.
Miller, J., 1993. The passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Anchor Books, Double-
day.

Social and Political Power
55
Miller, P. and Rose, N., 2008. Governing the present. Cambridge: Polity.
Mills, C. W., 1956. The power elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morriss, P., 2002. Power: a philosophical analysis. 2nd edition. Manchester Univer-
sity Press: Manchester.
Morriss, P., 2006. Steven Lukes on the concept of power: Review of Lukes’ 2nd edi-
tion. Political Studies Review, 4(2), 124-135.
Morriss, P., 2009. Power and liberalism. In: S. Clegg and M. Haugaard, eds. The Sage
handbook of power. London: Sage.
Mouffe, C., 2000. The democratic paradox. London: Verso.
Mouffe, C., 2005. On the political. London and New York: Routledge.
Newman, S., 2010a. The politics of postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Newman, S., 2010b. Postanarchism and power. Journal of Power, 3(2), 259-74.
Parsons, T., 1963. On the concept of political power. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 107(3), 232-62.
Rorty, R., 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Rose, N., 1999. Powers of freedom: reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ryan, K., 2007. Social exclusion and the politics of order. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Saar, M., 2010. Power and critique. Journal of Power, 3(1), 7-20.
Saussure, F., 1983. Course in general linguistics. London: Duckworth.
Searle, J., 1995. The construction of social reality. London: Penguin Books.
Searle, J., 2007. Freedom and neurobiology: reflections on free will, language and
political power. New York: Columbia University Press.
Spinoza, B., 2002 [1677]. Political Treatise. In: M.L. Morgan, ed. Complete works.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Torfing, J., 1999. New theories of discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Valverde, M., 1996. ‘Despotism’ and ethical governance. Economy and Society,
25(3): 357-72,
van Munster, R., 2010. Beyond liberal exceptionalism: or, how not to be governed
thus. Journal of Power, 3(1), 127-34.
Weber, M., 1978. From Max Weber: essays in Sociology. In: H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills, eds. London: Routledge.

Chapter 3
Power in political anthropology1
John Gledhill
In 1989, the late Eric Wolf devoted his Distinguished Lecture to the 88th
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association to “the prob-
lem of power and the issues it poses for anthropology” (Wolf 2001: 383).
Responding to what he described, in the wake of the epistemological and
theoretical auto-critiques of the 1980s, as a continual tendency for anthro-
pologists to “slay paradigms, only to see them return to life, as if discovered
for the first time” (ibid: 386), Wolf argued that anthropologists had not
made the most of what they had learned about power in the past and been
timid in asking new questions. Power, Wolf suggested, was a term that made
us uncomfortable because it was ‘loaded and polymorphous’, conflating a
multitude of meanings in a way that suggested some inner essence common
to a range of phenomena and conjured up ‘monstrous images’ such as the
Hobbesian Leviathan. Proposing that we overcome the latter difficulty by
distinguishing four different ‘modes of power’, Wolf saw the last of these,
which he termed ‘structural power’, as a way of bridging his own longstand-
ing commitment to a Marxist perspective with the post-structuralist perspec-
tives that were increasingly dominant in anthropology by the end of the
1980s, especially through the pervasive impact of the work of Michel Fou-
cault.
Although many in Wolf’s audience may not have followed up on his
suggestion to revisit earlier contributions, such as Richard Adams’s highly
original monograph on Guatemala, Crucifixion by Power (Adams 1970), the
lecture did identify one of the main lines of development in terms of what
political anthropology has had to say about ‘power’ in the last two decades.
Debate has gravitated around a continuing critical engagement with Marx
and Marxism, particularly of the Gramscian variety, and with the work of
Foucault, although other inspirations have played significant roles, not least
in attempting to move beyond the limitations perceived in these frameworks,
as I show in more detail later. Theoretically speaking, the anthropological
1 First published in Journal of Power [now Journal of Political Power], vol. 2(1): 9-34.

John Gledhill
58
study of power and power relations has therefore sought much of its inspira-
tion beyond the discipline (and even beyond the social sciences), forming
part of a broader intellectual movement that might be characterised as a re-
flection on the nature and contradictions of ‘modernity’.
The anthropological contribution has, however, been more than simply an
echo of broader intellectual trends in Europe and North America, although our
openness to other ideas, methodologies and disciplines refutes images of the
discipline as self-enclosed. Although anthropologists emphasise that we always
bring our ethnographic skills to the party of more general debates, especially
when invoking the work of philosophers, the subject’s ability to make critical
interventions also rests squarely on its comparative perspective and questioning
of ethnocentrism and intellectual postures that assume too much about the abil-
ity of North Atlantic power to determine global scenarios, past and future.
Nevertheless, the study of power has also proved unsettling for anthropological
paradigms themselves. Critiques that highlighted past bracketing out of global
(colonial and capitalist) power relations were not wholly lacking in foundation.
A focus on power has also proved unsettling of the role that ‘culture’ plays in
many types of anthropological analysis. As Kurtz (1996) and Crehan (2002)
have pointed out in critiquing many anthropological appropriations of Gramsci,
orthodox thinking about ‘culture’ as a system of ideas too often prevails when
it should have been more firmly unsettled by perspectives that ask how ‘cul-
ture’ is produced through action2.
Beyond such problems of undesirable forms of paradigm resilience, the
study of power and power relations by anthropologists raises methodological
issues about how different scales of analysis can be integrated and it also
raises political issues. Although many of the latter transcend disciplinary
boundaries and concern the contemporary role of intellectuals in general, the
kind of work that many anthropologists do, often outside their countries of
nationality, and sometimes with people living in precarious social situations
in transnational as well as national spaces, raises ethical as well as theoreti-
cal, epistemological and methodological questions that have become in-
creasingly delicate in an age in which ‘the war against terror’ is used to jus-
tify patterns of intervention by North Atlantic powers that seem inconsistent
with their expressed commitment to universal human rights and respect for
cultural difference. Peoples stigmatised as ‘marginal’ or ‘backward’, often
on racial grounds, in modernising state projects have always figured promi-
nently in anthropological research. Yet anthropologists have found them-
selves studying situations of extreme and sometimes genocidal violence in
2 This issue of how to best conceptualise culture relates to an idealism/materialism dichot-
omy, which is also in evidence when it comes to the concept of power, and is discussed be-
low under ‘theoretical trends’ (see also note ix below).

Power in political anthropology
59
many parts of the world in recent decades, in once peaceful former colonies
such as Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, and in countries where indigenous peo-
ple face an internal colonial situation, such as Guatemala and Peru. The
harsh conditions often faced by international migrant and refugee popula-
tions even in Northern democracies have highlighted the limitations of mod-
els of human wellbeing premised on citizenship rights in territorial states.
This, along with the frequency of ‘states of exception’ in which the most ba-
sic of human rights are suspended, has fostered anthropological interest in
conceptual frameworks that seek to account for such anomalies, notably the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s attempt to ‘complete’ Foucault’s
theory of governmentality by considering the relegation to the status of ‘bare
life’ of those groups to whom the sovereign state denies the protection and
rights of citizenship3 (1998, 2005). Many other anthropologists would share
Aihwa Ong’s dissatisfaction with the simplicity of Agamben’s dichotomy as
an analytical tool for understanding the possibilities of constructing more
humane worlds in spaces of suffering and exclusion in which the Northern
human rights framework may not be the only basis for making moral claims
(Ong 2006: 23). Yet this interest in the awesome power behind claims to
sovereignty underlines the way current anthropological scholarship is now
strongly engaged with fundamental global social problems, including those
created by neoliberal capitalism within the North itself. Together with an ac-
companying wave of new anthropological theorising about the state and, in
response to the global role of NGOs, the ‘state effects’ that may be produced
by other kinds of organisations (Trouillot 2001), this engagement suggests
that the increasing centrality of the study of power in anthropology has
proved productive.
Nevertheless, the uncomfortable relationship between North American an-
thropological conceptions of ‘culture’ and a focus on power may help us to un-
derstand why one senior North American anthropologist ushered in the 1990s
with an appeal to anthropologists to pay more attention to the latter topic, and
devoted the remainder of his distinguished career to furthering that project
(Wolf 1999), while another would shortly deliver a striking polemic against the
moves that had already been made in this area.4 In a characteristically witty as-
3 Agamben’s theory of sovereignty pivots around the concept of ‘exception’, which is the
power to demarcate the threshold between inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, cul-
ture and nature, zoē and bios. Agamben argues that the process of modern state formation
moves ‘bare life’ – life that can be ‘killed but not sacrificed’ – from the margins of political
order so that it ‘gradually begins to coincide with the political realm’ itself (1998: 9), with
the result that vulnerability to sovereign violence becomes the general condition character-
ising political modernity.
4 The differences between Wolf and Sahlins reflect differences in their approach to theorising
culture. Although Crehan (2002: 187) criticises Wolf’s final monograph on power and ide-
ology for opting, at the end of the day, for an ‘over-coherent’ concept of culture, Wolf had

John Gledhill
60
sault, now in its fourth printed edition, but originally given as an after-dinner
speech at the 1993 decennial conference of the UK Association of Social An-
thropologists, Marshall Sahlins (2002: 20) decried what he termed “the current
Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power”, arguing that it
produced a tendency for all ‘culture’ to be seen as an effect of power relations
and to be ‘explained’ in terms of ‘domination and resistance’. In consequence,
Sahlins suggested, anthropologists were in danger of becoming ‘the working
classes of the Cultural Studies movement’, empirical under-labourers in a
world in which high theory could best be left to ‘English Professors’ (ibid: 77).
Power had become anthropology’s ‘new functionalism’ (ibid: 13), an explana-
tion for everything that ended up explaining very little.
Yet this anthropological obsession with ‘power’ posed highly significant
questions about ‘culture’. For example, it highlighted the way that ‘culture’
becomes objectified under modern conditions, as a consequence of efforts to
construct nations and of the tendency of colonial regimes to bureaucratize
and reify ‘ethnic’ groups. People not only become conscious that they ‘have’
(and should ‘have’) cultures, but use that understanding to make political
claims to recognition, sometimes against the grain of modern states’ efforts
to inculcate their own (highly constructed) models of shared ‘national cul-
ture’. Continuing conflicts around the latter often enchant all the contesting
actors, so that dissidents also implicitly buy into aspects of the previously
constructed model that they are contesting, as Navaro-Yashin (2002) dem-
onstrates in her analysis of conflict between advocates of a ‘secular’ West-
ernised state and Islamists in Turkey. It therefore seems necessary to begin
by taking a more open-minded look at what the alleged obsession has
brought to anthropology in general and political anthropology in particular.
Even if Sahlins is right that the ‘focus on power’ was taken too far or even
in directions that justify a ridicule echoed by other anthropologists such as
Brown (1996), many anthropologists have accepted the value of this particu-
lar ‘obsession’ taking a more central place in the field. The review that fol-
lows will take us beyond the ‘domination and resistance’ paradigm, towards
innovations in thinking about ‘modern’ forms of power and ‘the state’ and in
unthinking certain Eurocentric assumptions in these areas of enquiry that
have long dominated not simply anthropology but the rest of the social sci-
ences. These are very much ongoing projects within the discipline today,
and they are not projects restricted to the English-speaking anthropological
world, although that will be the principal focus of the survey that follows. I
will try to show that even if anthropologists did not necessarily initiate the
always argued against the assumption that all members of a ‘society’ share a common cul-
ture and exhibit behaviour that is ‘programmed’ by this overarching structure of meanings,
and for a historically generated account of how ‘culture’ is produced. Sahlins, in contrast,
always leaned towards a more structural and ‘totalising’ vision of culture(s).

Power in political anthropology
61
key conceptual starting-points that shaped the field of enquiry that they
joined, they have often produced work that takes debate forward in ways
that would be inconceivable without their contributions.
Political anthropology since the 1970s
As Joan Vincent (2002: 2) points out in her introduction to a recent reader in
political anthropology, the sub-field was a ‘late specialization’ within the
evolving discipline. It achieved a high degree of coherence between 1940 and
1960, as a generation of scholars established a canon and set out a pro-
gramme. Although the end of this period saw calls for new approaches, rang-
ing from the need to pay more attention to symbolism to an embrace of sys-
tems theory, the waning of formal colonial rule and US defeat in the Vietnam
War produced an ‘explosion’ of demands for anthropologists to “break away
from ‘business as usual’ (i.e. developing the canon) in order to confront the
issues of the objective world of national liberation movements, imperialism
and colonialism, communism and growing global inequalities” (Vincent
2002: 2-3). In the deconstruction of the old canon, anthropologists read
widely outside their academic field, and examined their past practices, not
simply in relation to the colonial era, but under the strong critical pressures
exerted by Western feminism, whose impact was, Vincent suggests, crucial in
triggering a revitalisation of anthropology’s “concern with power and power-
lessness”.
Whatever the pitfalls of ‘slaying paradigms’, the 1970s marked a water-
shed in the subfield’s development that responded to fundamental changes
in the world, and as I have already emphasised, the new foci of attention in
anthropological studies of power since then have reflected continuing en-
gagement with changing global scenarios. Even those anthropologists who
have, again in Vincent’s words, ‘revisited’ classic cases in the original
canon of political anthropology, such as Evans Pritchard’s work on the Nuer
(Hutchinson 1996), have done so in a context transformed by postcolonial
experience, and with new theoretical frameworks that no longer ‘bracket’
the national state and the translocal and transnational processes associated
with war, money and displacement. As Jonathan Spencer (1997: 6) points
out, this was not true of many important works in the earlier canon: not only
did Barth’s Political leadership among Swat Pathans (1959) “barely ac-
knowledge the existence of the new state of Pakistan”, but it also completely
failed to mention that, just a few years before Barth did his fieldwork, “the
same area had been swept by a radical non-violent Islamic nationalist
movement ... which ... transformed the world of agonistic feuding found in

John Gledhill
62
Barth’s analysis”.5 Yet despite the best efforts of its practitioners to project a
broader and more up-to-date image of the discipline, and to emphasise that
at least some of the work of earlier generations did not entirely ignore issues
such as the role of states, capitalist transformation, migration and urbanisa-
tion, anthropology continues to be associated, in the minds of many academ-
ics as well as the public, with the study of ‘small-scale’, ‘exotic’ societies.
Although it would be possible to spend pages discussing the best way of
characterising contemporary groups that would still appear to fit this descrip-
tion, it is important to acknowledge that these traditional objects of anthropo-
logical analysis remain significant both as ‘laboratories’ for studying forms
of cultural alterity that help us to relativise occidental ways of understanding
what it means to be human, and also as one of the bases for more practical
anthropological engagements with national and transnational political fields,
such as campaigns for indigenous rights and advocacy of the interests of
groups threatened by the predatory depredations of transnational corpora-
tions. This is not to say that anthropologists all stand on the same side of the
political divides created by the rise of indigenous rights claims, or even ac-
cept the coherence of the concept of ‘the indigenous’ (Kuper 2003). It is,
however, to recognise another way in which ‘culture’ becomes politicised –
as multiculturalism – under modern conditions and another respect in which
processes of ‘modern government’ intrude on even the most classical of an-
thropological concerns.
In this context, work on ‘indigenous and colonised peoples’ inevitably
became caught up in broader debates about ‘domination and resistance’ and
attempts to ‘diagnose’ modern forms of power (Abu-Lughod 1990). Impor-
tant anthropological contributions to debates about the analytical significance
of concepts of ‘hegemony’, ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’ include the work of
Keesing (1992), whose writings about Melanesia were antagonistic to the en-
thusiasm for ‘radical alterity’ manifest in the work of many other scholars in
that region (Keesing 1994) and, in a context of proletarianisation and urbani-
sation, backed by extensive historical research, the writings of the Comaroffs
on the Twsana of Southern Africa (Comaroff 1985, Comaroff and Comaroff
1991). A large body of work through the 1980s and 1990s was focused on at-
tempts to link the distinctive ‘life-worlds’6 of groups that possessed forms of
5 The historical anthropological work that Spencer cites here is a PhD thesis by Mukulika
Banerjee, published as Banerjee (2000.) Her more recent research has included studies of
peasant perceptions of democracy in India.
6 The concept of life-world is central to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Alfred
Schutz, and figures prominently in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who describes it as an un-
thematised and symbolically structured ‘background consensus’, by which he means the
shared competencies and attitudes that constitutes the ‘horizon for speech situations and the
source of interpretations’ (1996: 22). In Chapter 3 of this Volume, Clegg uses this concept
to theorise organizations which, he explains, are ‘collective’ life-worlds ‘in which traces of

Power in political anthropology
63
social organisation distinct from those of the ‘dominant’ national societies of
which they formed part to the wider processes of colonialism, national state-
formation and transformations in capitalism. Critique upon critique was
mounted against any residual tendency to treat local populations as ‘bounded
cultures’. In arguing for the necessity of incorporating translocal and transna-
tional processes into any analysis of local configurations of social relations
and cultural forms, critics emphasised the centrality of power relations in
shaping such configurations.7
These developments did not inhibit anthropologists from continuing to
study the micro-politics of the communities in which they conducted their
fieldwork, not least because these were clearly relevant to understanding such
issues as enrolment in new kinds of religious organisations, such as Pentecos-
talist churches or ‘Fundamentalist’ variants of Islam, the impact of public
education systems, and the social effects of migrant work, but they did make
it less likely that they would do so without reference to the larger historical
and contemporary context. Past interests in such issues of the local ‘politics’
of age and gender, feuding and warfare did not disappear from the agenda,
and valuable new contributions appeared in the 1990s, such as Harrison
(1993), but these were increasingly related to historical transformations. Even
indigenous groups such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela, previ-
ously treated as a laboratory for studying ‘our contemporary ancestors’ by
anthropologists such as Napoleon Chagnon (1968), became the objects of
very different styles of historicised analysis at the hands of anthropologists
such as Alcida Ramos (1998) and Brian Ferguson (1999).
By the 1980s, however, anthropologists had long been engaged in the
study of very different kinds of societies, both rural and urban, and more and
more anthropological work was also being done within Europe and the
United States. Even the burgeoning anthropological interest in ‘globalisation’
and ‘transnationalism’ that marked the mid-1980s through the 1990s was not
entirely novel, although it was often accompanied by methodological cri-
tiques of single-site ethnographies and accompanied by arguments of broad
theoretical import such as those that examined the role of national states in a
world of ever greater movement and the continued viability of categories
such as ‘peasant societies’ (Basch, Glick-Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994,
Kearney 1996). In the 1960s and 1970s, established anthropological research
on ‘peasant societies’ and efforts to grapple with de-colonisation and nation-
state-building produced major contributions to topics such as peasant insur-
gency and revolution, such as Wolf’s classic Peasant Wars of the Twentieth
the past are vested, recur, shift, and take on new meanings’. In Chapter 7 Cerny also uses
the concept of life-world in his discussion of ‘smart power’.
7 For a collection that brings together much of this critical re-evaluation, see Gupta and Fer-
guson, eds., 1997.

John Gledhill
64
Century (1969). Yet anthropology, particularly in the United States, was soon
to be influenced by what Gutmann (2002: 114) terms a climate of ‘dimin-
ished expectations’ provoked by Reaganism’s dashing of the exaggerated
hopes for radical social change embodied in the anti-war and civil rights
movements, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In this new
context, the focus readily shifted towards a concentration on the micro-
politics of everyday resistance as embodied in the work of James Scott (1985,
1990) and various strands of post-structuralist thought, of which Foucault’s
concept of power as ‘productive’ rather than repressive was the most influen-
tial.
In addition to having obvious ideological attractions by permitting a
positive account of the continuing ‘struggles’ of ‘subalterns’ against all forms
of ‘power’ in a world in which grand narratives of social revolution no longer
seemed viable, resistance theories seemed to offer anthropologists the possi-
bility of applying the same theoretical tools to a broad range of objects of
ethnographic enquiry: the paradigm seemed relevant to subjects as diverse as
indigenous peoples, small farmers and landless rural labourers, urban work-
ing classes and the entire mass of ‘downtrodden’ people amongst whom an-
thropologists conducted ethnography at home and abroad, whilst also appli-
cable in the expanding field of anthropological studies of gender and sexual-
ity. It was also extensible to understanding the internal politics of organisa-
tions and institutions in which even less economically disadvantaged actors
could be seen as contesting as well as maintaining power relations in one way
or another. Indeed, the Foucauldian perspective underpinned whole new ar-
eas of anthropological attention to institutions as sites of disciplinary power
over society and persons, a development that was to prove both productive of
new insights and at the same time limiting in other respects, as I will show
later. One of the ways in which both uses and critiques of Foucauldian ideas
proved productive was in enlarging the horizons of anthropological analysis
of modern state power, and not simply towards considering the role of insti-
tutions beyond government in the narrow sense in forging hegemony – a per-
spective also associated with Gramsci’s “extended concept of the state”
(Bucci-Glucksman 1978).
There was, however, another negative side to anthropology’s growing
tendency to see power as ‘ubiquitous’ distinct from that on which Sahlins’s
critique centred. As Spencer (1997: 3) points out, it deflected interest from
‘politics’ in an institutional sense that would include not merely the govern-
ment apparatus, but also political parties and elections. Furthermore an obvi-
ous problem with dissolving everything into ‘politics’ is that people them-
selves often demarcate ‘politics’ as a particular domain. People in the former
colonies have had a vast array of occidental institutional forms (including
parliaments and electoral politics) thrust upon them. The problem is, as

Power in political anthropology
65
Spencer goes on to demonstrate from his own ethnographic work in South
Asia, that the enthusiastic embrace of mass politics by the citizens of post-
colonial states was refracted through local cultural and social concerns that
need to be understood in order to understand how, in addition to being a do-
main of instrumental action, the institutional structure of post-colonial poli-
tics also became a site of “intense moral evaluation, the articulation of collec-
tive images of nation and community, and sometimes plain old public enter-
tainment” (Spencer 1997: 9). Reinterpreted in terms of different political tra-
ditions, such as Buddhist kingship, institutional politics moved in very differ-
ent directions from those imaginable to occidental political theorists, and be-
came entangled in practices and organisations that appeared to have no place
in the political field at all from a Western standpoint. Yet it does not seem
enough to ‘deconstruct’ concepts that originated elsewhere because of their
lack of historical rootedness outside Euro-America, since, as Spencer points
out, that is to assume their transparency, coherence and truth value in their
region of origin (Spencer 1997: 14-15). This is where post-structuralist ap-
proaches to power might prove valuable for studying the ‘political’ as a spe-
cific domain. It is interesting, however, that whilst Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus8, originally, Vincent (2002: 4) reminds us, part of the Kantian En-
lightenment package, has been ubiquitous in the modern literature of political
anthropology, his writings on a topic that Spencer discusses at length, politi-
cal representation, has not (Gledhill 2000).
In broad terms, then, we might say that the anthropological approach to
power since the 1970s has swept out beyond the original sub-field defined as
political anthropology, whose weakness was, as Spencer notes, a tendency, in
Britain at least, to lapse into an instrumentalism that steered well clear of
‘culture’ by looking for general principles that would apply to political proc-
ess world-wide (Spencer 1997: 4-5).9 The broadening of vision has had many
8 Alem S. Kebede makes the point that the concept of habitus has an important place in the
history of Western thought, and is found in the work of Aristotle and the Scholastics, as
well modern thinkers such as Durkheim and Mauss. Bourdieu however put his own distinc-
tive stamp on the concept by developing it as part of his relational sociology, so that it is
used to address the problem of subject-object dualism. As a disposition that results from the
embodiment of social structures, habitus is (re-) enacted through social practice, though not
necessarily in the form of repetition, because habitus has what Kebede describes as ‘genera-
tive properties’, enabling individuals to improvise, and possibly even to ‘challenge the fun-
damental codes of existing symbolic power’ (2011: 302-3).
9 This generalization would be less valid for the work of Victor Turner, whose crossing the
Atlantic to spend the latter part of his career in the United States made a significant contri-
bution to reducing the schism between British ‘social’ and US ‘cultural’ anthropology, and
as Spencer notes, the writings of Geertz maintained a connection between studies of ‘cul-
ture’ and ‘politics’ in the United States. One might also argue that the parallels between US
and UK work amongst the first generation of ‘political anthropologists’ reflected a desire
by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to promote dialogue with the political science of

John Gledhill
66
positive consequences in the longer term. One is that anthropologists have
become better equipped to tackle the life-worlds and dilemmas of the full
range of contemporary political actors, ranging from elites (Marcus, ed.,
1983, Shore and Nugent, eds., 2002), through new middle classes in forma-
tion (Sen and Stivens, eds., 1998, Ong 1999) and North Atlantic working
classes facing ‘downsizing’ and deindustrialization (Nash 1989), to the most
marginalized victims of what anthropologist and medical practitioner Paul
Farmer (2003) termed the ‘structural violence’ of “a global war against the
poor”. Another is that we have become better equipped not only to think
about the nature of ‘states’ in a variety of national and cultural settings, and
in relation to transnational processes, but also to navigate in the troubled wa-
ters of a world of so-called ‘failed states’ and what Nikolas Rose (1999)
terms ‘government at a distance’, enacted through neoliberal ‘state reforms’
and NGOisation. In the next section I explore these developments further in
terms of cumulative shifts in theoretical perspectives since the 1980s.
Theoretical trends
I begin with some further remarks on the evolution of anthropologies of the
state, which will allow me to relate the declining enthusiasm of anthropolo-
gists for certain approaches to ‘resistance’ to their increasing interests in ex-
ploring ‘modern’ forms of power. Anthropology of the state before the 1980s
had often been something of an archaeology of non-Western institutional
forms bounced off uncritical adoption of a Weberian account of what ‘mod-
ern states’ should be like (Gledhill 2000). Nevertheless, this was a far from
useless undertaking, given that such work did reveal continuing differences
between the cultural logics of state forms and citizens’ relationships with ‘the
state’ in the West and other parts of the world. Kapferer’s (1988) comparison
between Sri Lanka’s ‘hierarchic’ state logic and the ‘egalitarian’ logic of rela-
tions between people and state in Australia demonstrated the insights that
may be obtained by an emphasis on the cultural substance of power relations
and differing cultural conceptions of power itself. Yet there are other takes on
‘the state’ which have appealed to anthropologists because they have allowed
their day. An interest in the relationships between ritual and power relations was, however,
always significant in the work of the Manchester school, and the work of scholars such as
Gluckman, Turner and Mitchell became an obligatory point of reference, albeit often also
of critique, in new works on political ritual in the 1980s (see, for example, Cannadine and
Price, eds., 1987, Kertzer 1988). The theme of political ritual was also taken up by scholars
working on the North itself (Abélès 1988) and progressively moved away from functional-
ist perspectives as it was incorporated into the debates about hegemony and rethinking the
anthropology of the state.

Power in political anthropology
67
them to make use of their ‘local knowledge’ and ability to study relationships
between actors in localities and state agents and institutions ‘from the bottom
up’.
A particularly influential work that drew on the Marxist perspectives in-
spiring a classic deconstruction of the reification of the state by Philip
Abrams (1988) and the path-breaking work on English state formation of
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985), but also reflected the influence of
James Scott, who contributed an essay to it, is the collection edited by histo-
rian Gilbert Joseph and anthropologist Daniel Nugent, Everyday forms of
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
(1994). This landmark volume challenged the image of the Mexican post-
revolutionary state as a coherent, pyramidally organised Leviathan. Empha-
sising the way differing regional configurations of power involving different
alignments of social forces in the ‘many Mexicos’ created by the European
colonisation of a complex geographical and ethnic landscape led to a negotia-
tion of the way postrevolutionary rule was enacted on the ground, it set the
pattern for a range of subsequent contributions emphasising the need to ‘de-
center the regime’ (Rubin 1996, Pansters 1997). Many anthropologists pur-
sued this fruitful combination of historical and ethnographic research to ex-
amine the way that analyses at a regional scale could illuminate the vicissi-
tudes of attempts to build stronger national states in Latin America during the
1990s. In addition to other important contributions from Mexicanists such as
Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992), an especially noteworthy example from Peru
that ran against the grain of the assumption that ‘hegemonising’ central gov-
ernments are inevitably ‘resisted’ by the provinces is David Nugent’s account
of how the Indian and mestizo citizens of the marginal region of Chachapoyas
demanded that ‘the state’ enter their lives, not simply to provide them with
much needed ‘modernity’ in the form of roads and schools, but to free them
from the arbitrary rule of an entrenched white oligarchy (Nugent 1997).
Yet if the terms ‘domination’, ‘resistance’ and ‘hegemony’ had become
everyday terms of reference in political anthropology by the 1990s, there was
less of a consensus over the meaning that should be ascribed to these con-
cepts, as a strong attack by William Roseberry on James Scott’s interpreta-
tion of Gramscian hegemony in Joseph and Nugent’s volume indicated10
(Roseberry 1994). The start of this decade also brought Foucauldian perspec-
tives into the debates in ways that were not simple replications of Foucault’s
own ideas. In an article that focused on critical dissection of the weaknesses
of James Scott’s work, but also noted that the same basic problem applied to
10 Roseberry argues that ‘What hegemony constructs…is not a shared ideology but a common
material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon so-
cial orders characterised by domination’ (1994: 361).

John Gledhill
68
the theoretical position of the Comaroffs, political scientist Timothy Mitchell
launched a strong attack on the way a “single, master metaphor: the distinc-
tion between persuading and coercing” dominated studies of power and resis-
tance across all the social science disciplines (Mitchell 1990: 545).
By highlighting the way that this entire corpus expresses a dualism be-
tween power operating at the level of ideas, and power as a material force co-
ercing the body, Mitchell not only argues, following Foucault, that it is
‘modern forms of power’ that create ‘the autonomous subject’ that Scott’s
model of resistance unreflectively reproduces, but he also contends, moving
beyond Foucault’s perspective to a stronger focus on the materiality of
power, that these new forms of domination create the illusion of a world “di-
vided from the beginning into two neatly opposed realms, a material order on
the one hand and a separate sphere of meaning and culture on the other”
(Mitchell 1990: 546). By appearing to stand outside local social practices as
external ‘programs to govern life’, modern schooling, organised religion, the
expertise of technocrats, and all the panoply of modern government, includ-
ing ‘the state’ and ‘the law’, generate the effects of ‘externality’, ‘fixity’ and
‘permanence’ that mask the fact that they are ultimately “nothing more than
particular social practices” (Mitchell 1990: 572).
This focus on modern forms of power as practices has become central in
much subsequent anthropological work on ‘the state’, not least because prac-
tices and the ways state agents and state subjects interact around them are
susceptible to ethnographic observation. Furthermore, as a collection of es-
says edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004) has demonstrated, to the
extent that anthropologists often study people who live at the ‘margin’ of the
state’s effective sovereignty, not simply in a geographical sense, but also be-
cause of the effects of exclusions from ‘normal’ citizenship or ‘exceptional’
situations of violence and impunity, an analysis of how state practices are ex-
perienced in such ‘marginal’ contexts and how the people who inhabit them
strive to ‘engage’ the state can be especially revealing. For some, practices
are also a means of rebuilding links to Marxist as well as Foucauldian per-
spectives. Since state practices operate in the materiality of everyday social
life, in taking up Mitchell’s critique, Navaro-Yashin (2002: 157) argues for
the need to go beyond positions that merely seek to deconstruct the reifica-
tion of ‘the state’ and unmask what lies behind it, such as Taussig’s “political
critique of the ‘thingification’ of historically situated relations of unequal
power between social individuals” (Taussig 1991, 1997). Emphasising that
anthropological studies of resistance “have risked overlooking the remarkable
phenomenon of public participation in reproducing systems of power” and
that power is often “regenerated in the very domain of so-called resistance”
(Navaro-Yashin 2002: 159), she argues that we need to understand how citi-
zens subject to ‘modern’ forms of power “fix, rebuild and maintain the state

Power in political anthropology
69
through our real everyday practices” even while maintaining a high level of
cynicism – in the Lacanian sense used by Žižek – about the social relations,
self-interested action and corruption that lie behind ‘icons of reification’11
(Navaro-Yashin 2002: 187).
Using rather different theoretical tools, derived from Norman Long’s ‘ac-
tor-orientated’ sociology and nourished by the Mexicanist ‘decentering the
regime’ literature, as well as by post-structuralist theory, Monique Nuijten
(2003) has also taken up Navaro-Yashin’s theme of how ‘fantasies of the
state’ are constructed. Looking ethnographically at the, at first sight, perplex-
ing persistence of peasant land claimants who engage with the state’s labyrin-
thine world of bureaucratic process and experience its corruption at first
hand, her study highlights the way that cynicism does not prevent the implan-
tation of what she terms ‘the culture of state’. In seeking the aid of intermedi-
aries (priests, lawyers, activist politicians) who might ‘connect’ them to a
centre of power that they must construct in their imaginations, Nuijten’s
peasants collaborated with official propagandists, the school system and the
media in constructing a ‘machine’ through which hope could be regenerated
despite repeated setbacks. The role of the intermediaries was not that of forg-
ing effective connections to the centre but that of helping peasants to invest
in the idea of using the law and bureaucracy as a means of solving their prob-
lems. In other words, we are talking about a domain of practices through
which ‘the state’ becomes ‘real’ and meaningful for people.
Another important influence on the development of a new anthropology
of the state is the work of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Like Nuijten,
Gupta stresses that flesh and blood social actors must construct ‘the state’ in
their imaginations, since, he argues, it is a “translocal institution that is made
visible in local practices” (Gupta 1995: 375-376). Along with Arturo
Escobar’s equally celebrated Encountering Development (1995), Ferguson’s
The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) takes its cue quite directly from Foucault,
but whereas Escobar’s emphasis is on the ‘discourse of development’ as a
framework that constructs ‘objects of Western knowledge’ that can then be
subjected to interventions by an apparatus embodying modern technologies
of power, Ferguson uses Foucault in a different way, to produce a different
understanding of what the development ‘apparatus’ actually does. Drawing
on Foucault’s discussion of how the apparent ‘failure’ of the prison to reha-
bilitate the criminal – its official ‘programme’ within a system of power/
knowledge – did not prevent the creation of a social category of ‘delinquents’
11 According to Žižek, the ‘grip’ of ideology in a ‘post-ideological society’ is explained not in
terms of false consciousness, but in terms of cynicism, and he turns a ‘well-known phrase
from Marx’s Capital: “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es” (“they do not know it, but they
are doing it”)’, on its head, arguing instead that we inhabit a situation whereby ‘they know
very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’ (1989: 28-30).

John Gledhill
70
as a secondary consequence of that programme from having all manner of
useful effects from the point of view of the ruling classes (Foucault 1979:
267-280), Ferguson argues that the repeated ‘failure’ of development projects
to produce development should not blind us to the constructive power effects
of intervention. The presence of development resources enables the state to
reach down into rural areas and build new forms of political control by ma-
nipulating programmes such as ‘food for work’ schemes; the discourse of de-
velopment reduces ‘poverty’ to a purely technical problem and de-politicises
it; and it also depoliticises the state itself by making it seem simply an admin-
istrative apparatus organizing development projects.
For Sahlins, this kind of use of Foucault might provide the perfect illus-
tration of the dangers of reinventing functionalist analysis via the Fou-
cauldian paradigm or as Brown (1996: 730) puts it, a view of culture “as
prison, culture as insane asylum, culture as ‘hegemonic domination of the
[insert Other of choice]’ ”. Although Ferguson could not justly be accused of
neglecting the ‘agency’ of those at the receiving end of development inter-
ventions entirely, his work does illustrate the limitations of focusing the an-
thropology of the state on even the secondary, non-programmed, effects of
institutions and disciplinary mechanisms. This approach does not consider
how citizens construct Navaro-Yashin’s ‘fantasies of the state’ – even when
they are ‘resisting’ particular interventions – or the significance of those
processes for understanding the ways in which ‘development’ can be re-
politicised under neoliberal regimes, as it clearly has been in many contexts
in recent years. Even more fundamentally, Ferguson’s model presents the
Northern development apparatus as more monolithic and more powerful than
it actually is. As David Mosse (2005: 6) points out, when Ferguson shows
that the development apparatus is ‘really’ a machine for ‘depoliticising’ the
development process by making it seem ‘technical’, and for reinforcing bu-
reaucratic state power, he actually destroys his own object of analysis. There
is no space left in this functionalist formulation for studying the actual inter-
play of power and politics that takes place between all the actors and stake-
holders involved in development projects: these include the international
agencies that sponsor development projects, the project workers who try to
implement them on the ground, who have different skills, values, interests
and power to influence events, and the people with whom these development
workers, who are also differentiated by such things as political status, class
position, and gender. Ironically, one of the problems with Ferguson’s ap-
proach is that it also makes a lot of the politics that takes place in and around
development projects disappear from view. These politics include the internal
politics of the development project team and its managers, and the politics
that take place within the communities to which projects are delivered. They
also include the way that local people adapt their demands to conform to

Power in political anthropology
71
what they think the development workers want to hear in order to extract the
biggest number of benefits they can from what is on offer from the develop-
ment agency. Mosse’s ethnographic approach to the study of the workings of
international development apparatus parallels the new ethnography of the
state’s focus on practices and the social relations constructed and reshaped in
contexts of practice.
To some extent the problems with Ferguson might be seen as problems
with the Foucauldian paradigm in general, but the Foucauldian governmen-
tality model has continued to prove productive in thinking about changes in
the nature of modern states themselves, as illustrated, for example, by Ong’s
(2006) notion of ‘graduated sovereignty’ in South-East Asia. Ong emphasises
how the pressures of ‘globalisation’ have not only led some states to out-
source particular aspects of state power and authority to non-governmental,
supra-national and corporate entities, but also how different parts of the
population have come to enjoy different qualities of citizenship, enjoying dif-
ferent standards of care and rights, under this new mix of state and non-state
entities in the business of ‘government’ as the administration of the health
and wealth of the population, the regulation of their conduct and the fostering
of technologies of intervention promoting self-management. There is, never-
theless, still a considerable difference between these societies and polities
and the European and North American cases that have served as the paradig-
matic examples of the emergence of ‘neoliberal governmentality’. Ong sug-
gests that East Asian states, including China, have selectively deployed parts
of what she sees as a globally ‘mobile assemblage’ of neoliberal techniques
of rule alongside other practices of government and ‘political rationalities’.
This and the fact that such techniques are targeted only at certain sectors of
society make neoliberal ‘biopolitics’ ‘exceptional’ in East Asian patterns of
development. The argument for exceptionalism is not an argument for mar-
ginality or insignificance but one that highlights the continuing need to con-
sider difference within global patterns of social and political transformation.
Ferguson and Gupta have argued that ‘outsourcing’ to non-state transna-
tional organizations has fostered “an emerging system of transnational gov-
ernmentality” that may make the distinction between states and NGOs less
relevant under modern conditions (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989), but
Gupta and Sharma (2006) also emphasise the way that, in India, the prolifera-
tion of this transnational regime can still co-exist with ‘big-budget’ govern-
ment service delivery programmes of the kind associated with the ‘high mod-
ernist’ developmental states, the primary object of James Scott’s (1998) work
on the state and development.12 Nevertheless, the limitation of a focus on
12 As Gupta and Sharma point out, these are themselves a product of transnational processes,
but their approach converges with a large number of anthropological attempts to study his-

John Gledhill
72
governmentality projects, modernist or neoliberal, often remains a tendency
to focus mainly on how practices construct ‘the state’ (or the authority of
NGOs) to people, the production of state effects, at the expense of questions
about how the subjects of these endeavours themselves participate in deter-
mining their relative success and limitations.
Foucauldian thinking has, however, also had salutary effects in the criti-
cal re-evaluation of the ‘resistance’ paradigm by anthropologists. One exam-
ple is Abu-Lughod’s attempt to turn Foucault on his head by taking up the
implications of his contention that “resistance is never in a position of exteri-
ority to power” and by retranslating his dictum “where there is power, there
is resistance” (Foucault 1978: 95-96) into “where there is resistance, there is
power” (Abu-Lughod 1990: 42). For Abu-Lughod, the advantage for anthro-
pologists of “using resistance as a diagnostic of power” was that they could
move away from abstract theories of power to the ethnographic “study of
power in particular situations”. In her ethnographic examination of the appar-
ently safe spaces in which Bedouin women could enjoy a smoke and elabo-
rate their ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990) about such matters as male vices
and arranged marriages, Abu-Lughod discusses the ambivalent implications
of the social and economic changes which led some women to wear make up
and add negligees to their trousseaux. She concludes:
In resisting the axes of kin and gender, the young women who want the lingerie,
Egyptian songs, satin wedding dresses, and fantasies of private romance their eld-
ers resist are perhaps unwittingly enmeshing themselves in an extraordinary com-
plex new set of power relations. These bind them irrecoverably to the Egyptian
economy, itself tied to the global economy, and to the Egyptian state, many of
whose powers depend on separating kin groups and regulating individuals. (Abu-
Lughod 1990: 52)
Nevertheless, after posing the question of whether “certain modern forms and
techniques of power work in such indirect ways, or seem to offer such posi-
tive attractions, that people do not as readily resist them”, she goes on to
show how the adoption of modest Islamic dress and participation in Islamist
movements represents a further possible reaction to the contradictions that
these new entanglements with global capitalism and the state pose for women
who remain relatively socially marginalised. Yet these practices not only en-
tail yet another set of disciplines, but also tie the participants into another set
of new transnational structures, the religious nationalisms of global Islam
(Abu-Lughod 1990: 52).
Here invocation of Foucault leads us away from the problematic di-
chotomies and closed spaces of freedom in which James Scott locates his ‘in-
torically and culturally determined differences between societies in terms of the impact of
neoliberal techniques of rule.

Power in political anthropology
73
frapolitics’ of subalterns, “an unobtrusive realm of political struggle” based
on “the veiled cultural struggle and political expression of subordinate groups
who have ample reason to fear venturing their unguarded opinion” (Scott
1990: 183-184). Donald Moore (1998: 352) has pointed out that the Fou-
cauldian position developed by Abu-Lughod can be seen as one that Gramsci
anticipated in speaking of the “limited and partial autonomy” of subaltern
groups, which remain subject to the ‘activity’ of dominant groups even when
they are engaged in counter-hegemonic struggles against them. Yet many an-
thropologists also found Scott’s work wanting on other fronts, whilst being
equally wary of post-structuralist approaches to subjectification that paid lit-
tle attention to the issues that attract the attention of ethnographers observing
the workings of material power relations in specific social contexts.
As Ortner emphasises in an article criticising the ‘ethnographic thinness’
of much of the ‘resistance’ literature, not only are practices of ‘collaboration’
often co-present with apparent practices of ‘resistance’, but ‘subaltern’
groups must be disaggregated into actors differentiated by age, gender, status
and other ‘subject positions’ (Ortner 1995: 175-176). Furthermore, as Fletcher
(2001: 47) points out, building on the critique of Mitchell mentioned earlier,
an apparently fatal consequence of the individual rational actor theory that
lies at the base of James Scott’s theory of ‘everyday resistance’ is that it
makes it difficult to understand why people in apparently similar situations of
domination, such as the indigenous people threatened with displacement by a
hydroelectric dam project that he studied in Chile, can adopt radically differ-
ent postures, some accepting offers of resettlement as a positive opportunity
to advance socially and voting for the political right, others responding to ac-
tivist calls to defend their lands and cultural way of life.
The ‘subject position’ concept, central to poststructuralist and postmod-
ernist thinking, draws our attention to the way that identities and subjectifica-
tion are in part the social product of the classificatory schemes of others
(which an individual can either affirm or reject, but not necessarily escape, in
daily life). In contemporary societies, cultures of consumerism and ‘lifestyle’
augment the possibilities of individual identity construction, but in most con-
texts possible subject positions are multiple – a woman can be a woman, a
poor woman, a peasant woman, a virtuous mother, a Catholic woman, etc. –
and situational, with one aspect of identity being appropriate for one context,
and another, possibly contrasting with or even conflicting with the first, more
suited to managing a different context of interaction. A canny and well-
connected peasant politician will often find it convenient to become a humble
and uneducated son of the village, for example. Yet whilst all this is useful,
Ortner points out the danger of ‘dissolving’ the subject as living agent in a
social context altogether (Ortner 1995: 184-186). Focusing on internal differ-
entiation, Ortner complained that one major problem with resistance theory

John Gledhill
74
was that, despite its expansion of the definition of ‘political’ action, and in
her view, contrasting with that of Sahlins, its useful role in highlighting “the
presence and play of power in most forms of relationship and activity”
(Ortner 1995: 175), it simply did not contain enough politics at the end of the
day, since the dominant-subordinate opposition concealed the lively internal
politics within subaltern populations (Ortner 1995: 177).
Ortner’s emphasis on the need for close ethnographic analysis reflects
her view that anthropologists need to concentrate on studying “real people
doing real things”, including pressuring particular human individuals to take
particular courses of action. In discussing the case of a Muslim woman who
refused to accept the court’s financial award she sued for support from her
husband following her divorce, Ortner writes:
Yet one cannot help but feel a nagging suspicion about the on-the-ground politics
surrounding Shahbano’s open letter rejecting the award in the name of Muslim
solidarity. Is the ‘refusal to occupy the subject position offered to her’ … an ade-
quate account of what happened here, or might we imagine some rather more im-
mediately lived experience of intense personal pressures from significant social
others – kin, friends, neighbors, male and female – who put pressure on Shahbano
in the name of their own agendas to renounce a monetary award she desperately
needed and had been seeking for ten years? … The shifting quality of her case is
not to be found in her shifting identity (whether essentialized as subaltern con-
sciousness or seen as strategic) but in the fact that she is at the low end of every
form of power in the system and is being quite actively pushed around by other,
more powerful, agents. (Ortner 1995: 185)
Yet close ethnographic work may be a necessary but not sufficient condition
for building an anthropology of power. This was certainly Eric Wolf’s view:
Structural power shapes the social field of action in such a way as to render some
kinds of behavior possible, while making others less possible or impossible … As
anthropologists we can follow the flows of capital and labor through ups and
downs, advances and retreats, and investigate the ways in which social and cul-
tural arrangements in space and time are drawn into and implicated in the work-
ings of this double whammy… Some have said that these questions have very lit-
tle relevance to anthropology, in that they do not have enough to say about ‘real
people doing real things’, as Sherry Ortner put it; but … I think that it is the task
of anthropology – or at least the task of some anthropologists – to attempt expla-
nation, not merely description, descriptive integration or interpretation … I think
we must move beyond Clifford Geertz’s ‘experience-near’ understandings to ana-
lytical concepts that allow us to set what we know about X against what we know
about Y, in pursuit of explanation. This means that I subscribe to a basically real-
ist position: I think that the world is real, that these realities affect what humans
do and that what humans do affects the world, and that we can come to understand
the whys and wherefores of this relationship. (Wolf 2001: 386)

Power in political anthropology
75
As I noted earlier, Wolf’s concept of ‘structural power’ was an attempt to
marry Marx’s understanding of the power of capital and Foucault’s account
of ‘modern government’ or governmentality. Distinguishing between (Nietz-
schean) power as a attribute or capability of the person, power as the ability
of one person to impose his or her will on another in social interaction, and a
third kind of power that is ‘tactical’ or ‘organisational’, the instrumental con-
trol of specific settings in which people or groups interact and corresponding
circumscription of their actions, Wolf introduces the notion of ‘structural
power’ to talk about what ‘organises and orchestrates’ the settings in which
these other forms of power may be exercised (Wolf 1990: 586-587).
Many reviewers expressed disappointment with Envisioning Power
(Wolf 1999), the monograph in which Wolf tried to put this framework to
work in the detailed analysis of three very different cases (the post-contact
Kwakiutl of the Canadian Northwest coast, the pre-conquest Aztecs of Mex-
ico, and Nazi Germany). A frequent complaint was that the perspective was
too ‘macro’ and ‘holistic’, leaving little space for the mass of the population
to play any role in shaping the dynamics of power, counter-hegemonically or
otherwise, and paying little attention to the ‘mobilization’ of ideology and
power through specific forms of communication and organization (despite
the fact that this dimension figures in Wolf’s general discussion of ‘modes of
power’).
For other critics, the work was more Weberian and Geertzian than mate-
rialist, reinstating an over-totalizing and over-coherent notion of ‘cultures’ of
the kind Wolf himself had so frequently criticized (Barrett, Stokholm and
Burke 2001, Crehan 2002: 187) and neglecting the materiality of power in
practice. Many found the selection of case studies baffling. Yet as Anthony
Marcus (2003: 124) suggests, this study of societies in crisis: “leaves us with
a frosty tundra where we see only the horror of European fascism and what-
ever contemporary imaginary worlds that George Bush has planned for us”.
In that, he argues, there may be a valuable lesson that other critics have
missed:
No social analysis is quite so powerful as to destruct or deconstruct simply by
naming and analysing. If there is anything to be learned from the case study of the
Nazis, it is that envisioning power is only the first step towards seizing it and ex-
ercising it. Structural power as Wolf defines it is composed of social forces that
are comprised of millions of people. This is an insight that Wolf uses throughout
his work, always calling into question ‘promethean’ fantasies that the world can
be changed simply by using the right words and ideas. It is the basis for his asser-
tion that the real world exists (Marcus 2003: 126)
In his final writings, Wolf was echoing a broader anthropological engage-
ment with the devastating social effects and political consequences of the late
twentieth century transformations associated with the rise of neoliberal capi-

John Gledhill
76
talism and the USA’s position as sole global military superpower. These con-
cerns with transformation as crisis are equally central to the recent writings of
the Comaroffs on ‘millennial capitalism’, which maintain a strong engage-
ment with Marxist perspectives in both their classical and more contemporary
forms, such as the influential writings of David Harvey (1989; 2005), now a
professor in CUNY’s anthropology department, in which he maintains a
lively dialogue with his colleagues on how complicated a story we need to
tell about neoliberal capitalism.13
The story that the Comaroffs tell is a relatively complicated one. It spans
the linkages between neoliberal capitalism’s own ‘spectral’ and ‘virtualist’
tendencies, as embodied, for example, in the processes of financialisation
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 295-296), and the intensification throughout
Africa of ‘occult economies’ focused around efforts to ‘conjure wealth’ and
“moral discourses and (re)actions sparked by the (real or imagined) produc-
tion of value through such ‘magical’ means” (ibid.: 310). Since such phe-
nomena as popular imaginings of zombie armies toiling for those who have
managed to ‘get ahead’ are not new in African history, the Comaroffs are
careful to recognize the cyclical patterns in capitalism that recent develop-
ments may exemplify, but they are also interested in highlighting the implica-
tions of evolution within the capitalist system for other aspects of the con-
temporary conjuncture.
This includes reflections on the implications not simply of the social con-
sequences of the restructuring of industrial production and ‘the disappearance
of work’ for different segments of the working classes but of “the experien-
tial contradictions at the core of neoliberal capitalism” for class conscious-
ness and politics and development of new forms of ‘identity’ politics (Coma-
roff and Comaroff 2000: 298-299). They therefore consider ways in which
neoliberal capitalism represents a further step towards the creation of a true
‘market society’ in which the market becomes central to the production of
social life and social personhood, through consumption, ‘lifestyle choice’ and
an insistent emphasis on individual responsibility for welfare and the need to
practise ‘technologies of the self’. As a consequence of these developments,
the Comaroffs argue:
as neoliberal conditions render ever more obscure the rooting of inequality in
structures of production, as work gives way to the mechanical solidarities of
13 In his recent work Harvey (2005) argues that the heart of the matter is a massive redistribu-
tion of income and power from labour to capital linked to ‘financialisation’ and accompa-
nied by a pervasive process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, but he also explores the
complications introduced by uneven development on a global scale in some depth. For a
critique that argues that anthropologists were too easily satisfied by Harvey’s earlier politi-
cal economy analysis of ‘flexible accumulation’ as an epochal shift within capitalism, see
Tsing (2000).

Power in political anthropology
77
‘identity’ in constructing selfhood and social being, class comes to be understood,
in both popular and scholarly discourse, as yet another personal traitor lifestyle
choice. Which is why it, like citizenship, is measured increasingly by the capacity
to transact and consume; why politics is treated as a matter of individual or group
entitlement; why social wrongs are transposed into an issue of ‘rights’; why dif-
fuse concerns about cultural integrity and communal survival are vested in ‘pri-
vate’ anxieties about sexuality, procreation, or family values (Comaroff and Co-
maroff 2000: 306)
While ‘occult economies’ are one response to these conditions, the Coma-
roffs also link them to the contemporary shape of religious change, in par-
ticular the expansion in Southern Africa of neo-Pentecostalist Churches such
as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a Brazilian church that has
achieved truly global reach by dint of a large-scale organisation and media
empire that enables it to mount a political as well as religious challenge to
Catholicism in its country of origin (Birman and Lehmann 1999). For the
Comaroffs, the ‘prosperity theology’ of the Universal Church and other
‘third-wave’ Pentecostalist churches makes them ‘holy-owned subsidiaries’
of ‘the neoliberal spirit’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 314). In the conclud-
ing section of this paper I argue that this may be an over-simple assessment,
not of the projects embodied in the leaderships of these churches, but of their
possible impacts on existing hegemonies through less obvious and unin-
tended contributions to the transformation of popular subjectivities. Never-
theless, a comparison between the way that, notwithstanding their analysis of
the colonial ‘colonisation of consciousness’, the Comaroffs earlier focused on
religion as a site of ‘resistance’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991) and the way
that they discuss it today is indicative of the pessimism that dominates their
analyses of later developments.
Pessimism also marks their treatment of the political consequences of
neoliberalism and the achievement of ‘democracy’. One side of it, that no
scholar working in contemporary South Africa could ignore, is growing vio-
lence, crime and insecurity. The other side is their critical dissection of the
socially and politically ‘progressive’ promises embedded in neoliberal dis-
courses. Once again, the Comaroffs emphasise the repetition of a cycle in the
interaction of capitalism and the political as they turn their gaze towards
foundational concepts such as ‘civil society’:
As in the late eighteenth century, and in strikingly similar fashion, the Idea of
Civil Society makes its appearance just as the fabric of the social, the possibility
of society, the ontological core of humanity, the nature of social distinction, and
the essence of identity are being dramatically challenged; just as we experience an
epochal metamorphosis in the organization of production, labor, and the market,
in technology and its sociocultural implications, in the constitutive connections
between economy and polity, nation and state, culture and place, person, family,

John Gledhill
78
and community; just as we find it impossible to sustain the dominant terms of
modernist sociology-as-lived, of received anthropologies of knowledge, of our
geographical grasp of an increasingly four-dimensional world. Amidst populist
moral panics, mass-mediated alienation, crises of representation, and scholarly
perplexity, Civil Society, in its Second Coming, once more becomes especially
‘good to think,’ to signify with, to act upon. The less substance it has, the emptier
its referents, the more this is so; which is why its very polyvalence, its ineluctable
unfixability, is intrinsic to its power as panacea. It is the ultimate magic bullet in
the Age of Millennial Capitalism. For it promises to conjure up the most funda-
mental thing of all: a meaningful social existence. And, thereby, to lay to rest – for
now at least – Adam Smith’s ghostly phantasm: the Society of Strangers. (Coma-
roff and Comaroff 2000: 334)
For the Comaroffs, another manifestation of this perceived “moment of
change and crisis” is that the global assertion of “civil society against the
state” becomes a symptom, reinforced by the proliferation of identity-based
politics, of the growing disarticulation of states and nations, a “rupturing of
the hyphen” (ibid: 326). As ‘political sovereignty’ is displaced by the sover-
eignty of a ‘market’ that has to be presented as embodying an inescapable
logic that is value-free and technical, the language of ‘rights’ and ‘legality’ –
‘the law’ as something pretending to universality but fetishised and external-
ised – becomes a means of “reducing difference to sameness” in a context in
which it becomes ever less possible to meet the economic aspirations of the
majority of citizens and address moral concerns incompatible with the state’s
role in managing neoliberal capitalist accumulation (ibid: 333).
At the end of this discussion of an increasingly fragmented world, the
Comaroffs do allow themselves to ‘hope’ that an ‘alternative, critical global
civil society”’ might emerge from the wreck (and that organised labour might
be part of it) (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 335). Yet there is little in their
analysis that provides grounds for hope. Ironically, given the emphasis of
many critics on the way Foucauldian concepts of power portray the social
world as a prison, other anthropologists who have embraced Foucault to pro-
vide critical analyses of neoliberal governmentality have produced less pes-
simistic analyses, though this may also reflect the fact that they are working
in different regional contexts.
Charles Hale (2002), for example, has argued, in a discussion of the
emergence of neoliberal multiculturalism in Guatemala, that the institution-
alisation of spaces and channels of participation, and politics of rights and
recognition, hardly a trivial matter in a country where genocide was on the
agenda in the 1970s and 1980s, nevertheless creates a boundary: that bound-
ary separates movements and demands that are acceptable from those that are
‘too radical’, and is strengthened by a predictable politics of resentment on
the part of non-indigenous ladinos. Hale argues that once primary responsi-

Power in political anthropology
79
bility for the restoration of ‘civic virtues’ eroded by the effects of neoliberal
economics is placed in the hands of non-state entities that include not simply
churches and NGOs but ‘communities’ with assumed historically shared ties
of culture, from the standpoint of governmentality the logic of the new rela-
tionship between community, identity and political subjectivity always gravi-
tates towards multiculturalism. Through this kind of multiculturalist strategy
“the state does not merely ‘recognize’ community, civil society, indigenous
culture and the like, but actively reconstitutes them in its own image, sheer-
ing them of radical excesses, inciting them to do the work of subject-
formation that would otherwise fall to the state itself”, so that the profession-
alised NGO becomes the neoliberal substitute for Bentham’s panopticon
(Hale 2002: 496). Yet Hale also suggests that ‘civil society’ in Latin Ameri-
can countries should be seen as more than a phantasm conjured up by neolib-
eral political discourse, and that the emergence of popular counter-move-
ments in this region that have been explicitly anti-neoliberal reflects a volatil-
ity based on historical differences from Europe and North America.
To pursue the idea of counter-movements further I will consider another
anthropological study of Guatemala, by Diane Nelson (2005), that is made all
the more interesting by the fact that the author’s personal practice as a soli-
darity and anti-globalisation activist has obliged her to question the compati-
bility between that stance and an enthusiasm for Foucault. To work her own
way through this question, Nelson examines two ‘biopolitical’ interventions
by the military regime installed after the CIA-backed coup against Jacobo
Arbenz in 1954, the military campaigns against indigenous communities that
finally ended with the signing of Peace Accords in 1996 (though human
rights violation did not) and the ‘all out war’ against malaria declared by
Guatemalan Health Ministry in 1955. Here the Foucauldian “biopolitics of
the population” seems simply a power of life and death, a “putting life in or-
der” that can seek to enhance “the vitality of the social body” (Nelson 2005:
216-217), by killing mosquitoes or by killing human beings deemed to de-
tract from that vitality. But Nelson shows how Foucault himself can compli-
cate this argument.
Her first step is a rethinking of the insurgency, which parallels many
other anthropological explorations of this question. By 1988, when it was
clear that the guerrilla had lost the armed struggle and factionalisation en-
sued, it was also clear that many indigenous people were now thinking in
terms of alternatives to what had originally been a programme of “modernis-
ing the country” by leaving indigenous identity and culture behind for both
the non-indigenous guerrilla leaderships and the minority of indigenous peo-
ple that actively supported the guerrilla movement at the outset. The war it-
self, and experiences of racism in the guerrilla ranks, encouraged different vi-
sions of ‘liberation’, including organisation around Maya identity and cul-

John Gledhill
80
tural rights (Nelson 2005: 223). Yet Nelson also found herself having to think
about the power of the army in a different way as it followed its scorched
earth policy of the early 1980s with a ‘development pole’ strategy that com-
bined discipline and surveillance with food aid, housing and health care pro-
grammes that attracted funds from foreign churches and NGOs as well as the
US and European governments (ibid: 223-224). Not only were the motiva-
tions of these transnational actors diverse, but Nelson also feels that it is in-
adequate to describe the outcome as simply a form of duplicity. In place of
simple opposition between a pure resisting people and a brutal military re-
gime, the war revealed more complex alignments and tensions, raised a series
of questions about whether ‘collaboration’ was simply the result of fear of
death, and ended up delivering at least some of the things that indigenous
people in Guatemala had previously been demanding, such as schools and
health care. It is difficult to see the programmes that delivered these things
(however inadequately) as simply another form of ‘repression’ and this is
perhaps not the first time in Guatemalan history in which “the popular strug-
gle for a more equitable distribution of the common wealth” might be seen as
what Foucault “termed a ‘reverse discourse’ that demanding that its legiti-
macy be acknowledged by using the same categories by which it was origi-
nally disqualified” (ibid: 225).14
In the case of the malaria eradication campaigns, a quintessential expres-
sion of deployment of modern techniques of organised state intervention,
there is another kind of ambivalence to what is at stake in terms of power.
The implementation of the programmes required intimate knowledge of the
population at the level of households (to ensure the success of medication
programmes), knowledge which could later be put to life destroying pur-
poses, but which, in this original context, also fostered a new interest
amongst peasants in collaborating with the state (and with each other) even
though some – as in the case of the guerrilla’s call for arms – also refused to
cooperate (ibid: 233). Nevertheless, malaria eradication was hardly a wholly
humanitarian enterprise, since the campaigns were also instigated “in order to
support neo-colonial capitalist assaults on resistant ‘unproductive’ lowland
environments and on ‘lazy natives’ too sick to work effectively” (ibid.)
14 This discussion also resonates with William Roseberry’s objections to Scott’s reading of
‘hegemony’ as the ‘dominant ideology’ thesis. In arguing that: ‘What hegemony constructs,
then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living
through, talking about, and acting on social orders characterised by domination’, Roseberry
(1994: 361) emphasises that ‘the dominated’ have to talk the same language as the domi-
nant in order to engage in a meaningful ‘counter-hegemonic practice’, at least up to a point,
so that hegemony should become a tool for thinking about ‘struggle’ rather than an as-
sumed ‘consent’ backed up by fear of violence.

Power in political anthropology
81
Yet it hardly seems reasonable to reduce malaria eradication to this one-
dimensional ‘hidden agenda’, because hygiene is not simply a matter of ‘so-
cial control’ and the campaigns had other effects that may have strengthened
the state in some ways but hardly undermined the case of the coastal labour
organisers (whom the state and landowners felt so consistently obliged to
murder) that improved health care was as necessary as better wages and
working conditions. Invoking Bruno Latour alongside Foucault, Nelson ar-
gues that these two biopolitical processes both illustrate the principle that
new sources of power and legitimacy are constantly being introduced into po-
litical processes since none of the human actors are either totally autonomous
subjects nor ‘docile automatons’ but bound up in complexes of relations
“through which power always flows in more than one direction” (ibid: 234).
This, it should be stressed, is not an ethically relativising, let alone ‘apoliti-
cal’ analysis, but an attempt to think through how an anthropologist can look
beyond the veil of sympathy and ‘solidarity’ to grasp the complex questions
of the changes in subjectification that emerge when subalterns engage with
power on multiple fronts and in multiple ways.
Concluding critical reflections
My last example also has implications for alternative ways of thinking about
possible unintended consequences of neoliberal techniques of rule, but let me
pursue this point in a direction that suggests the need for further thinking
about where we might find ‘resistance’ and emerging cracks in established
‘hegemonies’ by returning to the Comaroffs’ assessment of ‘third wave’ Pen-
tecostalism. I will do this by using a contextualized ethnographic case, al-
though I think it illustrates more general principles.
It is generally assumed by militant black organizations in Brazil that the
Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé provides the basis for a millennial culture
of Afro-Brazilian resistance and that neo-Pentecostalist churches are the en-
emy not simply because they further the penetration of individualistic neolib-
eral values but also because they do so by attacking Afro-Brazilian spirit pos-
session as a manifestation of the ‘diabolic’ (Kremer 2005). Yet in doing that,
neo-Pentecostalists also attack relations that have been central to past forms
of hegemony in Brazil. Without wishing to undermine the Comaroffs’ unflat-
tering portrait of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God unduly, it
does seem important to note that its transnational vision constitutes a form of
universalism that rejects the ‘rooted traditions’ of Brazil in a way that may
offer unexpected (and certainly unintended) emancipatory ‘subjectivising’
possibilities for poor Brazilians, even when, as so many do, they leave the

John Gledhill
82
church relatively disillusioned. A little more context will be necessary to
make sense of this contention and the ethnography that will illustrate it,
which is drawn from the north-eastern state of Bahia, once the economic cen-
tre of the Portuguese colony, but long overtaken by Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo by the start of the twentieth century.
Bahia’s conservative political elites began to re-evaluate the state’s Afri-
can heritage in the late 1930s, in the era of Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorial New
State, mirroring the politics with which Vargas sought to build a national
identity in order to reconstruct their own region’s place in the national
scheme of things (Ickes 2005). Candomblé was de-proscribed. Under the
military, and subsequently the domination of the Party of the Liberal Front,
Bahia followed a conservative path of capitalist modernisation under leader-
ship of the regional political boss Antônio Carlos Magalhães (ACM). Al-
though ACM’s initial interest in promoting African cultural heritage focused
on its value as a resource for developing global tourism and his restructuring
of the state capital as a modern capitalist city favoured the interests of prop-
erty developers over the poor black majority, as the national political context
changed his political pragmatism eventually ensured that a ‘multiculturalism’
centred on African heritage as well as the political patronage of some black
cultural and religious organisations would became a dominant motif in Ba-
hian politics (Dantas Neto 2006). Candomblé does continue to exist as a
lively and relatively uncolonised popular religious practice amongst the ur-
ban poor, but its centrality for the militant black identity movement is slightly
paradoxical since an institutionally well integrated series of ‘elite’ candomblé
temples has emerged (Parés 2006) and much of the priesthood are wary of
alienating their white patrons by embracing a ‘racialising’ politics, preferring
to sponsor programmes aimed at enhancing individual black ‘self-esteem’
(Van De Port 2005). Although as Burdick (2005) has shown, neo-Pentecostal
churches have also generated black identity-based organisations, in part be-
cause even here black congregants experienced tensions between messages of
universal equality and actual practices, it is difficult to produce unity among
these tendencies because the Evangelicals attack candomblé while the estab-
lished militants see it as crucial to maintaining subaltern cultures of identity
and resistance.
This brings me to a second contextualizing point. Militant black organisa-
tions still face an uphill struggle in Brazil. Both ordinary citizens and many
‘progressive’ intellectuals remain wary of racialisation of politics in a country
in which the absence of an actually existing ‘racial democracy’ does not neces-
sarily undermine its power as a lower class imaginary defining struggles for a
better future (Sheriff 2001). The word negro (as distinct from skin colour terms
such as preto or pardo) can now be used as a badge of pride by young people
and militant activists alike, reflecting the influence of the US black movements

Power in political anthropology
83
on Brazil (Sansone 2004). But others still use it as a term of disparagement.
Sheriff shows that poor people questioned about discrimination often say that
there are only two races in Brazil, black and white. This reflects a process of
class-based racialisation by which poor people of varying phenotypic appear-
ance may be stigmatised as biologically degenerate, prone to violence and
criminal, although ideas that link African blood with lack of emotional control
and other defects are found lower down the social scale as well. Yet as Fry
(1995) shows, radically different readings of a person’s ‘colour’ may occur if
the social context suggests that the person occupies a higher class position,
whilst, as Sheriff shows, colour-based categories are deployed in everyday in-
teraction amongst the poor situationally and according to a logic of social eti-
quette that makes intermediate categories such as moreno or mulato extremely
important for understanding the logic of a system which remains, in Fry’s
words, ‘multi-mode’ rather than binary on the US model. The Black movement
therefore has to convince people to think of themselves as both negro and
‘Afro-descendent’ against the grain of widely accepted ideas about Brazilians
being ‘mixed’, and there is an obvious danger in what is an inverse racialisation
strategy, since there is a possibility of exclusion of equally disadvantaged peo-
ple for not looking or feeling ‘black enough’.
Some recent ethnographic research suggests, however, that changing
popular religious affiliations can participate in the expression of a counter-
hegemonic imaginary that rejects conscription to established elite models of
the kinds of identities poor Brazilians ought to have, despite the fact that in
the first instance they are probably mainly about personal and often gendered
struggles to cope with poverty, economic and physical insecurity and afflic-
tion. John Collins offers a striking example is his research on the transforma-
tion, in the 1990s, of Salvador’s Historical Centre, the Pelourinho, from a
run-down red light district inhabited by poor working class families into a
UNESCO World Heritage site and “pastel-hued mnemonic device designed
to showcase the Bahian state’s version of national pasts” (Collins 2004: 191).
As the redevelopment apparatus set in motion by the political machine of
Antônio Carlos Magalhães set about displacing the Pelourinho’s existing
residents, it tried to defuse their active resistance to dispossession by sending
in squads of bureaucrats and bourgeois female supporters of charitable incli-
nation to affirm ACM’s enthusiasm for candomblé as the Afro-Brazilian
poor’s assumed religion of self-identification.
Yet their distribution of the ritual meals known as carurus, associated
with the Catholic saints Cosmas and Damian and Yoruba divinity Ibêji, pro-
voked a chorus of angry protest on the part of many residents, who, whether
they were committed Pentecostalists or not, used the argument that the elite
were trying to seduce their children with ‘the Devil’s food’ as another means
of denouncing “the state’s attempt to ‘folklorize’ them and confiscate their

John Gledhill
84
homes” (Collins 2004: 203). Religious changes rooted in the social trauma of
neoliberal economics can therefore have significant consequences through
which apparently apolitical alternatives feed back into the conditions struc-
turing the political field. The architects of new religious organisations cannot
completely control what those who embrace a faith will actually make of it in
the longer term. They may even have contributed to the visible loosening of
the grip of ACM’s political machine on Bahia prior to his death in 2007.
This suggests, then, that if we look more closely at what people actually
do, and why, through appropriately contextualised and situated analysis, we
may find resistance with significant implications in places where we did not
expect to find it and in forms that we did not expect either. The effects of so-
cial change are complex in a way that forces us to continually be wary about
what we think we ‘know’ about power. If the results are as likely to be new
hegemonies that will only prove partial emancipations, that would hardly be
anything new in history, but neoliberal projects have unintended conse-
quences that are likely to militate against a neoliberal end of history simply
because people respond to the material openings provided by those projects
and reinterpret the imaginaries that even neoliberalising discourses suggest to
them. In a context such as Brazil, it is probably positive that such discourses
have a universalising thrust to them.
An anthropology of power must therefore continue to embed itself in an
understanding of social experience to grasp the difficulties of building collec-
tive movements today, since individuals have multiple options for trying to
cope with the subjective experiences of everyday humiliation (which include
participation in crime and violence as well as joining a neo-Pentecostalist
church). Furthermore, since the poor themselves are the principal victims of
crime and violence, it is not surprising that they frequently act in ways that
affirm the state’s violent ordering powers, however contradictory that may
seem, given that they are also likely to be victimised by those same powers
(Caldeira 2000) or resort to the self-help justice of vigilantism and lynching
(Goldstein 2005). As Gutmann (2002: 115) argues, this kind of observation
should alert us to further difficulties in Scott’s characterization of the politi-
cal astute subaltern actor of an all-seeing ‘infrapolitics’ kept under control
simply through repression. Yet it should not blind us to the subterranean pos-
sibilities of diffuse forms of ‘infrapolitical’ life. As he himself demonstrates
in a discussion framed by the fact that many urban working class people in
Mexico City found it hard to identify with the struggles of indigenous people
from Chiapas, the fact that people see themselves as ‘different’, see their
problems as ‘different’, and advocate different strategies for solving them,
does not mean that they cannot have debates about politics and social justice
that slowly transform political culture and undermine the basis of existing
hegemonies (Gutmann 2002: 136).

Power in political anthropology
85
What is arguably still missing from a good deal of the anthropology of
power is the side of Gramsci’s original concept of hegemony that focused on
the political dynamics of historical blocs as unstable coalitions of class and
other forces, such as military and religious elites. The focus of the Foucault-
and Agamben-inspired anthropologies of the state on the materiality of power
analysed through state-making practices is useful but still relatively narrow in
scope. Gramsci urged communist militants and left intellectuals to understand
the ‘feelings’ and ‘elemental passions’ of ‘the popular element’, since knowl-
edge without understanding was politically useless (Crehan 2002: 206-7).
This did not amount to an injunction to communists to become ethnogra-
phers, and it was accompanied by an insistence that it was the job of intellec-
tuals to chart the contours of the new society and convince the ‘popular ele-
ment’ of its desirability. Yet it was a call to understand how people live their
class situations. It is not, however, enough to remain in the life-world of sub-
alterns, or even contemplate the processes of structural power that involve
millions. We do need to put the whole of politics back into political anthro-
pology, albeit in a culturally aware manner, if we are to go beyond ‘hope’
and the Promethean illusion of ‘speaking truth to power’.
References
Abélès, M., 1988. Modern political ritual. Current Anthropology, 29(3), 391-404.
Abrams, P., 1988. Notes on the difficulty of studying the state (1977). Journal of His-
torical Sociology, 1(1), 58-89.
Abu-Lughod, L., 1990. The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power
through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41-55.
Adams, R.N., 1970. Cruxifixion by power: essays on Guatemalan social structure,
1944-1966. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Agamben, G., 1998. Homo sacer: sovereignty and bare life. Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Agamben, G., 2005. State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Banerjee, M., 2000. The Pathan unarmed: opposition & memory in the North West
Frontier. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Barrett, S.R., Stokholm, S. and Burke, J., 2001. The idea of power and the power of
ideas: a review essay. American Anthropologist, 103(2), 468-80.
Basch, L.G., Glick-Schiller, N. and Szanton Blanc, C., 1994. Nations unbound: trans-
national projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states,
Langhorne: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers.
Birman, P. and Lehmann, D., 1999. Religion and the media in a battle for ideological
hegemony: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and TV Globo in Bra-
zil. Bulletin of Latin American research, 18(2), 145-64.
Brown, M., 1996. On resisting resistance. American Anthropologist, 98(4), 729-
35.

John Gledhill
86
Bucci-Glucksman, C., 1978. Gramsci y el estado: hacia una teoría materialista de la
filosofía. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores.
Burdick, J., 2005. Why is the black evangelical movement growing in Brazil? Journal
of Latin American Studies, 37(2), 311-32.
Caldeira, T.P., 2000. City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in Sao Paulo.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cannadine, D. and Price, S., eds., 1987. Rituals of royalty: power and ceremonial in
traditional societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chagnon, N.A., 1968. Yanomamö: the fierce people. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
Collins, J., 2004. X marks the future of Brazil: protestant ethics and bedeviling mixtures in
a Brazilian cultural heritage center. In: A. Shryock, ed. Off stage/on display: intimacy
and ethnography in the age of public culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L., 1991. Of revelation and revolution. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L., 2000. Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a sec-
ond coming. Public Culture, 12(2), 291-343.
Comaroff, J., 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a
South African people. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Corrigan, P. & Sayer, D., 1985. The great arch: English state formation as cultural
revolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crehan, K., 2002. Gramsci, culture and anthropology. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Dantas Neto, P.F., 2006. Tradição, autocracia e carisma: a política de Antônio Car-
los Magalhães na modernizacão da Bahia (1954-1974). Belo Horizonte: Univer-
sidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Das, V. and Poole, D. eds., 2004. Anthropology in the margins of the state. Santa Fe:
School of American Research Press.
Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Farmer, P., 2003. Pathologies of power: health, human rights, and the new war on the
poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferguson, J. & Gupta, A., 2002. Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neolib-
eral governmentality. American Ethnologist, 29(4), 981-1002.
Ferguson, J., 1990. The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticization, and
bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, R.B. 1999. A Savage encounter: Western contact and the Yanomami war
complex. In: R. B. Ferguson and N. Whitehead, eds. War in the tribal zone: ex-
panding states and indigenous warfare. 2nd edition. Santa Fe: School of Ameri-
can Research Press.
Fletcher, R., 2001. What are we fighting for? Rethinking resistance in a Pewenche
community in Chile. Journal of Peasant Studies, 28(3), 37-66.
Foucault, M., 1979. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Fry, P., 1995. O que a Cinderela negra tem a dizer sobre a ‘politica racial’ no Brasil.
Revista USP Sāo Paulo 28, 122-35.

Power in political anthropology
87
Gledhill, J., 2000. Power and its disguises: anthropological perspectives on politics.
2nd edition. London: Pluto Press.
Goldstein, D.M., 2005. Flexible justice: neoliberal violence and ‘self-help’ security in
Bolivia. Critique of Anthropology, 25(4), 389-411.
Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J., eds., 1997. Culture, power, place: explorations in critical
anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gupta, A. and Sharma, A., 2006. Globalization and postcolonial states. Current An-
thropology, 47(2), 277-307.
Gupta, A., 1995. Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of poli-
tics, and the imagined state. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375-402.
Gutmann, M., 2002. The romance of democracy: compliant defiance in contemporary
Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Habermas, J., 1996. Between facts and norms, trans. William Rehg. Cambridge Mas-
sachusetts and London: MIT Press.
Hale, C., 2002. Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the
politics of identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies, 34(3), 485-
524.
Harrison, S., 1993. The mask of war: violence, ritual, and the self in Melanesia. Man-
chester: Manchester University Press.
Harvey, D., 1989. The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cul-
tural change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Harvey, D., 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ickes, S., 2005. Adorned with the mix of faith and profanity that intoxicates the peo-
ple: the festival of the Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1930-1954.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 24(2), 181-200.
Joseph, G.M. and Nugent, D., eds., 1994. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution
and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kapferer, B., 1988. Legends of people, myths of state: violence, intolerance, and po-
litical culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press.
Kearney, M., 1996. Reconceptualizing the peasantry: anthropology in global perspec-
tive. Boulder: Westview Press.
Kebede, A. S., 2011. Habitus. In: K. Dowding, ed. The encyclopaedia of power. Lon-
don: Sage.
Keesing, R.M. 1994. Theories of culture revisited. In: R Borofsky, ed., Assessing cul-
tural anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Keesing, R.M., 1992. Custom and confrontation: the Kwaio struggle for cultural au-
tonomy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Kertzer, D.I., 1988. Ritual, politics and power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kremer, E.W., 2005. Spectacle and the staging of power in Brazilian neo-
Pentecostalism. Latin American Perspectives, 32(1), 95-120.
Kuper, A., 2003. The return of the native. Current Anthropology, 44(3), 389-95.
Kurtz, D.V., 1996. Hegemony and anthropology: Gramsci, exegeses, reinterpreta-
tions. Critique of Anthropology, 16(2), 103-35.
Lomnitz-Adler, C., 1992. Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexi-
can national space. Berkeley: University of California Press.

John Gledhill
88
Marcus, A., 2003. Imaginary worlds: the last years of Eric Wolf. Social Anthropology,
11(1), 113-27.
Marcus, G.E., ed., 1983. Elites: ethnographic issues. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
Mitchell, T., 1990. Everyday metaphors of power. Theory and Society, 19(5), 545-
77.
Moore, D.S., 1998. Subaltern struggles and the politics of place: remapping resistance
in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. Cultural Anthropology, 13(3), 344-81.
Mosse, D., 2005. Cultivating development: an ethnography of aid policy and practice.
London: Pluto Press.
Nash, J.C., 1989. From tank town to high tech: the clash of community and industrial
cycles. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Navaro-Yashin, Y., 2002. Faces of the state: secularism and public life in Turkey.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nelson, D.M. 2005. Life during wartime: Guatemala, vitality, conspiracy, milieu. In:
J. Inda, ed. Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality and life poli-
tics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Nugent, D., 1997. Modernity at the edge of empire: state, individual, and nation in the
Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nuijten, M., 2003. Power, community and the state: the political anthropology of or-
ganisation in Mexico. London: Pluto Press.
Ong, A., 1999. Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Ong, A., 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Ortner, S.B., 1995. Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 37(1), 173-93.
Pansters, W. 1997. Theorizing political culture in modern Mexico. In: W. Pansters,
ed. Citizens of the pyramid: essays on Mexican political culture. Amsterdam:
Thela Publishers.
Parés, L.N., 2006. A formação do candomblé. História e ritual da nação jeje na Ba-
hia. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp.
Ramos, A.R., 1998. Indigenism: ethnic politics in Brazil. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Rose, N., 1999. Powers of freedom: reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Roseberry, W. 1994. Hegemony and the language of contention. In: G.M. Joseph and
D. Nugent, eds., Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotia-
tion of modern rule in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rubin, J.W., 1996. Decentering the regime: culture and regional politics in Mexico.
Latin American Research Review, 31(3), 85-126.
Sahlins, M., 2002. Waiting for Foucault, still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Sansone, L., 2004. Negritude sem etnicidade. Salvador and Rio de Janeiro: Edufba
and Pallas.
Scott, J.C., 1985. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New
Haven: Yale University Press.

Power in political anthropology
89
Scott, J.C., 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press.
Scott, J.C., 1998 Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human con-
dition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sen, K. and Stivens, M., eds., 1998. Gender and power in affluent Asia. New York:
Routledge.
Sheriff, R.E., 2001. Dreaming equality: color, race and racism in urban Brazil. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Shore, C. & Nugent, S.L., eds., 2002. Elite cultures: anthropological perspectives.
London: Routledge.
Spencer, J., 1997. Post-colonialism and the political imagination. The Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute, 3(1), 1-19.
Taussig, M., 1991. The nervous system. London: Routledge.
Taussig, M., 1997. The magic of the state. London: Routledge.
Trouillot, M.S., 2001. The anthropology of the state in the age of globalization. Cur-
rent Anthropology, 42(1), 125-138.
Tsing, A., 2000. The global situation. Cultural Anthropology, 15(3), 327-360.
Van De Port, M., 2005. Candomblé in pink, green and black: re-scripting the Afro-
Brazilian religious heritage in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia. Social An-
thropology, 13(1), 3-26.
Vincent, J., 2002. Introduction. In: J.Vincent, ed. The anthropology of politics: a rea-
der in ethnography, theory and critique. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Wolf, E.R., 1969. Peasant wars of the 20th century. London: Faber and Faber.
Wolf, E.R., 1999. Envisioning power: ideologies of dominance and crisis. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wolf, E.R., 2001. Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern world.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Žižek, S., 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London and New York: Verso.

Chapter 4
Foundations of Organization Power1
Stewart Clegg
Foundations
Foundation is a term that enters English in the late 15th century in the sense
of a ‘solid base of a structure’. The meaning of foundations is usually ren-
dered as a part of a building, usually below the ground, and thus unseen, that
transfers and distributes the weight of the building onto the ground; or it is
seen as the basis of something such as a theory or an idea, or, perhaps, a fab-
ric to which other pieces of fabric are sewn in patchwork or appliqué. Foun-
dations are typically unseen in everyday functioning; are regarded as basic,
and seen as essentially a device for anchoring those constructions that cover
them. However, as the archaeological record of palaces, cathedrals, castles,
and sundry other structures indicate, foundations were built long before the
specific term that denotes them. Similarly, I want to suggest that the founda-
tions of organizations were in place archaeologically long before there devel-
oped a discourse to address them. Moreover, I want to suggest that there has
been a degree of uncoupling between the discourses and the foundations.
Hence we cannot investigate the foundations of power in organizations sim-
ply in the conventional terms that theories of power provide, as I have elabo-
rated elsewhere (Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips 2006).
Conventional approaches to power stress the relative bargaining strengths
of different actors represented by the sets of resources they command, con-
structed around a notion of the resource dependencies that result from the in-
terdependencies inherent within open systems of exchange. Such foundations
are usually conceived in relatively time-and-motionless epigenetic terms:
cause and effect are matters of virtual simultaneity in which there is no power
at a distance.
Against accounts of causality that stress an epigenetic conception, I wish
to stress an account of causal powers conceived in terms of dispositional
properties or tendencies embedded in structures and agents. Power needs to
be approached through such terms – applied to the attempted production, his-
1 First published in the Journal of Power, (now Journal of Political Power) 2009, vol. 2(1):
35-64.

92 Stewart Clegg
torically, of phenomena such as stable circuits of employees well-tempered in
body, soul, mind, and categories of language; capital that can be plausibly
constructed so as to act effectively and positively as a source of valorization,
and spatial relations that effectively bind together methods and narratives for
the exploitation of capital and labour.
Tempering the employees
In part, as Perrow (1986b) suggests, the theoretical story told by economic
historians such as Chandler (1977) captures some of the history of what actu-
ally happened as large-scale organizations emerged in the business sphere in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States. But it misses a
great deal, especially with regard to the ‘tempering’ of the employee. By
tempering I mean the creation of predictable, routine and compliant agency.
And this is where I believe the foundations of modern organization (as a verb
rather than a plural noun) reside.
The representation of well-tempered managers as essentially powerless
but authoritative, with only the renegades being power actors, is a view that
pops up all over the theoretical map. In principal-agency theory, for instance,
the problem is that managers do not accord with shareholder interests. Man-
agers either should be subject to close surveillance, which is costly, or, more
efficiently, their interests should be aligned with those of shareholders so that
their inherently different interests are reconciled (Jensen and Meckling 1976).
Large bundles of stock options are usually seen to do the trick. In transaction
costs analysis, those agents that owners of capital have to rely on in order to
manage their investments are seen as inherently untrustworthy, as likely to
transact with guile, or cheat, the investors. Transaction cost theory is built
from four basic ideas: uncertainty, small-numbers bargaining, bounded ra-
tionality, and opportunism (Williamson 1981). Uncertainty we have already
encountered and it is none too different in transaction cost analysis; it signals
a lack of control of phenomena outside the reach of the owner of capital.
Small-numbers bargaining arises when an owner enters into temporally bind-
ing contracts with employees, contractors or customers. Once the discipline
of the market is relaxed then these agents can cheat by seeking to renegotiate
the dependencies that have been entered into from within the privileged con-
tractual position. Bounded rationality and opportunism are closely related.
Bounded rationality creates a problem because of opportunism. Lacking per-
fect foresight and knowledge means that one might enter into relations where
the other agency can act opportunistically, with guile, as the theory says.
Market failures, which Perrow (1986b) has noted tend to be the norm, result

Foundations of Organization Power 93
from such situations. Uncertainty, small numbers, bounded rationality, and
opportunism all make the conditions of the perfectly competitive or neo-
classical market difficult to achieve; hence, where markets, theorized as the
natural order, cannot prevail, then organization – or ‘hierarchy’ – provides a
substitute, one in which the constant threat of guileful transacting can only be
countered by backwards and forwards integration. Transparency of contracts
increases; opportunism diminishes; bounded rationality chips away at uncer-
tainties, and transaction costs are minimized through internalization of
agency. Following the assumptions of rational choice theory we might say
that the bargaining strength of those agencies internalized within the organi-
zation is diminished due to their being incorporated under the surveillance of
the agents who are contracting with them. Implicitly, the assumption is that in
a free and voluntary exchange of labor, time for income inducements and
contributions must be in balance; otherwise an exchange would not take
place.
There is a certain historical familiarity in much of the twentieth century
debate about principles and agency and guileful transaction. The chronic lack
of trust in managers that is evident in these representations has been seen be-
fore, in the nineteenth century; then, however, the object of scrutiny and
scorn were not those who worked so much as those who shirked – the indi-
gent. A concern with schemes of management for the more efficient organi-
zation of work was not some new-fangled interest of the late nineteenth cen-
tury. In some respects, the foundations for systematic reflection on work
were laid down in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Social re-
formers had long sought to use work as a cure for indigent or idle hands
(Ryan 2004; Ryan 2007). Reformers had their eye on work and its design as a
privileged space through which social reform might be constructed. The fo-
cus of early social reformers was not on those who worked but those who did
not.
The most notable reformer, Jeremy Bentham, envisioned a system of
workhouses in which to incarcerate those to whom work did not come natu-
rally. These were the members of the dangerous, unruly pauper class – the
vagabonds and ruffians who roamed the countryside, unattached to land or
masters, widely regarded by most of polite society and the respectable poor
as being without skills other than those of thievery and trickery. Their crimes
and misdemeanors saw them become felons in Britain’s overcrowded jails,
prison hulks or be dispatched to the penal colonies of New South Wales and
other antipodean destinations (Hughes 1987).
The poor were an object of moral scrutiny for the simple reason that their
propensity to form a dangerous mob was the major source of domestic moral
panic, and had been since at least the sixteenth century and the development
of land enclosures. These made the poor wandering and dispossessed rather

94 Stewart Clegg
than fixed destitutes. Vagabondage was the social problem from the seven-
teenth century onwards and the Poor Laws – subject to frequent reform and
attempts at their improvement – were the instruments designed to handle and
manage it. Much politics surrounded the administration of the Poor Laws,
their repeal and reform (Court 1962), the fulcrum of which hinged on who
should pay, in which borough it should be dispensed, who was eligible to re-
ceive it and where, what should the tests of eligibility be, and how might
those who were subject to these poor laws be reformed so that they no longer
fell under their sway? In fact, minimizing the number of the latter was the
disciplinary intent of these laws: speaking of the New Poor Law of 1834,
Poovey (1995: 111) notes that it succeeded where its predecessors had failed
“because it incited in the poor the fear that all freedoms would be abrogated
if one acknowledged the need for relief.” The workhouse became the chief
instrument of policy: To receive poor relief the vagabond had to renounce
wandering ways and accept the discipline of the workhouse where, in return
for work, they might receive public assistance.
Spurring the reform of the Poor Laws were robust political debates. Utili-
tarian philosophers argued that the overall utility or benefit produced by an
action ought to be the standard by which we judge the worth or goodness of
moral and legal action and that the principle of usefulness must be elevated
above all else in order to minimize human misery and maximize human hap-
piness.2 They reasoned that assistance to the indigent few was justified by the
needs of the many for an orderly life. Such order was to be founded on prin-
ciples of economic competition.
Bentham was absolutely sure that it was necessary to “sequester certain
classes of subject within an enclosed space which is cut out of the wider soci-
ety, a controlled space where they could be subjected to techniques of train-
ing and character-formation” (Ryan 2004: 134). What Bentham proposed was
a program for distilling a certain mode of rationality into widespread con-
sciousness and use. He wanted to produce individuals who would think as
liberal subjects, as people capable of calculating their best interests and act-
ing on them, and he devised a specific means to achieve this end. In this way,
he sought to abolish the mentality of the pauper through reforming character
and creating individual effort in work. Honest laborers should see the work-
house as an abomination. It not only rewarded indigence but also taught vice
(Ryan 2004: 133-134; see also Ryan 2007).
What was required, thought Bentham, was a system that would produce
administrative certainty and perfection for society as a whole by categorizing
and reforming the classes of vagrancy and vagabondage. The classes needed
2 The most notable Utilitarians were the eighteenth century English philosopher Jeremy Ben-
tham and his nineteenth century intellectual heir John Stuart Mill.

Foundations of Organization Power 95
to be differentiated and categorized because pauperism had many different
causes and each cause should be subject to a different program. The underly-
ing genus that was being classified was the disinclination of indigent paupers
to be handled and thus, to be a hand. The problem was one of management:
why did poverty not act as a spur to productivity amongst certain classes of
the poor (Dean 1991; 1992)? The reason, Bentham suggested, was because
work was not the most attractive option. Certain classes of indigent people
would prefer to live at the expense of others, from the fruits of others’ labors,
rather than live off the fruit of their own labor. They were poor and feckless.
In this era to be designated as a pauper was to be judged as lacking in moral
fiber; being weak, the state could and should warrant intervention, correction
and rehabilitation of the indigent3.
Bentham’s aim was to create a universal labor theory of value which,
through considering the efficient causes of indigence, the nature, degree, and
duration of the inability to work, and the mode of relief, would place the
whole economy on a sound workmanlike basis. These systematic classifica-
tions expressed a centralized power that fixed the social, cultural and moral
grounds for economic management of those on the margins of society.
All types of indigent hands could be confined in the poorhouse and, once
there, be subject to employment in a widespread division of labor. Exposing
vagabonds to institutionalized moral and productive correction was intended
to induce workmanlike ideals. O’Neill notes that as the supply of surplus la-
bor grew, and grew more disaffected, “houses of correction became even
more punitive” and work in them “limited to intimidating and useless tasks so
that no one would ever enter them voluntarily” (O’Neill 1986: 51). Once put
to work, the poor would stay in the workhouse until they earned sufficient
funds to cover the costs of their relief in the institution. It was a self-
liberation principle, showing that the individual subject was capable, respon-
sible and worthy. They would not receive relief unless they had met the daily
requirement of their labor, showing that they could fulfill the essential duties
of a liberal subject – to work and earn productively. Bentham’s philosophy
elevated the principle of usefulness above all else, and used it to provide a
3 In short, the categories of indigence amounted to the following: Insane hands, through in-
firmity; Imperfect hands, through infirmity; Unripe hands (children), through the gradual-
ness of evanescence; Sick hands, occasioning an inability to work; Child-burdened hands,
through procreation; Lazy hands; Superseded hands; Out-of-place (or unemployed) hands,
due to temporary loss of work ; Stigmatized hands, whose inability to obtain work are due
to badness of character, such as thieves, forgers, and smugglers; Suspected hands (those
who might be guilty of something but whose guilt is unproven); Unavowed-employment
hands, such as gypsies and deserters; Strange hands, such as foreigners and travelers; and
Past-prosperity hands, including Decayed-gentility hands, whose loss of property has
thrown them onto a labor market of which they have no prior experience, having lived off
property previously.

96 Stewart Clegg
new meaning for efficiency, as an ‘efficient cause’, a predicate for causes that
will shape a desired effect.4
When Bentham began to think about how one might design a rational en-
terprise, one in which the utility of oversight could be maximized, he came
up with a design for something that he called a Panopticon: it was to be an ef-
ficient cause. The Panopticon was a complex architectural design for a work-
place, adapted from his brother’s factory in Russia. It consisted of a central
observation tower from which any supervisor, without themselves being
seen, could see the bodies arranged in the various cells of the building. In
each cell, the occupants were backlit by natural light, isolated from one an-
other by walls and subject to scrutiny by the observer in the tower. Control
was to be maintained by the constant sense that unseen eyes might be watch-
ing those under surveillance. You had nowhere to hide, nowhere to be pri-
vate, and no way of knowing if you were being watched at any particular
time5.
4 After Bentham, the notion of efficiency developed additional utilitarian meaning: it denoted
being cost-effective. In his writings on political economy, Mill was concerned with the
greatest efficiency of labor (Plamenatz 1949) to be attained best by a division of labor, so-
phisticated use of machines, and, only as necessary, skilled people – because of their
greater costs in the labor market. Efficiency was not an end in itself so much as a means to
maximizing public welfare: an efficient society would be a happier society.
5 The Panopticon’s ingenuity resided in the economy of effort required to administer it, once
it was designed and built. Literally, it was a means for making work as visible as it could
be, by virtue of the supervisor seeing as much as possible. It was the particular relation be-
tween the overseer and the seen that was significant in the Panopticon. Those who are being
seen were scrutinized in ways that did not enable them to see that they were under surveil-
lance (see Hannah 1997, for a good account; also see Ignatieff 1978). The situation was
structured such that obedience in and through productive activity seemed the worker’s only
rational option, not knowing whether or not they were being watched, but obliged to as-
sume that they were. Michel Foucault (1979) is responsible for the contemporary interest in
Bentham’s Panopticon as a unique instrument of reform and governance. The principles
embodied in the Panopticon had widespread influence. The key principle was inspection by
an all-seeing but unseen being – rather like a secular version of God. And it did not matter
if the inmates were actually being watched at any specific time – they would never know –
but they did know that they were always at risk of being watched. The principle of inspec-
tion or surveillance instilled itself in the moral conscience of those who were being over-
seen. The aim of Panopticon was to produce a self-disciplining person subject to an asym-
metrical experience of seeing, but not being seen, of knowing you were possibly being
watched, but not when or if you were. It was designed to produce employees socialized into
submitting their will to the task at hand; the alternative to imposed self-adjustment was the
fear of being corrected and disciplined. The Panopticon was not just a system of surveil-
lance but also a system of records and rules, comprising disciplinary power. The authorities
would have a complete file on the behavior of each inmate. There would be rules governing
timetables, the nature of work, and the authority to exercise surveillance. Disciplinary
power was embedded in the small things of everyday working life, the routines, the tiny de-
tails, especially as these were regulated through training and practices of examination that
sought to constrain human action into useful aptitudes, framed through what Foucault

Foundations of Organization Power 97
The panopticon was a component of a liberal political program that
thought it was largely unnecessary for government to intervene directly into
the economic machinery of production and exchange; the main battlefields of
liberal political economy were phenomena such as the Corn Laws and the
Poor Laws, for it was through these instruments of regulation that the costs,
and the necessity of labor, respectively, were administered. The Poor Laws
“played a key role in establishing the conditions under which the laws of po-
litical economy might operate to best effect” (Rose 1999: 70). They created a
threshold of necessity for work through the principles of eligibility in such a
way that, literally, only work could make one free. But within work freedom
was not explicitly regulated, except as the various nineteenth century Factory
Acts (most of which were ineffective as the Inspectorate was so limited) were
implemented6. Other than the gross limits on the age, gender and hours of
employees that might be employed in various activities, the limits to exploita-
tion or freedom in the workplace were, on the whole, at the discretion of in-
dividual masters of capital or their delegates.
The pre-modern world of organization was characterized by discretion
concerning freedom and exploitation. The right to organize work had not yet
been thought through systematically. It was enough that work should prevail,
be made necessary; how it was conducted was of less explicit concern. In the
earliest days of the new factory organizations of the nineteenth century, con-
temporary observers observed that the “manufacturing population … new in
its habits of thoughts and action” was “formed by the circumstances of its
condition, with little instruction, and less guidance from external sources”
(Thompson 1968: 209). During the nineteenth century, as recorded by Weber
(1976) and Thompson (1968), owners and managers sought workers who
were instructed and guided spiritually by religious, often Protestant, ethics.
Sometimes, as Spybey (1984) recounts, the moral machinery was supported
by a social organization of the built environment that facilitated its surveil-
(1979) termed ‘normalizing judgments’: the establishment of limits of accepted behavior
and the standards to be achieved. It was not just in and through the panopticon that nor-
malization occurred: in the early twentieth century in Japan, as Littler (1982) describes, co-
erced labor was kept in factory dormitories; indeed, as the occasional news story demon-
strates, tragic fires kill workers in Chinese factory dormitories, demonstrating that the prac-
tice still persists in China. Xinhua News Agency reported an incident in which a serious fire
broke out in a factory in Zhangzhou city in east China’s Fujian province on Saturday March
14, 2005, killing six people and injuring two others. The fire broke out in a paper products
factory in Beixitou village and soon engulfed the factory dormitories in which dozens of
people were housed (see http://news.surfwax. com/worldcities/files/Zhangzhou_China.
html, retrieved March 5 2005).
6 That was why the issue most discussed in substantive detail in Marx’s (1976) Capital was
the regulation of organizations by various Factory Acts: they were a novel frontier of con-
trol and intervention.

98 Stewart Clegg
lance, such as factory estates of workers’ houses. But rarely did it intervene
systematically in relations between master and employee; that was a project
of modernity yet to unfold.
Early modernity and management: power and the
political economy of the body
Taking etymology as a guide, it seems that there is something distinctive in
the emergence of management as a characteristic of the modern era, an era
that literally means ‘of our time’. The literal meaning is too imprecise, how-
ever. More specifically, one can think of modernity as a specific quality that
first emerged in Western civilization (Sayer 1991). In general, it is a period
of time and a quality of culture that the world has been experiencing for at
least the last two centuries. While there are many different ways of dating,
defining, and characterizing modernity, we will take the modern world as be-
ing born at the point where the individual emerges as a conscious reflecting
and reflected subject opposed to the “universal, social body of customs and
laws” (Kolb 1986: 67). Bauman (1997: 1) characterizes modernity as an ob-
session with order. Modernity, among other things, represents the cutting off
of the individual from traditional ways of life; it inscribes the use of reason to
govern and limit uncertainty.
As far as one is concerned with management, the maturation of moder-
nity is marked, programmatically, by the work of F. W. Taylor, for he was
responsible for creating the individual and responsible employee not just as a
creature of religion – the Protestant ethic – or habit – but as a consciously de-
signed utilitarian project. Taylor’s (1911) preface to The Principles of Scien-
tific Management makes this quite clear when he stresses the need for na-
tional efficiency. His utilitarianism can be seen in a number of characteristics
of his thought. First, it is teleological in its orientation to means: what is im-
portant is securing the desired consequences. Second, in Taylor’s philosophy,
actions can be judged only by their consequences: a dogged empiricism is al-
lied to an unquestioned grasp of the ends to be served. Third, ends are de-
fined in terms of efficiency (primarily for the factory owners) but are repre-
sented as the common good. Taylor took utilitarianism from a program for
dealing with the marginal and abnormal, the other, and transposed it into a
program for dealing with the everyday and the normal, the worker.
At the end of the nineteenth century the conditions of possibility for
building new practices and knowledge with which to discipline bodies pro-
duced a new political economy of the body. Foucault (1979: 28) discussed
the development of a political anatomy where “power seeps into the very

Foundations of Organization Power 99
grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures,
their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other peo-
ple”, in relation to earlier forms of drill: the bodies of marching soldiers and
the posture of school children became cases for analysis. With Taylor, their
non-institutionalized parents, if they worked in the factory, could also be re-
formed through an inspectorial urge.
Taylor’s concern with productivity and performativity shifted the focus
on hands from the margins of society, from indigent trash, to the key centers
of employment relations constructed in the market economy. It was this that
provided the intellectual and social context within which management was
first defined. It was a context riddled with power at every turn: Assumptions
about the natural order of things underlay Taylor’s idea that some were born
to manage and direct, while the fate of others was to be managed and di-
rected: efficient management was based on reforming power/knowledge rela-
tions, taking them out of the hands of the workers and systematically refash-
ioning them so that they could be placed in the hands of management. Effi-
cient management exercised no discretion but should merely obey the pre-
cepts of science and respect a liberal mentality, much as should efficient em-
ployees in general and once the one best way was devised, any deviation
from it should be regarded as anathema: the purity of power consisted in its
eternal return as repetition, as the same routine.
Power – getting others to do what one wanted them to do, even against
their will – was inscribed as the normalcy of the new system of scientific
management. In this system one should always do just as one was told; one
should never be where one does not belong, and what one should do and
where one should be were not to be left to chance but should be determined,
authoritatively, by the sciences of productive efficiency and management es-
tablishing new rules for workplace design and conduct. The new system of
rules could be denoted as a regime of impersonal authority which served no
interest other than the general interest in utilitarian efficiency, an interest
from which all, with the exception of lazy people who refused to change their
behavior, might prosper. The poor but honest laborer could enrich himself
through the dignity of his own exertions in a system designed to maximize
the rewards that flowed. So could the employer in the counting house, amass-
ing profits from the same principles. In principle, all would be for the best in
the best of all possible worlds.
Taylor’s utilitarian calculus was oriented to the problem of making em-
ployed, rather than idle, hands busier in the service of the greatest good of na-
tional efficiency and for the better reward of both hands and the businesses
that employed them. In fact, one of Taylor’s biographers, Kanigel (1997),
suggests that efficiency became iconic for almost all American, and increas-
ingly other industrialized nations’ organizations. It had to be worshipped,

100 Stewart Clegg
feted, and widely represented in cultural artifacts of the age. Taylor’s (1911)
Principles of Scientific Management was such an artifact. It helped persuade
people that efficiency was desirable as an end in itself and that all legitimate
means should be oriented towards it.
The innovation with which Taylor is most associated is the linking of ef-
ficiency to power through the medium of the human body: at the core of the
new meta-routines that systematic or scientific management ushered in was
the efficient use of the human body. The program sought to drill efficiency
into the nature of being, starting with the individual body (anatomical poli-
tics), moving to the collective body of/in the organization (bio politics), and
generally percolating into the societal body by economizing society (social
politics) – all in the name of efficiency. Returning to the sedimentation meta-
phor here, it should be apparent that the efficiency program occurred through
the historical constitution of the way things ‘ought’ to be by a ‘new’ power
elite of agents who emerged with the development of managerial forms of
capitalism. These programs were rarely if ever implemented as designed, of
course; they featured as guides for the dominant imagination – to be further
constituted through recurring and disciplined practices that were built both on
the foundations laid down and the effects, not always anticipated, that these
had on those being re-formed.
Efficiency means achieving desired effects or results with minimum
waste of time and effort; through minimizing the ratio between effective or
useful output to the total input in any system. Taylor started with a practical
problem: how workmen might best use lathes to cut metal when they were
powered by the new invention of electricity. As Jacques (1996: 105-106)
notes, Taylor’s innovations with the lathe were a result of applying mathe-
matics, creating quantitative tables, and using slide rules to shape new prac-
tices.
The central focus of Taylor’s system was the body of the individual laborer
and its relation not only to other bodies but also to the material artifacts that
formed the laborer’s immediate work environment. What Taylor produced may
be characterized as a political economy of the body7. As such, Taylor was the
symbolic icon and the visible point of an epoch and a mentality. In this way,
the overall contribution was made by a broad movement in which several indi-
viduals made an important contribution to building this management of bodies
(Taylor, of course, but also the Gilbreths, Münsterberg, Gantt, and others who
responded to the structural conditions provided by the new factory system
powered by electricity, by producing new mechanisms for managing bodies in
the factory and beyond: [see Nelson 1980; Watts 1991]).
7 Even perceptive observers of the body, such as Dale (2001) and Turner (1984) fail to rec-
ognize Taylor’s contribution in terms of a political economy of the body.

Foundations of Organization Power 101
Canguilhem (1992: 63) points out that Taylorism established a mode of
work premised not only on the subjection of the workers’ body to the supe-
rior intelligence of the managers’ mind, but also to industrial machinery: the
human body was measured as if it functioned like a machine. For the former,
Taylorism represented a working out of Cartesian dualism – the split between
mind and body – as a social relation, as Braverman (1974) was to argue. But
it is how this was done that interests us here: it was through new disciplines
focused on the individual human body, demanding “the optimization of its
capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness
and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic con-
trols”, (Foucault 1982: 139) that Taylor’s (1911) practice sought to produce
its effects. The new disciplines, the subjection of the body to new rigors,
were clearly justified by productive economic practices. Foucault defined a
discipline as a “unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘politi-
cal’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force” (Foucault 1979:
221). It was in this context that Foucault introduced the idea of anatomical
politics, related to the disciplinary regime of the individual body.
Taylor was the founder of the discipline and associated disciplinary re-
gime dealing with the design of machines and equipment for human use, and
the determination of the appropriate human behaviors for the efficient opera-
tion of the machines, which has subsequently and variously been called hu-
man factors, human engineering, and ergonomics (the latter of which could,
in fact, be seen as an example of what Foucault [1979] refers to as ‘bio-
power’ – the government of the social body – while Taylor was more con-
cerned with the management of individual actions rather than the use of
knowledge and categorizations to manage populations). Discipline targeted
the human body, with the goal of simultaneously exploiting it and rendering
it docile and cooperative. For instance, in his experiments with shovels at
Bethlehem Steel, Taylor focused on the body of the men; for instance, he told
a worker that the most efficient method of shoveling was to put the right arm
down by the right hip, hold the shovel on the left leg, and throw the weight of
the body forward when digging the shovel into a pile, instead of using the
arms and just pushing the shovel into a pile.
From Taylor’s point of view, the working body should be maximally pro-
ductive and minimally fatigued to become more efficient, a frame which very
much defined the legacy that he bequeathed to important followers such as the
Gilbreths, who developed his practice to innovative heights through the use of
time-lapsed photography, in a form of industrial futurism (Mandel 1989). It is
possible to provide a humanist gloss on Taylor as a reformer who aimed to
eliminate inefficient and excessively debilitating practices in industry, by lay-
ing the foundations for a sophisticated disciplinary apparatus for productive
technological bodies (see, for example, Amar 1920). In short, we might say that

102 Stewart Clegg
Taylor produces a political economy of technologies for the body. Political, be-
cause it is a deliberate, reformist intervention into the body politic of the fac-
tory or steel works; an economy, because the overarching aim is the achieve-
ment of efficiency, and technologies, because he develops a whole new system
of notation, measurement and representation of the body8. The most important
8 It was in seeking to define the limits to systematicity that control and power became key
elements: That which was uncontrollable, unexpected, unanticipated – in a word – uncer-
tainty – spoilt the systematic picture. Uncertainty became seen as the central resource con-
ferring power. On the eve of World War I, scientific management became the first big man-
agement fad, a source of innumerable new truths about work and its organization. The
truths were not uncontested. Opposition came largely from unsystematic managers, often
internal contractors (Littler 1982) who were averse to their present power being eroded by
the Planning Departments that Taylor favored. Union opposition grew, especially from the
AFL (American Federation of Labor), which supported the attempts by the International
Association of Machinists to have Taylor’s practices banned. The new system was adopted
in military arsenals and in naval yards in the period leading up to America’s involvement in
the First World War in 1917 (by which time Taylor had died – in 1915). In Du Pont’s pow-
der works managers discovered a direct relationship between efficiency and safety. Interest-
ingly, safety was not an issue that Taylor had considered. When two explosions occurred in
Du Pont’s powder works on the eve of its WWI expansion it not only hastened the firm’s
shift from efficiency to safety but also raised the possibility of a link between increasing ef-
ficiency and diminishing safety. The most notable arena of contest around Taylor’s ideas
occurred in the legislature. A special subcommittee of the US House of Representatives
was established from 1911-1912 to inquire into the Taylor system, especially as it was im-
plemented in the Watertown Arsenal (Aitken 1960): it was believed that industrial unrest
was being created by the adoption of the system. One small result of the enquiry was that
laws were passed banning the use of stopwatches by civil servants. Taylor was interviewed
extensively about his system and, controversial as it was, used these interviews as a plat-
form to promote his ideas. Taylor was not a popular figure, even amongst the nascent
community of management scholars. Many of those who saw themselves as having labored
for decades in similar endeavors, without the attention that Taylor attracted, were somewhat
disgruntled with his fame, while others, more nimble in using elements of Taylor’s ideas
and blending their own mix, made capital out of the fashion. Taylor’s intellectual predeces-
sors amongst the engineering fraternity opposed scientific management – they saw their
own programs as suffering in the wake of its notoriety and as lacking the branding that Tay-
lor had achieved. These were individuals such as Alexander Hamilton Church, Frank C.
Hudson, Leon Alford, and Dexter Kimball who had been associated with proselytizing ear-
lier approaches to systematic management (Shenhav 1999: 114 -116). Some sought to re-
form Taylor’s ideas: An important reformer of orthodox strategies was Henry L. Gantt who
developed welfare work policies (see Nelson and Campbell 1972). Other advocates of sys-
tematic management sought to put space between themselves and the controversies sur-
rounding Taylor. Lillian Gilbreth, together with her husband Frank, sought to differentiate
their program from Taylor’s, cleaning up the image of motion studies by taking out the em-
phasis on time, seeking to redefine it as benign and pro-worker human factor engineering
(Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1916), at least in their presentation of it as a discipline to workers;
for employers the efficiency arguments remained paramount. The Gilbreths introduced the
therblig (their name reversed) as the basic unit for motion studies – a micro-measure of mo-
tion. Taylor’s ideas – and those of his contemporaries such as the Gilbreth’s – spread rap-
idly, globally and unevenly in the period after the First World War (Clegg and Dunkerley

Foundations of Organization Power 103
of these new graphic technologies were developed to record previously unre-
corded physical processes like heart rate, muscular contraction, and, most im-
portantly, movement. Indeed, some of Taylor’s associates, such as the Gil-
breth’s, took his interest in body measurement to great extremes.
From disciplining the individual body to disciplining
collective dispositions
One thing that Taylor did not develop but which lifted the applicability of
some elements of his system to new heights, whilst seeing the abandonment
of much that he held dear, was the moving production line. In 1913, 30 years
after Taylor installed his first system, a revolution in manufacturing occurred
when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line as a new way of producing
automobiles, modeled on the Chicago slaughterhouses. The relations of
power in these organizations were shaped by ever more elaborate definitions
of routines, embedded less in traditional craft and practice but more in the
creation and specification of new workplace relations and routines. They
reached their zenith in the new workshops and factories of the automobile in-
dustry, especially the Ford Motor Company, which in the 1920s was seen as
the very harbinger of what modernity was all about. The power of mass pro-
duction was seen as the greatest productive power that had been unleashed by
the modern world. But behind the glittering automobiles, behind the assem-
bly lines of modern times, there was another more complex and subtle moral
machinery of power at work.
While it is important to know how much time each element requires to be
accomplished, other aspects of time study techniques were not appropriate for
assembly line manufacturing. Individual incentives were not appropriate be-
cause every operator was tied to the speed of the line and they were not needed
because of the discipline the line imposed. What remained from the Taylor sys-
tem was the elemental decomposition of jobs. Jobs were small, repetitive and
routine. In fact, routine became such a problem among Ford’s workers that, in
the first year of full assembly line operation, the company experienced about
900 percent turnover (see Williams, Haslam and Williams 1992). Between Oc-
tober 1912 and October 1913, Ford hired 54,000 workers in order to maintain a
work force of 13,000. The annual turnover rate settled at around 400 percent
and daily absenteeism ran between 10 and 20 percent. It was for this reason that
1980; Clegg et al 2006).The analytics of power, focused on a political economy of the
body, sought to create workers as precision instruments through the use of meta-routines.
We noted the importance of task decomposition, the reformation of tasks and their physical
undertaking according to methods, and the use of imposed sequences.

104 Stewart Clegg
on January 5. 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced the five-dollar, eight-
hour day for all production workers, irrespective of pieces produced (which
was determined by the speed of the line, anyway, not individual effort). What
the company announced was not a plan to pay workers an hourly rate equiva-
lent to five dollars a day but a plan that allowed workers to share in the com-
pany profits – which, in principle, would amount to a five dollar day. This rep-
resented a considerable sum of money for production work in contemporary
terms, doubling incomes and, with the possibilities afforded by hire-purchase, a
new innovation, meant that having consumer goods such as cars became some-
thing to whose ownership it was feasible to aspire.
To ensure only deserving workers received the money, in 1914 Ford es-
tablished the Sociological Department to administer the program and to in-
vestigate the home lives of workers (Marcus and Segal 1989: 236-8). It was a
remarkable example of an ultimately failed attempt to institute meta-routines
governing societal politics. The five-dollar day was designed to include only
those who were ‘worthy’ and who would “not debauch the additional
money”. The rules governing eligibility were demonstrating that, if one were
a man, one lived a clean, sober, industrious and thrifty life, while women had
to be ‘deserving’ and have some relatives solely dependent upon them. After
a probationary period, subject to a recommendation from their supervisor,
worker eligibility would be investigated. About 60 percent were found to be
eligible. Investigators from the Sociological Department visited workers’
homes and suggested ways to achieve the company’s standards for ‘better
morals,’ sanitary living conditions, and ‘habits of thrift and saving’. Employ-
ees who lapsed were removed from the system and given a chance to redeem
themselves. Long-term failure to meet Ford Motor Company standards re-
sulted in dismissal from the company9.
Of course, there was a degree of racism at work here as well, paralleling
Ford’s well documented anti-Semitism (Lee 1980): after the Civil War, black
people had been leaving the sharecropper society of the Deep South in
droves, fleeing a culture rooted in slavery. And, after hitting Highway 61,
they headed for the burgeoning factories of the north, in Chicago and Detroit,
in the latter of which Ford began hiring African Americans in large numbers
9 Meyer (1981) reports a 1917 Sociological Department report. Fifty-two investigators vis-
ited 77 districts throughout Detroit and its suburbs. Each district contained an average of
523 workers. Each investigator had an average caseload of 727 workers making 5.35 regu-
lar investigations each day, five ‘absentee calls’ and 15 ‘outside calls’. For each investiga-
tion Ford maintained a record consisting of every available source of information from
churches, civic organizations, and the government. The company wanted to know whether
or not the worker was purchasing a home, whether he had a savings account and whether he
had debt. It required the bank account number, name of the bank and balance of any ac-
counts; for debts, the company needed to know the holder of the debt, its reason and the
balance (Meyer 1981: 130).

Foundations of Organization Power 105
in 1915, paying them the same wages as his white employees. The material
basis of the jazz age for the many black people who headed north was work-
ing in the factories and assembly plants. By 1923, Ford employed 5,000 De-
troit-area black men, far more than in other plants.
The influx of black people into Northern cities and jobs was the occasion
for middle-class white anxieties. Indeed, at the time they were a source of
what Stanley Cohen (1972: 9) has referred to as a ‘moral panic’. A moral
panic occurs when some “episode, condition, person or group of persons” is
“defined as a threat to societal values and interests”. Such moral panics are
based on the perception that some individual or group, frequently a minority,
is dangerously deviant, and poses a menace to society. They often occur as a
result of a fear of a loss of control when adapting to significant changes.
Typically, as Cohen suggests, authorities create ‘stylized and stereotypical’
representations, raise moral fears, and ‘pronounce judgment’.
Moral panic fed into the work of Ford’s Sociological Department. They
wanted to ensure that Ford employed were sober, disciplined men, whose en-
ergies would be conserved and their minds wholly focused on the necessity
of being excellent five-dollar-a-day men. Workers who wasted money on
booze, dope, and vice were not welcome as Ford employees, as members of
the Ford family. Decent white folk knew the type of person most likely to be
wasteful of their energies and the kinds of excesses in which they would be
wasted. African-Americans, jazz, and dope became inexorably intertwined in
the popular imagination of, as well as some experience in, black culture. The
scapegoating of black cultures, such as jazz, for spreading marijuana usage
into white society was emblematic of a deep-seated paranoia.
Jazz received a fair amount of negative press in the late 1910s and then
became the object of a moral panic during the 1920s. Some whites feared
jazz because it was rooted in black culture, because it played a role in facili-
tating interracial contact, and because it symbolized, in racially coded terms,
the intrusion of popular tastes into the national culture … (Porter 2002: 9).
The moral panics that grew in the 1920s and 1930s around ‘reefer mad-
ness’ and ‘jazz’ were barely coded concerns for the contagion of white soci-
ety by black bodies and black culture. As Lopes (2005: 1468) suggests, from
the Jazz Age of the 1920s “the sordid world of jazz and the deviant jazz mu-
sician became a common trope in the popular press, pulp fiction, and Holly-
wood film. Jazz in general served as a trope for the darker side of the Ameri-
can urban experience.” Despite the fact that, as its name suggests, marijuana
first came into the US from Mexico, jazz and marijuana became inextricably
linked with black people and black music in the popular imagination. The
first recorded use of marijuana in the US was in Storyville in 1909 (Abel
1980), which was the red light district of the port of New Orleans and the
birthplace of jazz. Foundational jazz musicians, such as Jelly Roll Morton,

106 Stewart Clegg
honing their craft in the bordellos, created incidental accompaniments to the
central commerce conducted there. Rather than drink, dope was the preferred
drug. Marijuana didn’t slow down the reflexes and improvisation the way
that alcohol could; also it seemed to heighten the creative impulse.
Jazz and dope were not exactly the stuff of a rationalizing impulse. Thus,
having a Sociological Department (as well as employing Pinkerton’s to spy
on potential trouble-makers and unionists and to break up union meetings)
seemed a small investment to make to ensure an efficient, reliable and certain
workforce, untroubled by jazz, dope, or booze, or an inability to save, invest
and consume. All such irrationalities were to be expected of people who
made jazz their culture. It is not surprising that jazz played this role; first, it
was associated by respectable white society with unrespectable black society;
second, it infused the body with passion, rhythm, movement – a lack of dis-
ciplined sobriety. It was wild dance music and its main feature was its exu-
berant ability to move its fans and musicians to shake their bodies, dance, and
beat the rhythm. As Appelrouth (2005: 1497) suggests, “manners of the body
share the potential for becoming a stage on which the struggle for social le-
gitimacy and control is dramatized”. In the body may be seen the larger so-
cial order and its struggles to impose good order, taste and discipline on na-
ture. Pollution of the body is a metaphor for the disruption of the boundaries
that shape ‘legitimate’ society (Douglas 1996). Thus, following Appelrouth
(2005: 1497) “we should not be surprised to find anxieties concerning social
disruptions expressed through a body-centered discourse. During periods in
which challenges are posed to existing social divisions and schemes of classi-
fication, attempts to define the body publicly take on heightened signifi-
cance”. The popular imagination was shaped by a discourse that regarded
jazz as disorderly, as Appelrouth notes by citing an article asking “Does jazz
put the sin in syncopation?”, from the Ladies Home Journal by Anne Shaw
Faulkner (1921), who was the national music chairperson of the General Fed-
eration of Women’s Clubs, in which she said:
Jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to extreme deeds, to a
breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its
influence is wholly bad … The effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an atro-
phied condition on the brain cells of conception, until very frequently those under
the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with in-
harmonic partial tones are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and
evil, right and wrong (Faulkner 1921: 16; from Appelrouth 2005 : 1503).
Degenerate brains, an inability to follow rules, and a general lack of moral
qualities were not what Mr. Ford required in his employees, so the Sociologi-
cal Department had much to do. After 1921 the Sociological Department was
rolled into the notorious Service Department, run by ex-boxer and security
chief Harry Bennett, who formed it into a private army of thugs and gangsters

Foundations of Organization Power 107
to terrorize workers and prevent unionization. Ford’s Service Department
would grow to be the largest private police force in the world at that time. Its
major work was spying – no-one who worked for Ford was safe from spies,
intent on seeing that the $5 dollars was not being wasted, both literally and
metaphorically10.
Power in the organization increasingly came to be effectively buttressed
by power in the wider society; in order to ensure the most efficient routines at
work some control over the type of person that was employed was required.
Initially, the new power of surveillance over private life was vested in and an
extension of the organization; latterly, as Fordist modernity became charac-
teristic of modernity in general, in workshops large and small, the state took
over the functions that private capital had hitherto assumed. Small employers
or those new to business could not develop their own Sociological Depart-
ments – but the state, as an ideal total moralist, supplemented the work of
surveillance over those in whom the churches and associated temperance
movements had not succeeded in instilling a governmental soul. Power
shifted its focus from the individual to the collective.
We should understand these innovations as extensions of a panoptical
complex11. They lacked the specificity of Taylor’s targeting of the body and
10 There was increasing societal support for Ford’s ‘sociological’ and ‘service’ projects: Prohibi-
tion, (the doomed attempt to ban alcohol consumption from a number of US states) which
started in 1920, also intensified a prohibitory gaze that sought to ensure that employees could
resist temptations to vice. In fact, the struggle against liquor was also a struggle against jazz –
as they were associated in their licentiousness. Gramsci explicitly made the connection to
moral panics. ‘The struggle against alcohol, the most dangerous agent of destruction of labor-
ing power, becomes a function of the state. It is possible for other ‘puritanical’ struggles as
well to become functions of the state if private initiatives of the industrialist prove insufficient
or if a moral crisis breaks out among the working masses’ (Gramsci 1971: 303-304). Moral
panic was heightened during the 1930s and extended by the banning of cannabis in seventeen
states. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established in 1930. In 1937 the Marijuana Tax
Act effectively banned cannabis throughout the United States.
11 Some scholars, following Kondratieff (1935), suggest that when viewed historically, organiza-
tional power relations should be seen as cyclical: systems rationality is dominant in the up-
swing of the cycle with a rhetorical stress on commitment and moral authority dominant in the
downswing. Although originally imported into the discussion of management by Harvie Ram-
say (1977), these ideas have recently been taken up by U.S. theorists of management, such as
Barley and Kunda (1992) and Degreene (1988). The most recent and empirically sophisticated
proponent of these is Eric Abrahamson (1997), who has coupled an account of long waves
with an explanation as to why management theories and practices change. Long-wave theory
proposes that the world economy displays a rhythmical pattern, as rapid expansion and stagna-
tion alternate with a periodicity of about fifty years. A single long wave is estimated to have
about a fifty-year cycle through initial growth to decline. The causes of the seismic changes
that long waves represent are seen as the result of massive investments in, and the subsequent
depreciation of, major aspects of infrastructure such as canals, railways, and roads. Others fol-
low Schumpeter (1934) and think that it is less the decline in infrastructure that is responsible
and more the fact that clusters of innovation bunch together, creating new and discontinuous

108 Stewart Clegg
were more oriented to the collective body politic. In accord with Gramsci
(1971) we can see these new managerial techniques of Taylorism and Ford-
ism seeking to suppress the ‘animality’ of man, training him, as Turner
(1984: 100) suggests, “for the regular disciplines of factory life”, in an ana-
tomical politics. Even as the state supplemented “the private initiatives of the
industrialist” in framing the political morality of work (in an era before ran-
leading-edge sectors in the world economy, driving macroeconomic growth. Periodic ‘gales of
creative destruction’ wipe out preexisting innovations. Eventually, further innovation restarts
the whole cycle around further discontinuous innovation bunches. Innovations precipitate sys-
tem changes across firms, industries, and countries. New eras are ushered in by innovations
like the steam engine, automobile, computer, and Internet. Substantial economic restructuring
and organizational redesign accompany each phase. The impact is variable across countries,
industries, and organizations, and each of these adds their own level of indetermination to the
picture, producing a highly contingent outcome. Each innovation-led system change, related to
key factors, such as steel, oil, and electronics, crystallized new patterns of rational manage-
ment in the upstream swing, according to Abrahamson (1997). The advent of mass production
bureaucracy contingent upon the dawn of the automobile era would be one example. Today,
the corollary would be the impact of the digital revolution that accompanied the growth and
importance in computers and the emergence of new organizational forms. Thus, new rhetoric
for management theory and practice emerges around the onset of each expansionary upswing
of the long wave, a wave of economic activity that takes approximately twenty-five years to
crest and twenty-five years to recede. There are two types of management rhetoric that organ-
ize theory and practice, suggests Abrahamson (1997): rational and normative rhetoric. Ra-
tional rhetoric is associated with upswings and normative rhetoric with downswings. Rational
rhetoric stresses technical aspects of work organization, whereas normative rhetoric stresses
the orientations of the employees. Rational rhetoric stresses the formalization and rationaliza-
tion of management and organizations, such as Taylor’s (1911) scientific management. It uses
engineering-type analogies and metaphors to make its rhetorical points, thinking of organiza-
tions as if they were machines. Although such thinking clearly characterized scientific man-
agement, it also marked the systems rationalism of the 1950s and 1960s, although now the
mechanistic analogy was less with a machine and more with the organization as a type of cy-
bernetic system. Normative rhetoric stresses that it is the orientation and attitude of employees
that is most important. The stress is on the needs of the employees and their satisfaction in the
firm, modeled as a community. Managers must meet employee needs (human relations) and
simultaneously unleash their creative energies (corporate culture). While the rational rhetoric
is stronger in the upswing and the normative rhetoric is stronger in the downswing, neither is
ever wholly dominant. They coexist with greater or lesser emphasis. Why is a new rhetoric of
management theory and practice innovated? Performance gaps open up when the targets that
managers wish to meet, and their performance in meeting them, do not coincide – when the
targets are out of reach. Consequently, managers become interested in rhetoric that holds the
promise that they can bridge the gap. Should management or environmental changes narrow
these gaps, then interest will shift to other rhetoric that seems better able to address other gaps
that have been ignored or have opened up more recently. Also, as rational innovations recede
in importance, then the pendulum swings toward normative innovations in the rhetoric of
management theory and practice because they seem capable of squeezing better performance
out of the rational technologies in use. Again, this seems plausible as an account of the change
from scientific management to human relations, and Abrahamson (1997) would argue that it
accounts for subsequent shifts in emphasis as well.

Foundations of Organization Power 109
dom drug-testing of employees had become widespread), newer, more spe-
cifically targeted practices were being shaped in opposition to Taylor’s po-
litical economy of the body, private initiatives by industrialists, and the
state’s regulatory bio-power.
Mid-modern management: From disciplining collective
dispositions to disciplining the soul
A decisive shift was underway; the body had been at the frontline of power
and the new disciplines of management at the inception of its modernity; in-
creasingly the body’s discipline was being buttressed by a new focus on the
collective consciousness of the workers, seeking to shape it to individual as-
pirations and accounting, collective labour and individual consumption. As
modernity and its management were consolidated the emphasis was shifting
from physical to moral shaping. As time passed it became increasingly evi-
dent that the body alone was not what was employed at work – the worker’s
body, to be truly disciplined at work, required disciplining in life. The body,
though always individuated, houses a social being; one with a culture and an
identity, as well as passions and interests transcending the working week.
The conceptualization of this managerial problem was a natural progression
of the moral projects that sought to reform the employee through political
economy aimed at the body. If projects of power were to overcome the lim-
ited efficacy of their efficiency concerns to date, then they had to address
both body and soul; they had to recognize the place of the being in the body
as a social subject. The embodied person faded into the background and the
foreground increasingly was filled by the moral body as being – as soul, or in
more secular vein, (un)consciousness. The realization that the body sustains a
soulful life with communities of others that may undercut individual effi-
ciency was to have some bizarre disciplinary effects – not least Ford’s spin
on sociology. More important, in intellectual terms, were several theorists
who were representative of these new concerns, including Mary Parker Fol-
lett, the most innovative in many ways, as well as better known figures such
as Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard. Eventually, as they brought the emer-
gent idea of the informal organization into an analytical relationship with the
prior stress of systematic management theory on formal organization, they
sought to reconcile the dualism of formal and informal, body and soul, struc-
ture and culture. The key to reconciliation was seeing the informal as a func-
tioning entity within the whole framed by the formal organization. It was a
solution called ‘functionalism’ in which the central concept was that of au-
thority – not power. Moreover, the solution did not read backwards to grasp

110 Stewart Clegg
the political economy of the body as itself a political project of power. In-
stead, the earlier history was seen simply as one in which a simple, formal,
and mechanical view of the body needed to be supplemented by a stress on
the soul of the individual, the authority of the leader, and the culture of the
group. It was the prioritization of functional knowledge of the individual as
the way to foster efficient practice through common ideas. Their contribu-
tions changed the landscape of management from Taylor’s engineering ap-
proach to the political economy of the body to a social sciences approach that
focused on the interior life, the mental states, the consciousness and uncon-
sciousness – what Follett and Foucault termed the ‘soul’ – of the employees.
Worker productivity would, henceforth, be interpreted predominately in
terms of patterns of culture, motivation, leadership, and human relations
(Maslow 1978). The locus of power shifted from the engineering expert, de-
signing the job, selecting and training the right worker, and rewarding per-
formance, to the manager, responsible for leading, motivating, communicat-
ing, and counseling the individual employee as well as designing the social
milieu in which work takes place. The well-tempered manager was under
construction. Just as Taylor’s focus on disciplining the body were tempered
in practice by Ford’s concern with the morality of his five dollar a day work-
ers, so these theoreticians of management shifted their focus from the body to
the soul (consciousness and unconsciousness) – the loci of the moral being
defined as one who not only is but wants to be an obedient subject. The self
became “an object of reflection and analysis, and, above all, transformable in
the service of ideals …” (van Krieken 1990: 353). What was under construc-
tion here was an attempt to establish patterns of spontaneous obedience.
The work of authors such as Chester Barnard and Elton Mayo rose to
prominence during the Depression years of the 1930s when the widespread
unemployment that ensued tested notions of managerial responsibility as
mass layoffs became the norm in much of U.S. industry. The post-World War
I years had seen the decline of many of the huge corporations that had domi-
nated U.S. economic life, particularly as effective antitrust legislation took
shape from 1932. A concern with the concentration of power and the disper-
sion of share ownership was to become allied with the view that there had
been a ‘managerial revolution’ in U.S. corporate life (Berle and Means 1932;
Burnham 1942). Power had shifted to the stewards of capital – the managers
– and the major concentrations of capital held by the dominant stockholders.
But if there had been a managerial revolution, then where did that leave the
many individuals who were not or never would be managers, those who
toiled ceaselessly, at management’s command? Fortunate indeed, argued
Mayo and Barnard, because modern management was the authority best able
to hold society together, even in the face of overall macroeconomic irration-
ality. Within the rational organization, employees were sheltered against ad-

Foundations of Organization Power 111
versity, could rely on each other, and above all, rely on their managers to
manage them in their best interests. Their organization was a closed haven in
an uncertain world and so, not surprisingly, was conceived in what would
later be seen as closed system terms. In such a system, it was in the self-
interest of individuals to submit to authority as part of an implicit contract.
Assent was conditional upon management being efficient and delivering
benefits to the individuals and, as Mayo was at pains to stress, the groups that
inhabited this anthropological space. Of course, people frequently were de-
luded about their interests, said Mayo and Barnard. It was the task of effec-
tive managerial leadership to align individual values, sentiments, and emo-
tions with the organization, through providing moral codes and leadership,
and Mayo argued that the recognition and support of informal groups and or-
ganizations within the formal structure were effective ways of achieving this.
For responsibilities to be discharged sentiments had to be engaged; the ra-
tionality of functions alone could not be relied on. Authority, similarly, was
insufficient in itself; it had to be buttressed by moral leadership that could
produce cooperation and collaboration within organizations12.
12 In the Depression-torn 1930s, the legitimating and authoritative sentiments expressed by writ-
ers such as Mayo and Barnard were largely produced for domestic consumption. They were
not to achieve large-scale export success until after World War II. With the exception of
Fayol, the influential debates came from the United States and were exported globally, with
variable market penetration. In Britain, the titled and wealthy defined rationality largely in
terms of aristocratic rather than managerial values. Engineers were regarded as lowly indi-
viduals with dirty hands, and were thus hardly in a position to carry a societal project. Indeed,
British engineers have been remarkably unsuccessful in attaining occupational status and
power. The term engineer is stretched to refer both to professional engineers with formal
qualifications as well as to people who use tools to do manual labor. In France or Germany,
such a stretch would be unimaginable. Despite the early impact of approaches to industrial
management (Littler 1982), managerialism was slow to become really established. (In fact,
Prime Minister Thatcher was still railing against the complacent inefficiency of British man-
agement in the 1980s when she was promoting ‘efficiency in government,’ much as had Prime
Minister Wilson in the 1960s when he was spreading the ‘white heat of the technological revo-
lution.’) Elsewhere, in France, the interwar state, under Clemenceau, introduced some ele-
ments of technocratic rationalization from above, befitting both the elite status of engineering
and Fayol’s eminence in its application to management. In Germany, although America be-
came increasingly an inspiration for engineers from the early years of the century, it was not
until the rise of the National Socialist state that a management project premised on efficiency
was widely adopted and diffused. In Italy, scientific management ideas were sponsored by no-
table industrialists, such as Gino Olivetti, in a counter-argument to ideas emergent from the
workers’ movement (Clegg and Dunkerley 1980: 110-111), and also became espoused by
Mussolini’s Fascist state – whose achievements, for many, were summed up in the idea that it
‘got the trains running on time.’ In the aftermath of World War II, with the end of Fascism
among the combatant countries and the bankruptcy of most of Europe, the overwhelming su-
periority of U.S. know-how and management were all too clear. The impact of U.S. institu-
tions on postwar Europe through the Marshall Plan, and in Japan under postwar occupation
ensured a process of widespread dissemination of U.S. management and organization theory.

112 Stewart Clegg
In one of the most sophisticated accounts, Phillip Selznick’s (1957)
Leadership in Administration, explicitly divides the soul from the body. The
organization is a corporate body: a tool, an instrument rationally designed to
direct human energies to a fixed goal, an expendable and limited apparatus.
However, the body has a soul, something largely natural, living, and un-
planned, a distinctive identity, something which Selznick (1957: 21) identi-
fies as an ‘institution’. As those organizational tools that are constructed
evolve into something with a soul, something valued for its own sake, they
become infused with value and meaning – they become soulful institutions.
Or they will if they are managed properly – and there is specificity about how
to achieve such proper management.
Management is the job of the elites. “Maintenance of social values de-
pends on the autonomy of elites” (Selznick 1957: 8). These autonomous el-
ites must produce that commitment and identification, that great soulful
boundless leap, which makes the bodies of the employees more than a mere
tool. The elites must make the individual components of the tool identify
with and feel committed to the elites and their purposes. They will do this
both by stimulating soulful feelings and controlling them “to produce the de-
sired balance of forces” (Selznick 1957: 100). These soulful individuals
sound closer to well-made Replicants than to real flesh and blood people
(Scott1982; Dick 1968). They will have the freedom of human agency but it
is one that will always be exercised in such a way as “to be consistent with
the organization’s objectives” because of the ‘organization personality’
(Simon 1957: 109) that the elites will have implanted in the Replicants –
those simulacra of free men and women – who people the instrument. It
makes the Tyrell Corporation seem less science fiction and more organization
science. Management, in the form of its elites, seeks to normalize the psyche
of subordinates such that obedient self-supervision became a reflexive in-
stinct. (Appropriately, the Tyrell Corporation’s emblem in the movie Blad-
erunner is an all-seeing eye.)
Fortifying routines of efficiency required perfecting supporting rou-
tines; thus political economy shaded into moral economy as the 1930s de-
veloped. Slowly, it became evident that efficient routines could only be
founded on the social and cultural rehabilitation of the worker as a whole
person rather than merely their perfection as an instrument of political
In Europe business schools were created on explicitly American lines. Curricula were devel-
oped, and Writers on Organizations (Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings 1971) studied, most of
whom were American, although a few who were not, such as the French Fayol or British Ur-
wick, were admitted to the pantheon. Even in relatively under-industrialized countries, such as
Australia, a national school of management was established in the late 1970s. American man-
agement had, by and large, become institutionalized as the template for modern management
(see Locke 1984).

Foundations of Organization Power 113
economy. The political economy project was doomed by one simple sub-
stantive fact. What people ordinarily know and do – sometimes in ways that
theories never capture – is essential to how organizations are able do what
they do. The one best way could never be entirely prescribed and where it
was attempted then, by definition, something close to a non-learning or-
ganization would be instituted; this was the main lesson of the Hawthorne
studies. It was a realization that became the impetus for Mayo’s moral
economy project.
The moral economy project was not really as radical as some of its
prophets, such as Mayo, assumed. It built on what Taylor bequeathed. It did
not deconstruct the legacy. In turn, contemporary theory builds on the legacy
of both of these schools. In this approach, the ordinary knowledge of ordinary
people is regarded as a neglected resource that managers must access, use
and routinize. They will do this through the simple strategies of building so-
cial capital (brought into focus primarily through the work of Robert Putnam
[1993; 1995]) and through the use of those coactive power strategies that
Mary Parker Follett had recommended to build such capital – all those years
ago. Once social capital has been identified, then new routines can be con-
structed. Social capital takes care of the coactivity while knowledge man-
agement will structure the new routines. It is tempting to see the former as a
continuation of the concern with the moral economy and the latter as a simple
extension of scientific management – to incorporate the mind as well as the
body and soul of the employee.
Foundations of organization power
The foundations that I have sketched to this point were not established in
theory but in practice. As suggested elsewhere (Hardy and Clegg 2006), theo-
retical address of power in organizations did not really develop until the post-
Second World War period, when it emerged and coalesced around ap-
proaches that understood organizations as systems that strove to be rational
but which were characterized by uncertainty. Those who could control this
uncertainty were those who would be powerful.
Most organization theorists, where they talk about power at all, see it as
something that some agency has because it commands resources on which
some other agency depends. As these perspectives have been used in organi-
zation theory they have been constructed around a notion of the resource de-
pendencies that result from the interdependencies inherent within open sys-
tems of exchange. Within these systems, for many economic, political and
other social scientists, there exist individuals making rational choices.

114 Stewart Clegg
Within system terms, the most rational world would be one that accorded
with the patterns of a closed system, in which uncertainty had been removed.
Uncertainty basically signals freedom rather than closure; it signals the limits
of the organization in controlling the actions of others. The conception of
open system organizations presumes that, in principle, a total rationality is
possible; however, in practice, as Thompson (1967) theorized, although or-
ganizations strive to be rational, because they are open systems, they can
rarely if ever achieve such rationality. The tension between the cult of theo-
retical rationality and the struggle with irrational practices was characterized
by Reed (1985: 21) as an intellectual schizophrenia in organization studies.
Organizations are always open to irrationalities even as they strive to be ra-
tional. When the failure of the system to rationalize all relations within it cre-
ates dependencies that are not mapped on to the formally rational structure of
dominancy, or, in other words, when what is taken for granted as authority
does not extend its remit to all niches, segments or strata of the organization
in question, then there are power relations. In terms of interorganizational re-
lations, when resources are scarce, where conflict about goals occurs, and
when there is disagreement or uncertainty about means-ends relationships
(how to achieve goals), then there will be power dependence relations.
Where there is irrationality in the organization then there we will find
power, because power is conceptualized by organization theorists such as
Mintzberg (1983) as deriving not from rationality, not from reason, not from
rule, but from irrationality, unreason and an absence of rules. Power occurs
when illegitimacy runs rife; where there is legitimacy there is not power but
authority. In other words, power is a dysfunction when seen from a system
point of view. Residual sources of uncertainty in otherwise rationalized sys-
tems are seen as unanticipated irrationalities of rationalizing systems. Their
existence denotes an absence of functional authority. Power is not only the
enemy of system reason and rationality but also of the individual’s freedom
to act. The systems theory view of authority sees power as residing in unruly
spaces where the remit of authority did not extend. Power is something done
against authority – not in its name. It was to be found in the gaps and niches
that rationalizing systems neglected or created precisely because rationalizing
systems were regarded as equivalent to authority: what they colonized was
legitimate and authorized, a priori, by definition, as it emanated from a ra-
tionalizing and sovereign centre. What is not authority and is not authorized,
what is residual and remains obdurate to the will of rationalizations – this
must be power. Power represents deviations from normalizing rationalization
because it is embedded in those spaces that authority does not extend to.
From an organizational point of view power will invariably be related to re-
sistance because it is outside of and other to authority. Hence, for influential
writers such as Mintzberg (1983) power is the illegitimate antithesis to au-

Foundations of Organization Power 115
thority embedded in hierarchy: power is seen as something deviant to be ex-
plained rather than something that is somehow embedded in the normal func-
tioning of organizations. Authority, with its assumptions of legitimacy, im-
plies necessary consent to the rule that is invoked.
Within functionalist social theory, the centrality of a cultural institutional
viewpoint means that values and goals in organizations cannot be treated em-
pirically as fundamentally problematic or as contingent on structures of
dominancy – Weber’s (1978) Herrschaft. If that were the case, the central
value system would not be doing its theoretical work. Nor would power have
much of a role to play in organizations because it could only ever be de-
ployed in the service of goal attainment – as indeed is the case in Parsons’
(1964) positive theory of power. My view is that organizational structures
and systems are structurally sedimented phenomena that result, in part from a
history of victories and losses already embedded in the organization, and in
part from the ways its roles and relations have been shaped historically. Or-
ganizations are not neutral or apolitical. We should think of an organization
as a collective life-world in which traces of the past are vested, recur, shift,
and take on new meanings. I take this to be the import of Weber’s idea that
organizations already incorporate a ‘structure of dominancy’ in their func-
tioning: authority, structure, ideology, culture, and expertise are invariably
saturated and imbued with power in their relations. Thus, we may conclude
that the relations of power vested in formal organization design have been
taken for granted by mainstream organization and management researchers.
Where they do consider power they do so largely through models that see it
as a form of deviancy, a deviation from a normal order of authority and obe-
dience. Thus, the exercise of power has been seen as an illegitimate and un-
authorized aberration within a given structure of dominancy (Perrow 1986a;
1986b). Such an approach constitutes power as that which escaped rational-
ity. It is not managers or the system that is the source of power relations in
organizations; power relations only reveal themselves when the system
breaks down in some way, when deviance occurs, when authority cannot en-
sure the achievement of commitment to system goals by all those who are in-
corporated within the organization.
There is an implicit idealism to the systems perspective; the assumption
is that organizations are goal-oriented entities and the people who are em-
ployed by them should be committed to achieving these goals. Hence, when
reality does not accord with the ideal picture, power will be seen to be pre-
sent in the shape of people espousing sub-optimal goals or manifesting resis-
tance to goal-oriented behaviours. Sometimes these phenomena come dis-
guised as a problem of commitment.
The notion of organizational commitment had its roots in the contract-
based labour relations that are prevalent in North America, and gained popu-

116 Stewart Clegg
larity as a conceptual counterweight to the deteriorating labour relations that
resulted from the 1980s wave of industrial restructuring. To a large degree,
commitment expresses a concern about unwanted employee turnover. The
question of “what can be done to shape commitment” is a managerial para-
dox. The more commitment is under pressure because of the threat of job loss
or poor employment conditions, the less managers can do to prevent it from
falling – let alone raise it. In as far as commitment can be shaped, it is at the
start of the employment relationship.
The need for commitment parallels the exercise of power; the more
power has to be exercised in order to restore control the less strong the power
relations that precipitated the need for its exercise. In such situations, the ex-
ercise of power is a sign of relational weakness. Similarly, while commitment
is often seen as diametrically opposed to power, the structural and relational
situation is very similar. The greater the need for commitment to be present,
the less likely it is to be evident. If commitment is the central currency of soft
domination and power (Courpasson 2006), efforts to increase it signal a cur-
rency deficit just as much as do attempts to reassert domination through the
exercise of power. Neither soft power gloved in commitment, nor its harder
exercise without the protective covering, can be exercised without advertis-
ing, precisely, the deficit of that which is desired: a settled order. Maintaining
commitment seems to be a matter of keeping promises and striking a balance
between organizational and employee interests, and interests are central to
the ways in which power has been theorized in broader social theory.
Theorizing power in idealist and pragmatic frames
Gordon (2008) makes a distinction between two distinct streams of organiza-
tion literature concerned with power: one with an idealist orientation, the
other with a pragmatist orientation. Standard organizational behavioural ap-
proaches to power are, Gordon suggests, idealist, because they operate with a
normative model of what power relations should be like. The lineages of
these approaches derive from Weber respectively and a major point of pas-
sage was the debate generated in American political science about the nature
of community power, which developed from the late 1950s. Many of the
definitions and ideas about power generated therein, which were remarkably
behaviourist and mechanical in their conception, were to influence notable
organization contributions that drew on the behavioural models developed
within what Lukes (1974; 2005) termed the one-dimensional view of power,
conceived as an A getting a B to do something that they would not otherwise
do.

Foundations of Organization Power 117
The Community Power Debate gave rise to what became known as the
second face of power; the kind of power that occurs without conflict, without
an explicit clash of polarities. From these perspectives derives the idea that
all organizations have a certain mobilization of bias inherent to them; that
some issues never materialize and remain regarded as non-issues because the
balance of power relations is against making them issues. That some issues
are not raised as problematic and thus do not generate conflict does not mean
that they do not exist; they do exist, but in the under-life of the organization,
rather than being on the formal agendas and policy directions.
A decade after the political scientists Morton Baratz and Peter Bachrach
first articulated the second face of power, Steven Lukes (1974) published a
slim book on power. In this text he introduced the idea that there was a third
dimension to power: power could be exercised through the management of
meaning in such a way that people – members of organizations, for instance –
were unable to formulate an independent account of where their interests lay.
They could think about and see the world only through subaltern concepts
that already positioned them as subjected, and subjects of, a power that had
no need to exercise itself crudely through one-dimensional manoeuvres. In
fact, he saw power as operating much more insidiously through the way in
which the categories of consciousness were already pervaded by the taken-
for-granted world views and categories of the powerful – a conception that he
related to the idea of hegemony as promulgated by the noted Italian political
theorist, Antonio Gramsci (1971).
For the one-dimensional theorists the ideal is clearly a world of plural
power relations; for the two-dimensional theorists the ideal is clearly a world
in which those things that are issues for those who feel the yoke of power re-
lations are not regarded as so hot to handle that they languish as unspoken
and unarticulated but barely repressed non-issues. Theorists of ethnicity,
gender, and of intersectional issues that fuse with these, have, not surpris-
ingly, been attracted to this perspective.
The pragmatist accounts stress the interpenetration of power with knowl-
edge as socially constructed and thus culturally significant and context de-
pendent, used as resources in strategic local games of politics. For these theo-
rists, ultimately, all politics is local. At the core of pragmatic conceptions of
politics is the centrality of the ways that people make sense. Pragmatists owe
a debt to Nietzsche and Machiavelli, and the main point of passage in their
debates has been the work of Foucault. Contributors to the ‘pragmatist
stream’ are not concerned with telling people how power ‘ought’ to be in or-
ganizations, rather they are concerned with studying ‘how’ power comes to
be exercised in the way that it is, says Gordon. Here the impulse is resolutely
empirical and descriptive, and is often regarded as dangerously amoral be-
cause of the emphasis on the workings of power irrespective of the niceties of

118 Stewart Clegg
its actual deployment. The description Machiavellian is often applied to
analysis as if it were a term of opprobrium. Rather, it should be considered a
compliment, a way of capturing a determined anthropological desire to fol-
low the actors and the action wherever it takes one rather than subscribing to
the idealism of accounts in which certain positions, practices, authorities are
a priori positioned as legitimate and others as illegitimate. Such matters are a
question of empirics, not principle: not surprisingly then, Nietzsche is also a
major influence on this stream, often through the influence of Foucault.
Gordon’s sympathies are clearly with the more pragmatist orientations
rather than those that are more idealist because, as he says, the former places
an emphasis on processes and learning as opposed to the latter’s grand narra-
tive of the way things ought to be arranged as authority, without power. The
less normative the orientation the less likely there will be an emphasis, ana-
lytically, on a destructive war between authorities and resisters in a pluralist
world. From a normative perspective, if organizations become isomorphic
with their institutional context in order to secure social approval (legitimacy),
which provides survival benefits then this requires that the institutional con-
text is already secured and is seen as such a sign of legitimacy. Compara-
tively and historically, the extent to which any structure of domination in or-
ganizations is authoritative is always an empirical matter. The best guide to
this is the comparative analysis of states as organizations (Hall 2008).
Re-thinking power
Retrospectively, the major approaches used in organization theory have been
quite limited in their appreciation of power. There has been little genealogical
consideration along the lines alluded to in the earlier sections of the paper.
The three-dimensional view of power has not been widely used, except by
theorists such as Ranson, Hinings and Greenwood (1980). One consequence
is that there has developed a marked disconnection between the approaches
of organization theory and the approaches of social theory, as Hinings and
Greenwood (2002) argue. Where they are to be found the organization theory
accounts of power tend to be mostly one-dimensional, looking at concrete in-
stances of decision-making, the bases for ‘having’ power, and so on (see
Clegg et al 2006). The assumptions underlying these accounts are often em-
bedded in rational choice and systems perspectives. Rational choice perspec-
tives have been particularly limiting because they privilege the sovereignty of
choice. People are expected to know what they want and they express these
wants through their preferences to do certain thing; when preferences become
subject to other agencies making people do things they would not otherwise

Foundations of Organization Power 119
prefer to do then power is clearly evident. From this perspective, the idea that
people could be mistaken about their preferences is absurd: their preferences
are expressed in decisions to allocate resources to certain consumption goods,
to choices to do certain things, and so on. For instance, as consumers spend,
markets reach equilibrium between what consumers choose to buy and what
producers choose to sell, through the price mechanism. To neo-liberals this is
a kind of ‘original position’, which has ultimate legitimacy because power
appears to be absent. If people are choosing to do certain things there cannot
be power at work.
What gets lost from such accounts is the fact that such a market-driven
‘original position’ might be skewed by the capacities of the actors. What they
may want and desire is determined by a habitus shaped by a previous life ex-
perience and a product of their capacities in the first place. The idea that there
might be such a thing as systematically skewed preferences that determine
actors’ capacity for action is inadmissible. Such systematic skewing occurs
through the articulation of markets, advertising, and conceptions of desire for
consumers and is structured organizationally for employees as the object of
culture, commitment and communication programs.
Much organization theory shares with neo-classical economics a curious
regression to a mean marked by equilibrium. At the equilibrium point it is as if
there was no history. There is no account of how preferences might be subject
to formation, historically, structurally, comparatively – organization actors’
preferences just exist rather than being seen as historically constituted causal
powers (Harré1986). Causal power involves more than negation, retardation of
a theoretically correct consciousness or creation of one that is false. With Fol-
lett, Parsons, Arendt, and Foucault, power can also be positive.
Consider preferences: they are expressed through effective demand and
desire being combined. One desires something and one has the wherewithal
to demand its supply. But desire – where does that come from? Whatever
preferences can be formed can only be imagined through the categories
available from which and with which one can choose. Categories are the
means through which we routinely, albeit largely unconsciously, observe and
classify events and experiences as we understand them to be in the languages
that we ordinarily use. Lakoff (1987: p. 5-6) suggests that “There is nothing
more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech.
Every time we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a tree, we are
categorising. Whenever we reason about kinds of things – chairs, nations, ill-
nesses, emotions, any kind of thing at all – we are employing categories.”
And these categories are necessarily experiential and empirical; they are
grounded in our ways of being in the world.
Perhaps the most astute observer of categorical necessity was Harvey
Sacks. Within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Sacks (1972)

120 Stewart Clegg
suggests that membership categorization devices, which systematically fol-
low rules of economy and consistency, signal how everyday activities are ac-
complished locally and recognizably. The terms are the members, not ana-
lysts, and they signify how members make sense of the world. It is in investi-
gating how these categories are deployed that we can gain a grounded appre-
ciation of the way that these members construct the world.
If our ‘human nature’ is constituted through a power that enables us to
realize our essence as members of an organization by facilitating autonomy
through collaboration with others, then it would seem that it is only the abso-
lute elites, the ‘masters of war’ and the ‘masters of the universe’, who have
such power. The rest of us live in the shadows that their machinations create.
We have very limited ability to do much other than to affect aggregate
changes in line with the reasoning that constitutes the rules for making sense
that are embedded in the system; thus we can act as rational choice actors in
response to price signals such as the interest rate or salary rates. It would take
a ‘deep conflict’ to overthrow these notions of rational choice; thus, in es-
sence, the dominance of market relations can be seen in the way that their
truths frame entirely what is ‘rational’ and thus prove different systems of
thought not only arbitrary but also pointless – they have no meaning in the
ways that practices are structured. Hence, the practices produce the personnel
rather than the personnel producing the practices.
Using the three-dimensional power perspective only takes one so far in
the analysis of power, however. Its focus remains fixed on a negative concep-
tion of power as a means of making people do things they would not other-
wise do. Often, in the third dimension of power, this is seen to operate
through subtle mechanisms shaping a compliant consciousness on the parts of
those least privileged by existing power relations. In radical three-dimensional
perspectives such power occurs through dominant ideology; however, as the
‘dominant ideology thesis’ (Abercombie et al 1980) notes, three-dimensional
power works as much through organizing the consciousness of those whom
extant power relations privilege more than it disorganizes the consciousness
of those who are disadvantaged by these relations. From this perspective we
should seek dominant ideology in the organizing ideas that animate and or-
ganize specific elites, not so much producing justifications for consumption
by the broad masses but innovations for elites. In a link with the work of
theorists such as Flyvbjerg (1998) and Gordon (2007) one can say that such
innovations produce rationalizations of strategic initiatives. Much of the de-
bate about the three dimensions of power and the dominant ideology thesis
occurred within the context of a consideration of capitalism as a system not
only of relations of production but also relations of meaning. Nobel prize-
winning economists such as Black and Scholes (1973; also see Merton 1973)
who have the ability to renew capital (even though such renewals may have

Foundations of Organization Power 121
longer-term destructiveness built into them) should thus be thought of as or-
ganic intellectuals producing rationalizations of and for the dominant ideol-
ogy.
We need to abandon the structuralist metaphors of dimensions where the
most radical dimension provides the foundations, the footings, through domi-
nant ideology. If instead, as the emphasis on dominant ideas suggests, ruling
ideas organize dominant classes then they must do so through what people
know rather than through what they are prevented from knowing. The shift in
focus from dominated to dominant ideas is useful because it enables a con-
nection to be made with the power/knowledge nexus constituting social rela-
tions. Rather than metaphors drawn from structuralism we should organize
enquiry into power relations – in organizations and elsewhere – through
metaphors of flows.
Figure 1: Circuits of Power
The idea of circuits of power can be used to represent the ways in which
power may flow through different modalities. Relatively simple is causal
power, where one agency seeks to get another to do what they would not oth-
erwise do. Power in this sense usually involves fairly straightforward epi-
sodic power, oriented towards securing outcomes. The two defining elements
of episodic power circuits are agencies and events of interest to these agen-
cies. Agencies are constituted within social relations; in these social relations
they are analogous to practical experimentalists who seek to configure these
relations in such a way that they present stable standing conditions for them
to assert their agency in securing preferred outcomes. Hence, relations consti-
tute agents that agents seek to configure and reconfigure; agencies seek to as-
sert agency and do so through configuring relations in such a way that their
agency can be transmitted through various generalized media of communica-
tion, in order to secure preferential outcomes. All this is quite straightforward
and familiar from one-dimensional accounts of power.

122 Stewart Clegg
Episodes are always interrelated in complex and evolving ways. No
‘win’ or ‘loss’ is ever complete in itself nor is the meaning of victory or de-
feat definitely fixed as such at the time of its registration, recognition or re-
ception; such matters of judgment are always contingent on the temporalities
of the here-and-now, the reconstitutions of the there-and-then, on the reflec-
tive and prospective glances of everyday life (Schutz 1967). If power rela-
tions are the stabilization of warfare in peaceful times then any battle is only
ever a part of an overall campaign. What is important from the point of view
of the infinity of power episodes stretching into a future that has no limits are
the feedback loops from distinct episodic outcomes and the impact that they
have on overall social and system integration. The important question is
whether episodic outcomes tend rather more to reproduce or to transform the
existing architectonics – the architecture, geometry and design – of power re-
lations? How they might do so is accommodated in the model through the
circuit of social integration. Episodic outcomes serve to more or less trans-
form or reproduce the rules fixing extant relations of meaning and member-
ship in organizational fields; these fix or re-fix obligatory passage points,
channels and conduits, in the circuitry of extant power relations. In this way
dispositional matters of identity will be more or less transformed or repro-
duced, framing the stability of those extant social relations that had sought to
stabilize their powers in previous episodes of power. As identities are trans-
formed then so will be the social relations in which they are manifested and
engaged.
System integration, achieved primarily through legitimated domination,
also needs to be considered. Changes in the rules fixing relations of meaning
and membership can facilitate or restrict innovations in the techniques of dis-
ciplinary and productive power, which, in turn, will more or less empower or
disempower extant social relations that seek to stabilize the episodic field,
recreating existing obligatory passage points or creating new ones, as the case
might be. Dominant ideologies, for organizing dominant elites rather than
subordinating masses, as suggested, are especially significant here.
Any model of circuits of power must start from the realization that any
given arena necessarily intersects with many other episodic circuits in which
what is stable and taken-for-granted in one circuit may well be deconstructed
and destroyed. There is no fixed starting point for episodic power – these are
always points in a contextually shifting here and now constantly redefined by
prospective and retrospective sensemaking (Weick 1995; Schutz 1967).
Moreover, episodes of power can start wholly outside the formally estab-
lished relations between organizations, and episodic circuits tend to intersect.
However much an organization may assume that it has stabilized the circuits
of power flowing through a specific arena, that arena is always capable of be-
ing reconfigured by other circuits, other actors.

Foundations of Organization Power 123
Conclusion
When inspected, I would maintain, the foundations of organizations are
rooted in power relations, unfolding through the body, soul, mind, into the
categories of language itself, and always grounded in determinate social rela-
tions that can be represented as flowing through distinct circuits of power.
Note that, contra Lukes, these should not be interpreted as different structural
dimensions, but are merely different channels. Most of the time, the economy
of power will contain matters in the episodic circuit, when, as was observed
by Lukes with regard to the third dimension of power, the most effective use
of power will be that which overcomes resistance occurring, when compli-
ance becomes routine, when ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ merge. When ac-
tors join together to act in concert (power to), they do so to realize joint tasks,
and in so doing they make each other do things which they would not other-
wise do for the purposes of a shared goal. Even when it appears to be most
absent, power is always most present; we see this especially in the slippage of
everyday organizational life, in the centrality of practical organization mem-
bers and theorists with concerns such as commitment, culture or motivation.
It is the inability of organizations to achieve closed system status that creates
opportunities for power as resistance; it is in the attempts of organizations to
secure system closure through certainty that power as domination constantly
asserts itself; if the attempts are successful then domination shades into le-
gitimate authority. The foundations of organization are, indeed, relations of
power.
References
Abel, E. L., 1980. Marihuana: the first twelve thousand years. New York: Plenum.
Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. S., 1980. The dominant ideology thesis. Lon-
don, Allen and Unwin.
Abrahamson, E., 1997. The emergence and prevalence of employee management rhe-
torics: the effects of long waves, labour unions, and turnover, 1875 to 1992. Aca-
demy of Management Journal, 4(3), 491-533.
Aitken, H. G. J., 1960. Scientific management in action: Taylorism at Watertown ar-
senal, 1908-1915. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Amar, J., 1920. The physiology of industrial organization and the re-employment of
the disabled. London: Routledge.
Appelrouth, S., 2005. Body and soul: jazz in the 1920s. American Behavioral Scien-
tist, 48(11), 1496-1509.
Barley, S. and Kunda, G., 1992. Design and devotion: surges of rational and norma-
tive ideals of control in managerial discourse. Administrative Science Quarterly,
37, 363-399.

124 Stewart Clegg
Bauman, Z., 1997. Postmodernity and its discontents. Cambridge: Polity.
Berle, A. A. and Means, G. C., 1932. The modern corporation and private property.
NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Black, F. and Scholes, M. S., 1973. The pricing of options and corporate liabilities.
Journal of Political Economy, 81(3), 637-654.
Blade Runner, 1982. Motion picture Directed by Scott, R. United States: Warner Bros
Braverman, H., 1974. Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the
twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Burnham, J., 1942. The managerial revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Canguilhem, G., 1992. Machine and organism. In: J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds. In-
corporations. New York: Zone Press.
Chandler, A., 1977. The visible hand. Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press.
Clegg, S. R., 1989. Frameworks of power. London: Sage.
Clegg, S. R., Courpasson, D. and Phillips, N., 2006. Power and organizations. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Clegg, S. R. and Dunkerly, D., 1980. Organization, class and control. London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul.
Clegg, S. R. and Rhodes, C., 2006. Management ethics: contemporary contexts. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Cohen, S., 1972. Folk devils and moral panics. London: Routledge.
Courpasson, D., 2006. Soft constraint. Liberal organizations and domination. Oslo:
Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press.
Court, W. H. B., 1962. A concise economic history of Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dale, K., 2001. Anatomising embodiment & organization theory. London: Palgrave.
Dean, M., 1991. The constitution of poverty: towards a genealogy of liberal govern-
ance. London: Routledge.
Dean, M., 1992. A genealogy of the government of poverty. Economy and Society,
21(3), 215-251.
Degreene, K. B., 1988. Long-wave cycles of sociotechnical change and innovation: a
macropsychological perspective. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 61(1), 7-23.
Dick, P. K., 1968. Do androids dream of electric sheep? New York: Ballantine.
Douglas, M., 1996. Purity and Danger. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Faulkner, A. S., 1921. Does jazz put the sin in syncopation? Ladies Home Journal, 38,
16-34.
Flyvbjerg, B., 1998. Rationality and power: democracy in practice. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M., 1979. Discipline and punish. Harmondsworth: Pengiuin
Foucault, M., 1982. The subject and power. In: H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, eds.
Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: University of
Chicago
Gilbreth, F. B. and Gilbreth, L., 1916. Fatigue study – the elimination of humanity’s
greatest waste: A first step in motion study. New York: Sturgis and Walton Co.
Gordon, R. D., 2007. Power, knowledge and domination. Oslo: Liber and Copenha-
gen Business School Press

Foundations of Organization Power 125
Gordon R. D., 2008. Legitimacy and power. In: S. Clegg and M. Haugaard, eds.
Handbook of Power. London: Sage.
Gramsci, A., 1971. From the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Greenwood, R. and Hinings, C. R., 2002. Disconnects and consequences in organiza-
tion theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47, 411-421.
Hall, J. A., 2008. Liberalism for Hobbesian reasons. Journal of Power, 1(1), 75-85.
Hannah, M., 1997. Imperfect panopticism: envisioning the construction of perfect li-
ves. In: G. Benko and U. Stohmayer, eds. Space and social theory: interpreting
modernity and postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 344-359.
Hardy, C. and Clegg, S. R., 2006. Some dare call it power. In: S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy,
B. Thomas and W. R. Nord, eds. The Sage handbook of organizational studies.
London: Sage.
Harré, R., 1986. Varieties of realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hinings, C. R. and Greenwood, R., 2002. Disconnects and consequences in organisa-
tion theory? Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(3), 411-21.
Hughes, R., 1987. The fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Aus-
tralia, 1787-1868. London: Collins Harvill.
Ignatieff, M., 1978. A just measure of pain: the penitentiary in the industrial revolu-
tion, 1750-1850. New York: Pantheon Books.
Jacques, R., 1996. Manufacturing the employee: management knowledge from the
19th to 21st centuries. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Jensen, M. C. and W. H. Meckling., 1976. Theory of the firm: managerial behaviour,
agency costs and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics, (Octo-
ber), 305-360.
Kanigel, R., 1997. The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of ef-
ficiency. New York: Viking.
Kolb, D., 1986. The critique of pure modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and after. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kondratieff, N., 1935. The long waves in economic life, Available from: http://www.
kwaves.com/kwave.pdf [Accessed 6 October 2008].
Lakoff, G., 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lee, A., 1980. Henry Ford and the Jews. New York: Stein and Day.
Littler, C. R., 1982. The development of the labour process in capitalist societies: a
comparative study of the transformation of work organization in Britain, Japan
and the USA. Aldershot: Gower.
Locke, R. R., 1984. The end of the practical man: entrepreneurship and practical
education in Germany, France and Great Britain. London: JAI.
Lopes, P., 2005. Signifying deviance and transgression: jazz in the popular imagina-
tion. American Behavioural Scientist, 48(11), 1468-1481.
Lukes, S., 1974. Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan.
Lukes, S. 2005. Power: a radical view. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Mandel, M., 1989. Making good time: scientific management; the Gilbreths; photog-
raphy and motion; futurism. Riverside: California Museum of Photography.
Marcus, A. and Segal, H. P., 1989. Technology in America. New York: Harcourt Bra-
ce Johanovitch.

126 Stewart Clegg
Maslow, A. H., 1978. A theory of human motivation. In: V. H. Vroom and E. L. Deci,
eds. Management and motivation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx, K., 1976. Capital. Harmondsworth: New Left Books/Penguin.
Merton, R.C., 1973. Theory of rational option pricing. Bell Journal of Economics and
Management Science, 4, 141-183.
Meyer, S., 1981. The five dollar day: labor management and social control in the
Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921. Albany, State University of New York.
Mintzberg, H., 1983. Power in and around organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Nelson, D., 1980. Frederick W. Taylor and the rise of scientific management. Madi-
son, WI: University of Wisconsin Press
Nelson, D. and Campbell, S. 1972. Taylorism versus welfare work in American indus-
try; H. L. Gantt and the Bancrofts. Business History Review, 46(1), 1-16.
Nelson, R. R. and Winter, S. G., 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic change.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.
O’Neill, J., 1986. The disciplinary society: From Weber to Foucault. British Journal
of Sociology, 37(1), 42-61.
Parsons, T., 1964. Essays in sociological theory. New York: Free Press.
Perrow, C., 1986a. Complex organizations: a critical essay. Glenview, Ill, Scott,
Foresman.
Perrow, C., 1986b. Economic theories of organization. Theory and Society, 15, 11-45.
Plamenatz, J., 1949. Mills utilitarianism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Poovey, M., 1995. Making a social body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, E., 2002. What is this thing called jazz? African American musicians as artists,
critics, and activists. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pugh, D. S., Hickson, D. J. and Hinings, C. R., 1971. Writers on Organizations. Har-
mondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Putnam, R. D., 1993. The prosperous community: social capital and public life. Ame-
rican Prospect, 13, 35-42.
Putnam, R. D., 1995. Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of
Democracy, 6, 65-78.
Ramsay, H., 1977. Cycles of control: workers’ participation in sociological and his-
torical perspective. Sociology, 11(3), 481-506.
Ranson, S., Hinings, R. and Greenwood, R., 1980. The structuring of organizational
structure. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25(1), 1-14.
Reed, M., 1985. Redirections in organizational analysis. London: Tavistock.
Rose, N., 1999. Powers of freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ryan, K., 2004. Social exclusion and the politics of order in modern Ireland: from
panopticism to inclusive governance. Dissertation (PhD), National University of
Ireland Galway.
Ryan, K., 2007. Social exclusion and the politics of order. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Sacks, H., 1972. An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing
sociology. In: D. Sudnow, ed. Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press.
Sayer, D., 1991. Capitalism and modernity: an excursus on Marx and Weber. Lon-
don: Routledge.

Foundations of Organization Power 127
Schumpeter, J. S., 1934. The Theory of Economic Development: an Enquiry into prof-
its, capital, credit, interest and the business cycle. Trans. by Redvers Opie. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schutz, A., 1967. The phenomenology of the social world. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern
University Press.
Selznick, P., 1957. Leadership in administration: A sociological interpretation.
Evanston, Ill: Harper & Row.
Shenhav, Y., 1999. Manufacturing rationality: the engineering foundations of the
managerial revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Simon, H. A., 1957. Models of man. New York: Wiley.
Spybey, T., 1984. Traditional and professional frames of meaning in management.
Sociology, 18, 550-562.
SurfWax World Cities News. Available from: http://news.surfwax.com/worldcities/
files/Zhangzhou_China.html [Accessed 5 March 2005].
Taylor, F. W., 1911. Principles of scientific management. New York: Harper.
Thompson, J. D., 1967. Organizations in action: social science bases of administra-
tive theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Thompson, E. P., 1968. The making of the English working class. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Turner, B. S., 1984. The body and social theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
van Krieken, R., 1990. The organisation of the soul: Elias and Foucault on discipline
and the self. Archives Europeénes de Sociologie, 31(2), 353-371.
Watts, S. L., 1991. Order against chaos: business culture and labor ideology in
America 1880-1915. New York: Greenwood Press.
Weber, M., 1976. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Weber, M., Roth, G., and Wittich, C., 1978. Economy and society: An outline of in-
terpretive sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weick, K. E., 1995. Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publica-
tions.
Williams, K., Haslam, C. and Williams, J., 1992. Ford versus ‘Fordism’: The begin-
ning of mass production? Work, Employment & Society, 6, 517-555.
Williamson, O. E., 1981. The economics of organizations: the transaction cost ap-
proach. American Journal of Sociology, 87, 548-577.

Chapter 5
Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches
Jill Vickers
In this chapter, I survey approaches to power associated with second-wave
feminism.1 While suffrage-era feminists sought political inclusion, radical
feminists, whose ideology dominated ‘second-wave’ thinking about power,
were alienated from it. To radical feminists, all forms of power are inherently
male-dominated, or ‘patriarchal’. Moreover, women’s perceptions and uses
of power were considered different from men’s; and male dominance was
deemed the model on which all other forms of dominance were based. Radi-
cal feminists also consider male dominance based in male sexuality leading
to a focus on private power relations, and hence repudiate the (liberal-
endorsed) separation between the public and public spheres, which is thought
to enhance men’s power monopoly. In terms of activism, radical feminists
politicize ‘domestic’ power relations, as suggested by the slogan: ‘the per-
sonal is political’. Viewing state power as inherently patriarchal and danger-
ous, radical feminists distrust governments and support structures which con-
strain their activities. They especially distrust coercive power even if associ-
ated with legitimate democratic governments. Within this ideological frame-
work, the idea that democratic governments can be ‘women-friendly’ allies,
as claimed by feminists in some democracies, is untenable.
These ideas were part of a radical feminist ideology which in the 1960’s
and 1970’s mobilized millions of women. They also led the first generation
of feminist scholars to develop a gender-specific theory of power rather than
challenging mainstream theories with feminist insights. Their influence per-
sists, especially in feminist political theory. Section 1 of this chapter outlines
ideas about power in second-wave feminist ideology. Section 2 explores the
main approaches to power in feminist political theory. Section 3 identifies
approaches to power in feminist political science. In sections 2 and 3, I pre-
1 ‘Wave’ imagery is a convenient shorthand for feminist activism in ‘the West’. The first
‘wave’ began in mid 19th century and focused on the vote, education, legal and economic
rights. The second ‘wave’ began in the mid 1960’s and sought societal and sexual trans-
formation.

130 Jill Vickers
sent approaches, debates and representative theorists. I demonstrate strong
links between radical feminist ideology and feminist political theory, but
more of a disconnect with power approaches in feminist political science,
which revolve around debates on the ‘women-friendly’ potential of democ-
racy. There is no section exploring the influence of feminist approaches on
mainstream political science, because after four decades this is still largely
ignored by power theorists within the discipline.
I hypothesize that differences in power approaches reflect the extent to
which women wield political power in the country experienced by particular
scholars, as well as the location of that country in global power hierarchies.
Evidence suggests an inverse relationship between the power of a given de-
mocracy and the women who wield state power in that democracy. This may
explain the enduring influence of radical feminist ideas valorizing women’s
alienation from state power. In the US for example, feminists face a State that
wields vast economic and military power, as well as exercising cultural
dominance. Yet, more women wield power in some smaller, more peripheral,
democracies. In democracies in parts of the global south (e.g. Asia), many
radical feminist ideas about power are less tenable.
Current feminist approaches to power in political science also reflect
epistemological debates which overlay earlier ideological conflicts, partly
because many younger gender scholars lack direct experience of movement
activism. Approaches to power divide into a modernist project in which lib-
eral- and liberationist-feminists challenge “social, political and economic
power in laws, institutions, policies and practices which exclude or oppress
women”; and a post-modern project in which “linguistic feminists” use a
“discourse of identity” to promote change by “destabilizing the meaning of
gender” (Haste, 2000: 22). Modernists conceptualize power within liberal
and left-liberationist searches for gender justice; while post-modernists con-
sider gender “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott,
1986: 1069), and try to destabilize power relations by disrupting discursive
gender meanings. Post-modernists focus on discourses; modernists deploy
both ideational and material explanations of understanding power as discur-
sively and materially produced (Bryson 2000: 44).
Selecting which texts, authors and debates to include posed a methodo-
logical problem because the most influential English-language texts about
power are by US radical feminists and reflect their experiences in the context
of a superpower. Moreover, US women were denied citizenship rights for
generations, making their entry into state institutions more difficult than in
smaller Western democracies, and some post-colonial democracies, where
men and women won citizenship rights together (Vickers 2007). The idea
that democratic state power can be ‘women-friendly’ is a product of Nordic
women’s experiences, where structures were designed to ensure female rep-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 131
resentation (state feminism), and which has stimulated a global campaign for
electoral quotas to increase women’s legislative presence. The UN for exam-
ple promotes a special ‘women’s machinery’ to ensure that democratic states
are responsive to the demands of women. To balance the focus on radical
feminism in the US (section 2), I have selected texts from smaller democra-
cies and the global south, which are discussed in section 3.
Power in Feminist Ideology2
Mobilized by two key ideas – patriarchy and politics without power – radical
feminist activists conceptualized cooperative and non-hierarchical all-women
groups in which consensual, collective decision-making was the only ‘good’
form of politics. The small consciousness-raising (C-R) groups that resulted
were deemed innocent of power relations. Unlike first-wave feminists, the
second wave rejected representative forms of democracy, valorized grass-
roots, social movement activism, and displayed an outsiders’ belief that not
having power signifies virtue. Portraying women as a (sex) class, with com-
mon interests in conflict with men’s interests, they rejected power as inextri-
cable from male dominance. They believed that being powerless marked
women and their relationships as morally superior. Advocating a strategy of
non-violence and non-cooperation, they labeled women who supported na-
tionalist, anti-colonial or anti-racist movements ‘unfeminist’.
Mansfield (1998: 154) thinks second-wave (radical) feminists adopted
the idea of male/female difference to promote solidarity among (US) women
otherwise divided by conflicting interests. They claimed ‘women’ share com-
mon interests, and all women are equally oppressed by patriarchy, which they
conceptualized as a global phenomenon, thereby erasing the colonial, class
and race oppressions from which white, majority women benefited. Failure to
acknowledge women’s differences collapsed unstable organizations without
conflict-management procedures (Vickers 2006a). But their (purportedly)
non-hierarchical organizations made ‘politics without power’ seem possible.
Ackelsberg (1997) notes similarities between ‘communalist anarchism’ and
2 To modernists, ideology means organized sets of ideas associated with social movements,
which diagnose negative events and provide a program for change. Sociological explana-
tions invoke interests, or strain for the causes and consequences of ideological beliefs but
ignore the truth value of the ideas themselves, which cultural explanations also do. Rational
choice explanations focus on how ideas mobilize individual’s actions, partly by assessing
their truth value. Discursive approaches explore the meaning of discourses, but ignore
causal regularities. Discourse is claimed to constitute power relations, whereas for modern-
ists, ideas are one possible explanatory factor among several.

132 Jill Vickers
radical feminism: both condemn power as domination; valorize ‘politics
without power’; promote an anti-statist orientation; and adopt strategies of re-
sistance and empowerment to be realized in grass-roots activism and non-
hierarchical, consensus-based organizations. Ackelsberg believes these views
facilitated (radical) feminists’ commitment to transformative goals which re-
quired a ‘social movement’ orientation.
Most second-wave feminists organized against patriarchy. Male domi-
nance was seen as rooted in a universal, male ‘nature’ and sexuality; and
manifested in all male/female power relations. Patriarchy thus became the
central concept in radical feminist ideology. But liberal and leftist feminists
also appropriated it because of its powerful mobilizing capacity. In radical-
feminist texts (Millet 1969; Firestone 1970; Figgis 1970) patriarchy was
theorized as a universal system of power relations based on male dominance
and female oppression. But radical feminist theorists differed on the question
of causation. Millet and Figges offered cultural explanations; Firestone theo-
rized women’s role in reproduction, unmediated by technology. Anti-
feminists also appropriated the concept. Goldberg for example (1979: 25)
would seem to agree with feminists in defining patriarchy as “any system of
organization ... in which the overwhelming number of upper positions ... are
occupied by males”. But his purpose was to deny patriarchy’s oppressive na-
ture by attributing male dominance to ‘basic’ differences between men and
women. Such appropriations reinforced women’s solidarity against a com-
mon enemy, deflecting attention from power differences among women.
Fox (1988) identifies three models of patriarchy, as: 1) collective male
dominance permeating all societies; 2) a self-contained system of genera-
tional reproduction parallel to the productive system (dual-systems theory);
and 3) a sex/gender system which includes power dimensions producing gen-
der, sexuality and heterosexuality. The first model is essentialist, attributing
systematic male dominance to men’s innate desire/need for power, making
social structures aggregations of individual wills to power. This can be seen
in O’Brien’s (1981) claim that men need power because human reproduction
alienates them from their ‘seed’, while women experience genetic continuity
through giving birth. O’Brien suggests that men compensate for this by build-
ing institutions that they can dominate, which results in asymmetrical power
relations. Essentialist concepts of patriarchy have also been developed by so-
cialist-feminists, who equate patriarchy with universal systems of production
and class relations (Delphy 1977; Eisenstein 1979; Kuhn and Wolpe 1978;
Mitchell 1975).
Fox’s two other models identify mechanisms that maintain male domi-
nance. In dual-systems explanations, economic/productive power relations
are conceptualised in Marxist terms, while reproductive power relations are
explained in radical-feminist terms, with both are governed by ‘masculinism’

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 133
which manifests in rules and laws (Burstyn 1985: 61). Hartmann (1981: 14)
theorized “social relations between men” have “a material base” and enables
men to dominate women. The third model attributes “goal-directed activities”
to patriarchy in the way that this produces “the heterosexual and gendered in-
dividual” and the specific social relations that characterize familial norms
(Fox, 1988: 171). Patriarchal power thus structures the entire social system,
from the family to the state, while men’s ‘need for dominance’ is attributed to
childhood socialization by mothers, who seem all-powerful to their children
within the domestic sphere (Chodorow 1978). Locating male dominance in
gendered subjectivity and the sex/gender system, gender-power relations are
distinguished from power relations of production. But these models fail to
explain women’s relation to state power, and in particular variations in the
extent to which women are present in legislatures. Their key ideological
claim is that men dominate – have power over – women everywhere.
Radical feminist perceptions of patriarchy remain a key concept in the
analyses of anti-violence movements, which are the product of conflict ex-
perienced by minority-race, survivors of rape, incest and battering, and shel-
ter workers. It also remains a key concept for sexual minorities. In academia,
it is central to the work of many US feminist legal scholars. The associated
claim that all power relations are gendered can be found in the work of many
contemporary feminist political theorists. Indeed radical feminist ideology is
the backdrop against which theoretical feminist approaches to power have
developed. Also, derived from this is the focus on power relations in the do-
mestic sphere, which extends the concept of politics so that it becomes virtu-
ally coterminous with social relations. Moreover, state power is either ig-
nored or viewed as dangerous and to be avoided by women.
Power in Feminist Political Theory
This section draws on three frameworks exploring feminist approaches to
power. Yeatman (1997: 145) theorizes feminists’ relations to democratic
states developing through three stages marked by conceptualizations of
power as coercion, protection and capacity. Allen (1998, 1999) and Squires
(2000) theorize approaches across public and private power relations. Allen
conceptualizes power as domination, empowerment and resources, while
Squires categorizes power as conflict, capacity and practice. For ease of
presentation, this broad conceptual vocabulary will be discussed as five
themes: 1) power as domination/coercion; 2) empowerment; 3) the impact of
feminist scholarship’s move to ‘gender’; 4) multidimensional theories; and 5)
approaches to democratic state power.

134 Jill Vickers
Power as Domination/Coercion: Power Over
Early domination theorists conceptualized power over (potestas) as ‘conflict-
ual’ and ‘possessional’ (Squires, 2000); moreover, power equaled male
dominance, although explanations of how men dominated varied from force
(MacKinnon), economic exploitation (Delphy) to actual or threatened rape
(Brownmiller). Male domination was also attributed to abstract factors – the
nature of reproduction (Firestone, O’Brien), or the mode of production
(Eisenstein). Pateman conceptualizes male power as “the ... political right ...
all men exercise by virtue of being men” (1988: 206), such that male/female
differences constitute “the political distinction between freedom and subjuga-
tion” achieved by contract, thereby making pervasive male domination the
core barrier to women’s citizenship.
A key early debate was whether and to what extent male domination was
socially constructed. Dworkin (1987: 125-6) considered socio-political rela-
tions of domination essential and indistinguishable from (hetero)sexual inter-
course, claiming that “all men have some kinds of power over all women”.
But, while agreeing that “no woman escapes ... being a woman” because sex
inequality is “pervasive”, MacKinnon (1987: 104-5) saw male/female differ-
ences as socially constructed when men exaggerate small variations in
strength between the sexes to legitimize their seizure of power and domina-
tion over women. Allen (1999: 14-15) believes Dworkin’s “equation of
power with domination and of domination with a master/subject model ... dis-
torts the nature of gender inequality” because it ignores “inequalities of race,
class and sexuality ... intertwined with … gender”. Others critique early
domination theorists’ failure to see the complexity of power relations; or ac-
knowledge that women too exercise power. Moreover, their focus on inter-
personal relations has ignored state power beyond describing it as patriarchal.
Some two-dimensional domination theories involve both conflictual and
empowerment aspects, combining consensual (power with) and capacity
(power to) elements. They also divide power normatively between male (bad)
domination, which is conflictual and destructive, and female (good) empow-
erment, which is consensual and creative. This Manichean model makes a
virtue of being powerless, and as Yeatman (1997: 145) observes, equates
power with force, so that “counter-power has to be counter-force”.
The most cited domination theorist is US radical feminist MacKinnon,
who works with contemporary anti-violence and anti-pornography move-
ments. These movements run transition houses, and they pressure hospitals
and police to take male violence seriously. They also campaign for bans on
pornography, claiming it promotes violence, and develop legal strategies to
make the courts respond to women’s oppression. MacKinnon rejects the lib-
eral public and private distinction, claiming both spheres are constituted by

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 135
gendered power relations and perpetuate male dominance (1989). She also
rejects the liberal view of the family as pre-political, because if abuse in the
domestic sphere is considered ‘private’ then it is more easily excluded from
state action. Unlike some feminists who value a (reconstituted) private/public
boundary, MacKinnon considers ‘privacy’ valuable only for men. She claims
that men’s domestic power gives them more leisure and access to women’s
property, labour, sexuality, energy and progeny, facilitating men’s public-
sector dominance, and perpetuating an unjust gendered division of labor. Al-
though recognizing its socially-constructed nature, MacKinnon (1989: 3)
views men’s sexuality as the determining structure of their dominance, claim-
ing powerful men deploy their social power to eroticize male dominance and
female submission. MacKinnon considers gender to be unjust because the re-
sulting hierarchical power relations are created and reproduced through vio-
lence experienced or anticipated by women. MacKinnon also considers the
state constituted by male power and as advancing only men’s interests. As
members of a powerless social category, therefore, she thinks women cannot
occupy positions of power, and even if they do, they remain relatively power-
less.
A common critique (Laden 2003; Allen 1999) of MacKinnon’s domina-
tion theory is that it provides no theoretical basis for feminist resistance.
Yeatman (1997: 147) claims that “when a movement understands itself as
representing powerless ... victims ... it neither permits itself responsibility for,
nor engagement in the affairs of the world”. Instead it “maintains an inno-
cence ... in regard to power”. She also thinks radical feminists’ alienation
from state power denies effect to the actions of women office-holders.
MacKinnon (1987: 53) however considers female power “a contradiction in
terms”. Her conceptualization of power as relational and gender as socially-
constructed facilitates activism by going beyond a “dyadic, master/subject re-
lation” (Allen, 1999: 18). The “sameness/difference theory of sex equality”
dominating sex discrimination law and policy in the US can result in judges
evading anti-discrimination laws, and MacKinnon’s (1998: 295) approach
can help feminist legal activists to defend such laws.
Empowerment: Power To, Power With, Capacity
Feminist conceptions of power as capacity (power to) respond to weaknesses
in the domination approach. Early empowerment theorists believe women
understand and use power differently than men and focus on modes exercised
by women: power to (potentia) and sometimes collective capacity (power
with). Individual and collective instances of power to and power with are
sometimes conflated however, because the focus is on mothering, which in

136 Jill Vickers
modern Western societies tends to be organized on an individual basis. How-
ever, in the ‘women in development’ (WID) field, empowerment includes
more varied modalities: power from within, power with, power to, and power
as resistance (Townsend et. al, 1999). US minority scholars deploying inter-
sectional analyses also identify multiple modes of power (Bookman &
Morgen 1988). Allen distinguishes empowerment from power as a resource.
Allen (1999: 10) also identifies the need for a distributive understanding of
power, because without this comes a tendency to overlook power’s relational
nature; to valorize the male/female dyad; to ignore collective power; and to
conflate power distributions with power structures. Moreover, she thinks lib-
eral, distributive approaches fail because gender/power distributions are theo-
rized as being changed by what is, ultimately, a patriarchal state. Whether
democratic states in theory could effect such changes depends of course on
how the state is conceptualized. Most feminist political theorists consider
them essentially ‘patriarchal’, in the sense of serving men’s interests, and
some see states as sites of gender conflict, but few believe that male-
dominated states have to the potential change gender/power relations unless
male elites consider it in their interests to do so (See Dahlerup below).
Squire’s (1999: 35) capacity concept combines resource and empower-
ment approaches. Grounding capacity in Arendt’s idea that power “corre-
sponds to the human ability ... to act in concert”, Squires (1969: 44) claims
that power relations are not always zero-sum since male dominance and fe-
male power can co-exist (Sanday 1981; Lerner 1986); and power with in-
volves a collective capacity creating space within which women’s power can
develop. In her multi-dimensional theory, Allen (1999: 18) treats transforma-
tive aspects of power as a resource, and conceptualizes empowerment as “the
ability to empower and transform oneself, others and the world”. This as-
sumes women have capacities repressed in patriarchal societies, whilst link-
ing empowerment to maternalist politics. Empowerment approaches promote
a ‘care perspective’ as the basis for a beneficial, even revolutionary, under-
standing of power, which is to enable a ‘feminist re-visioning of society’.
This includes power-from-within: a creative capacity to be harnessed by
women’s movements. Held (1993: 137) for example suggests that “the capac-
ity to give birth ... nurture and empower could be the basis for new ... con-
cepts” of power, while Jones (1993) mines accounts of how women exercise
power in different contexts in her theory of “compassionate authority”. It
should be noted that maternal power combines domination and empower-
ment, so that conceptualizing mothering as empowerment alone is mislead-
ing. Allen (1999: 24) examines mothering as a complex practice with multi-
ple power modes, so that mothering occurs within, and is shaped by, domi-
nance relations, which make it problematic to valorize such practices as femi-
nist. Consequently, mothering is a weak basis for feminist re-conceptualiza-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 137
tions of power, especially for state power. Nonetheless, numerous theorists
model political power on mothering. Moreover, a few rely on empirical evi-
dence, for example the mother movements which are the basis for resistance
movements in many states in the South, which demonstrate the mobilizing
potential of maternal power. Empowerment theories also relate to, and are in-
formed by, the ‘women’s voice’ approach in feminist psychology. These
range from lesbian and indigenous spirituality to maternalist ecofeminism.
Analyzing the public/private divide in Western political thought, Elshtain
(1981: 15-6) conceptualizes state politics as “an elaborate defense against the
tug of the private ... familial, against evocations of female power”. Rejecting
radical feminists’ collapsing of the public/private divide, Elshtain (1992: 115-
6) claims western societies historically associated “complementary forms of
power with the ... sexes”, hence ‘formal’ male power over was balanced by
‘informal’ female power to. Only in families, Elshtain believes, do women
retain sufficient power to preserve the human values of empathy and compas-
sion against masculine values of efficiency and rationality. She insists on the
distinctiveness of state [formal] politics, rejecting feminist attempts to depoli-
ticize state power, avoid political authority, and evade citizenship responsi-
bilities. She rejects a homology between power in personal relationships and
state power, theorizing each as distinct; and rejects the Manichean view of
state power as brute domination. She also values a redrawn sphere of privacy
within which women’s distinctive maternal powers can be expressed and pre-
served. Conceptualizing power as a resource based on women’s maternal
creativity, and involving both public and private domination, Elshtain (1982)
claims empowerment emerges from maternal practices. She opposes making
women participate in state coercion, rejecting especially claims that women
should fight for their country to gain first-class citizenship. Believing that
wielding coercive power represses women’s ability to obstruct the techno-
logical intensification of states’ destructive power, Elshtain envisions a ‘third
way’ for women, between restriction to the domestic sphere and legitimizing
the state’s destructive power by participating in it.
The Transformation of Gender
Until relatively recently, it was commonplace in academia to treat relations
between the sexes as ‘unproblematic’ (Davis et. al. 1991: 3), because sex
asymmetries were considered biological, hence beyond politics. The material
differences/processes attributed to sex were conceptualized as unchanging
and part of nature, but then ‘gender’ was distinguished from ‘sex’ (Oakley
1972: 3) – a category which is mutable, historical, and socially-constructed.
Some political theorists (Rubin 1975; Vickers 1980, 1994) developed an in-

138 Jill Vickers
ter-actionist approach which theorized sex/gender regimes as socially-
constructed and shaped by material factors. It was argued that the extent to
which material or social factors determined outcomes depends upon a soci-
ety’s capacity for technological mediation.
‘Gender’ is now the concept used by most feminist theorists (Scott and
Butler 1992; Harding and Hintikka 1983; Harding 1986; Scott 1986, 1988 ).
Conceptualizing gender as the “primary way of signifying relationships of
power” (Scott 1986: 1069) made it possible to locate “relations between the
sexes within other socially structured relations of power ... [since] gender
asymmetries were socially produced and reproduced, and ... subject to trans-
formation” (Davis et. al. 1991: 4). The move to ‘gender’ has provided new
ways of thinking about power asymmetries, but it does not always explain
them and may even obstruct our understanding of state power, particularly
the material aspects of power.
The shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ raises an important methodological
question for feminist social scientists: should they develop a gender-specific
theory of power or incorporate gender into existing theories? In 1987 for ex-
ample, Dutch feminist social scientists rejected gender-specific theory by ar-
guing that power relations “involving domination and subordination tend to
be unequal in more than one way: moreover, power gets conflated making it
hard to determine what results from gender, and what from class, ethnicity,
nationality” (Davis et. al. 1991: 6). They believe existing theories of power
can explain gender/power relations if masculinist biases are removed. Others,
pursuing gender-specific theory, claim that mainstream political theorists re-
sist including gender in their analyses, or trivialize it if they do include it
(Davis et. al. 1991).
Multidimensional Approaches: Power Over, With and To
Several feminist political theorists have developed multidimensional ap-
proaches. Janeway’s Powers of the Weak is one such approach, combining
power over (‘governing power’) with collective, oppositional, power. Por-
traying women as among the ‘weak’, Janeway (1981: 5) theorized women as
different from others, among ‘the governed’, because they are isolated and
harder to mobilize. She conceptualized power relations ‘from below’, arguing
that by acting together women develop the capacity to contest domination
and build ‘people power’ through forming alliances with others among the
weak resisting domination. Janeway (1981: 3-4, 8) views power as relational,
so that the creation of people power requires ‘cooperation and interaction’.
Unable to resolve “the contradiction between a limiting power to compel and
a liberating power to act”, she outlines multiple dimensions of power: domi-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 139
nation, individual empowerment, and the collective capacity to promote
change by opposing domination.
Author of another early multidimensional theory, Hartsock (1983) devel-
oped feminist standpoint epistemology and a gender-specific version of his-
torical materialism. She contrasts traditional (male) power theorists ‘contract
model’, portraying power relations as competitions between self-interested
individuals, with a model she attributes to women theorists, which focuses on
collective aspects of power (power with). Squires (1999: 41) observes that her
conception of power as capacity is a part of a ‘feminist standpoint’ based
upon historically and materially specific circumstances “realized through
consciousness-raising”. Hartsock considers feminist conceptions of power
morally superior because they are less destructive and more fully human
(Deutchman 1996: 8).
Critics of Hartsock’s theory focus on how she legitimizes the relations
she posits between men’s and women’s conceptions of power. Yet Hart-
sock’s (1996: 37) claims are not essentialist: rather she claims different life
experiences “lead to different world views and distinctive theoretical com-
mitments”. Critics (e.g. Elshtain 1992; Vickers 1994) claim some men also
have experiences which make them view power as a capacity. Moreover,
they see power over and power to not as opposites but as complementary.
Critics also challenge Hartsock’s willingness to cede state power to men,
without considering women’s potential collective capacity to resist and con-
test domination, and to form alliances.
Brown’s (1992; 1995) multidimensional approach combines a radical-
feminist conception of states, a discursive conception of gender, and a prac-
tice conception of power (Squires, 1999: 35-39). Brown (1988: 208) distin-
guishes current manifestations of power – conceptualized as relational, ubiq-
uitous, largely invisible and expressed in sexual, economic, political, discur-
sive, intellectual and physical modes – with the potential of ‘post-masculinist’
formulations. Moreover, as it currently exists, power is unsystematic, multi-
dimensional, unconscious and without a centre; thus intangible, except when
expressed in violence or discrimination. Violence is not essential to power.
However, when subordinates regulate their behavior in response to threats,
“legitimation is procured ... through the absence of viable alternatives”
(Brown, 1995: 138); that is, dominance can be habitual.
Brown believes many feminists mistake one mode of power for the
whole, urging feminists to explore all dimensions. And she considers why
women become fixated on domination: because they fear it, they rebel
against it, dream of its absence and idealize maternal power in inventing al-
ternatives. Theorizing that politics involves power conflict and struggle
which are not part of mothering, however idealized, Brown claims that while
gender identities are ‘impossible to generalize’ because of their fluidity and

140 Jill Vickers
diversity, gender power can “be named and traced with ... precision” because
“modes of power are far more circumscribable than their ... agents, vehicles
and objects” (Squires 1995: 166-7). Brown (1995: 168) focuses on state
power arguing that the puzzle of women’s relations with state power must be
solved because “an unprecedented ... number of women ... are ... totally de-
pendent on the state for survival”.
Considering (state) politics the most masculine human activity, Brown
(1992) theorizes a homology between male dominance and state power. She
identifies four modalities: juridical-legislative, economic, prerogative (com-
mands) and bureaucratic. The ‘prestige of domination’, Brown (1992: 25)
claims, reserves prerogative power for men. Despite some women’s partici-
pation, domination and command construct masculinity and give it prestige.
Bureaucracy is identified as modernity’s most “distinct and ubiquitous form
of domination”. Unlike anarchist-feminists (e.g. Ferguson 1984) who equate
bureaucracy with patriarchy, Brown (1992: 29) theorizes that state power is
increasingly centralized and male-dominated because technology heightens
its instrumental rationality. Seeing the masculine will to power and control
expanding throughout society via technology-infused bureaucracy, Brown
(1992: 28) claims “the state monopolizes the institutionalized physical power
of society” through the police and military, which serve men’s interests by
reinforcing maleness as bureaucracy’s norm.
Departing from the earlier belief that a gender-specific approach to
power was needed, some younger theorists develop multidimensionality by
inserting feminist power concepts into mainstream theories. Foucault is a fre-
quent ‘partner’, as are the following: Bachrach and Baratz (Townsend et al.
1999), Bourdieu (Risseeuw, 1991), Lukes (Meyer, 1991) and Giddens (Wolf-
fensperger 1991). Dutch feminists found Lukes’ theory (1974) useful regard-
ing power in love relationships, but concluded that power “in loving relation-
ships is not comparable to power in other relationships” (Meyer, 1991: 21).
Many feminists engage with Foucault’s work. Early efforts mainly explored
the ‘fit’ between Foucault’s power concepts and feminist goals. Bartky criti-
cizes Foucault for writing “as if power constitutes the very individuals upon
whom it operates” (1985: 11), but concludes that feminists can ‘fix’ Fou-
cault’s problems regarding agency. Munro (2003: 79-99) compares Fou-
cault’s account of power to radical feminism, seeing sufficient similarity, es-
pecially in Foucault’s early analysis of domination, to confirm Foucault’s
theory as being relevant to feminist theorizing.
Some theorists combine Foucault’s approach to power with Butler’s con-
ceptualization of ‘gender’. Mills (2003: 253-272) assesses such conflations,
highlighting the way in which Butler posits a homology between the work-
ings of power and language. She concludes that Butler’s concept of resignifi-
cation as resistance absolves her of charges of being a-political, but that But-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 141
ler’s (1997) critique of Foucault merely elaborates his idea that the subject is
formed through the operation of power (2003: 258-9) – I discuss Butler’s the-
ory of perfomability below. Many have critiqued the “troubling political im-
plications” (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly, 1995: 34) of the Foucault/Butler concep-
tualization of power3. However, Oksala (2004: 99-121) rejects the argument
that Foucault de-materializes women’s bodies, claiming his discursive con-
ceptualization enables counterattacks against normalizing power. Sawicki
(1998: 93-107) promotes Foucault’s concepts of subjectivity, power, emanci-
patory practices and freedom as a way for post-modern feminists to develop a
power theory with which to counter radical- and socialist-feminist accounts.
Allen (1991: 2) believes feminists should study power because of “an in-
terest in understanding, criticizing, challenging, subverting and, ultimately
overturning the multiple axes of stratification which affect women in con-
temporary Western societies, including ... sexism, racism, heterosexism and,
class oppression”. Her goal is to bring clarity to the diverse and at times con-
flicting accounts of power, resulting in her own multidimensional approach.
Allen (1999) identifies three types of power which she relates to Foucault,
Butler and Arendt: resource, domination and empowerment.
Allen believes there is an impasse in feminist theorizing about power be-
cause current approaches do not help feminists to learn about how to resist
domination. Believing domination is not overturned by individual acts of re-
sistance, Allen considers feminists’ interests as realized through theorizing all
three dimensions of power – power over, power to and power with. Domina-
tion is always judged as negative, while power as resource, empowerment or
transformation are considered positive. Moving away from this language
game, Allen (1999: 8) claims that “conceptions of power as domination and
... empowerment reify power as a whole into ... one of its aspects”, resulting
in a “distorted picture of women’s situation”. A better approach would con-
ceptualize their interplay as between two ‘modalities of power’. To resolve
the impasse, Allen proposes a third dimension modeled on Arendt’s ‘power
of solidarity’; and combines the positive aspects of all three power modalities
into a multi-dimensional theory, which reflects feminists’ interests.
Allen’s (1999: 119) first dimension derives from Foucault’s genealogy of
power, which is considered a “compelling alternative to the juridical account
that ... power is fundamentally oppressive”, and she embraces Foucault’s
claim that we are “subject to power and at the same time ... a subject in and
through power”. However, Allen is not uncritical in her use of Foucault and
she takes him to task for his lack of normative judgment about power’s uses;
for treating power as strategic while ignoring solidarity; for his unresolved
3 Butler’s gender theory also troubles modernist feminists.

142 Jill Vickers
paradox of agency; and for failing to his fulfill his promise of developing a
genealogy of resistance.
Allen’s second dimension derives from Butler’s appropriation of Der-
rida’s citationality or iterability: because subjects must cite/iterate sex/gender
norms which constrain them, agency and subversion become possible when
they mis-cite. Allen (1999: 120) also believes that Butler “focuses too nar-
rowly on the discursive as the dimension through which power is exercised”.
Moreover, like Foucault, Butler avoids the question of how to evaluate the
uses of power; thus she works with a purely strategic conception of power,
and ignores the relationship between power and solidarity. This last point
leads directly to Allen’s (1999: 120) third dimension, which is derived from
Arendt’s concept of power as solidarity. While “the normative idea of recip-
rocity or mutuality” can explain feminist collective action, Allen also argues
that solidarity can produce “normatively problematic group interactions” –
for instance, armies. Because Arendt sees power as communicative, Allen
(1991: 120) considers her theory “less helpful for theorizing the systemic re-
lations of domination”.
To achieve feminists’ interests, Allen (1991: 121) proposes a power the-
ory to “illuminate domination, resistance, and solidarity” and their interrela-
tions. Incorporating positive aspects and avoiding the weaknesses of the ap-
proaches of Butler, Foucault and Arendt, Allen (1999: 123; 125-6) defines
power over as “the ability of ... actors to constrain the choices available to”
others “in a non-trivial way”. While domination is one application of power
over, often routine rather than intentional, resistance and empowerment in-
volves an actor’s capacity to respond to another actor exercising power over
her. Moreover, feminists use empowerment “to contradict the masculinist
definition of power as dominating and controlling power over others”, which
positions empowerment as equivalent to power-to. This satisfies one interest
feminists have in conceptualizing power as power-to. Empowerment is not
equivalent to resistance, but feminists’ interest in solidarity requires an addi-
tional conceptualization of power as collective empowerment, or power-with,
as conveyed by Arendt’s “ability ... to act in concert”. But solidarity and
power-with are not equivalent; and collective power-with is also a basis of
male dominance. Feminists’ interest in solidarity leads Allen (1999: 127) to
define it as “the ability to collectively act together for the agreed-upon end of
challenging, subverting, [or] ... overturning a system of domination” Allen
(1999: 127) defines power in three dimensions as “the ability or capacity” of
‘actors to act’, which she considers “better suited to the interests ... feminists
bring to the study of power”. She seems to side with empowerment theorists
by privileging power-to, but Allen theorizes dimensions of power as dynami-
cally interacting and conceptually interrelated, rather than as opposites.
Power-over, to and with are simultaneously features of a situation, and pro-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 143
vide tools to make sense of complex power relations. Such tools distinguish
between foreground and background perspectives within which power rela-
tions occur, and respectively explicate power relations between individuals or
groups, and between social conditions: subject-positions, cultural meanings,
practices, institutions and structures. It can be argued that Allen’s (1999: 130)
assignment of democratic (state) power relations to the background, deliber-
ately minimizing them to “allow ... [foreground] power relations to appear”
shows the weakness of her approach. A result is that feminists’ activism oc-
curs in the narrow spaces created by empowerment and resistance, not as col-
lective action or of the solidarity of ‘people power’ which focuses on chang-
ing background conditions. Allen’s approach thus shares Foucault’s and But-
ler’s restricted focus on small-scale acts of empowerment/resistance.
Feminist Approaches to Democratic Power, Legitimate
Coercion and Protection
How are feminists’ interests advanced by excluding states from their concep-
tualization of power? Jacquette (2003) claims that (radical) feminists’ dreams
of politics without power, or their portrayal of politics, power and gender as
texts, identities, or performances, reflect their anti-state bias. While acknowl-
edging the legitimacy of critiques of state power, she believes feminist theo-
rists in the affluent democracies over-emphasize the importance of identity
differences, while ignoring global and domestic economic inequalities from
which (white) Western women benefit. Jacquette (1996: 47) also claims
feminist theorists’ “case against the [democratic] state” is based on half-
truths, and she argues that “democracies require coercion” for change to oc-
cur, otherwise the status quo is privileged. Western feminists may be able to
ignore state power, declaring only grass-roots politics (i.e. without power) is
‘truly democratic’, but Jacquette insists this stance is not in minority
women’s interests, nor those of women in the global South.
Because women have a stake in achieving a ‘capable state’, Yeatman
(1997) believes they have a strong interest in understanding the need of de-
mocracies for legitimate coercion. Unless people want to return to the condi-
tions of pre-state societies, egalitarian power models reflect the need for a
capable state, which requires democratic coercion. So feminists’ interests in-
volve understanding the conditions for ‘a capable state’, and how to engage
with it. In her multidimensional approach, Mansbridge (1994: 53) suggests
that democratic power involves getting people “to do what they would not
otherwise do by threat of sanction or the use of force”. She argues that de-
mocratic coercion is both necessary and legitimate, otherwise “those who
support the status quo are given more weight than those who favor change”.

144 Jill Vickers
Because coercion is used unfairly, state power is dangerous, making it essen-
tial that communities contest it by developing resistance, and being willing to
resist democratic coercion when it is used to impose unjust policies. Resis-
tance limits such unfair uses.
Mansbridge (1994: 55-6) distinguishes between power as “the actual or
potential causal relationship between the interests of an actor or set of actors
and the outcome”, and a meaning which combines power to, with and over.
Even decisions reached through democratic deliberation (Arendt’s ideal) may
need coercion to implement. But democratic coercion differs from authoritar-
ian coercion because democracies follow agreed-to procedures. So, although
the less powerful are disadvantaged in debate, they are promised procedural
fairness (Mansbridge 1994: 58-9). Consequently, feminists have an interest in
theorizing when to engage with and when to resist democratic state power.
Yeatman (1997) rejects the conflation of democratic state power with
domination arguing that women need the power over of democratic states to
secure their rights and agency as citizens. Locating democratic coercion
within a three-pronged theory, she argues that each conceptualization reflects
a phase in feminists’ relations with democratic state power, which coexist in
uneasy, contradictory, combinations. They have changed over time, but also
vary according to the political context, so feminists in specific democracies
may proceed through the three conceptualizations at a different pace; or may
learn from one another.
The first phase is power as coercion, reflecting women’s long experience
of relative powerlessness, which leads feminists to conflate democratic coer-
cion and nondemocratic force. As with other activists focusing on liberation,
feminists believe their movements “represent ... those dominated and ex-
ploited by some kind of ruling class” (Yeatman, 1997: 145). Hence, in this
conceptualization, feminists do not distinguish between democratic and un-
democratic uses of power over, or between legitimate and illegitimate domi-
nation. To move beyond this impasse, they must understand the role of le-
gitimate domination in maintaining democratic practices, as in the rule of law
from which they benefit despite its patriarchal origins, and discriminatory
elements. If power is equated only with coercion, feminists will be unable to
distinguish between democratic and undemocratic power modes; and with no
positive relationship to democratic politics, they will be removed from the
ways in which democratic institutions and values develop.
Yeatman (1997: 149) identifies feminists’ second conceptualization of
power as protection, reflecting “women’s liberation from patriarchal despotic
authority in individual households”. In this phase, women’s rights depend on
democratic paternalism, so are easily reversed, while men enjoy inalienable,
natural rights and still wield coercive power over women collectively through
public patriarchy (Walby 1997), which extend to intimate relations. This con-

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 145
structs women as innocent victims who need state protection from violence,
and state action to guarantee any rights they gain. The third phase concerns
power as capacity, including coercive capacity. While the first two concep-
tions reflect “conditions of strategic survival for women as a relatively pow-
erless group”, capacity reflects the “long and sophisticated politics of advo-
cacy for women within modern democratic freedoms”. In the first two
phases, feminists eschew violence in a reactive morality, mistaking women’s
“historical incapacity for violence as virtue”. However, a more complete un-
derstanding of power as capacity, so Yeatman (1997: 155) claims, requires
theorizing the full repertoire of action, including “democratic deployment of
legitimate state domination”. Democratic states must respect women’s rights
because of their personhood, not because of a special need for protection.
Yeatman considers feminist conceptions of power as coercion and protection
as especially problematic in relation to neo-liberalism, which bases citizen-
ship on autonomy, urging development of more self-reliant concepts of
power as capacity.
Power Approaches in Feminist Political Science
This section explores approaches to power undertaken by feminist political
scientists. Unlike the theorists considered in the previous section, these ap-
proaches are influenced by feminist ideology, and also responsive to both re-
search and real-life problems. The section first explores model of power con-
cepts used in feminist political science as developed by Deutchman, permit-
ting consideration of whether feminist political theory affects the field’s em-
pirical wing. It then explores debates about democratic power, governance
and leadership. Third, the section focuses on concepts of power in interna-
tional relations (IR); and empowerment as practice in the women-in-
development (WID) subfield. The section further explores several themes in-
troduced earlier, and speculates about the disconnect in evidence between the
field’s two ‘wings’.
Deuchman’s Model of Power
Deutchman’s (1996: 5) surveys feminist approaches to power to develop a
theory which is “non-essentialist, structural and historical”. She argues that
most of these approaches developed during the Cold War, and before the
emergence of post-modernism. Her analysis relates to the debate in feminist
political science about whether getting more women elected as legislators

146 Jill Vickers
would improve women’s lives. Those who believe it would, assume women
use power differently if elected, which would make democratic institutions
and policies more ‘women friendly’. Deutchman (1996: 5) identifies the key
assumption of feminist political science in the thesis: “to talk about power is
to discuss gender”; i.e. power is ‘gendered’. She constructs the debate about
power as a dialogue between advocates of a transformed power-over concept;
and those who see empowerment as uniquely associated with feminism
and/or women.
Most early, feminist social scientists (Lipman-Bauman, Flammang, Lips)
saw empowerment as an alternative to power as domination. Lips (1981: 10)
saw women as torn “between the desire to increase their power and ... distaste
... for ... imposing their will on others.” Lipman-Bauman (1984: 21) claimed
that “men and women engage in the gender power relationship with notably
different styles”. Flammang (1983: 71) saw women as outsiders who “don’t
want power if that means business as usual” and defining women’s power as
“essentially social and cooperative”. She also argues, however, that men will
not give power up without resistance.
Deutchman (1996: 7/8) considers empowerment a distinctive power con-
cept associated with women and/or feminism4. As such it constitutes “a way
of describing and analyzing women’s actual power behaviour”. Portrayed as
a cooperative and gendered (female) form of power relations, concepts of
empowerment are both normative and descriptive but only potentially theo-
retical. Deutchman (1996: 8) also associates empowerment with power-to and
power-from-within. Moreover, because “power is so intimately connected to
political participation”, she thinks that how “one sees power ... is a critical
determinant of one’s political behaviour”.
The thesis that power is about empowerment, or about women, became
part of feminist debates about whether democracies can ever become more
‘women-friendly’. But Deutchman (1996: 9) also thinks feminist ‘valorizing
of empowerment is a reaction to the widespread anti-feminism in political
science.’ She insists feminist scholarship would gain from engaging with
non-feminist approaches to power, but that this does not happen because
(US) feminist political science “counter-poses itself against a [disciplinary]
theory of power that does not see gender as critical”. In early feminist politi-
cal science, this oppositional stance resulted in separate and opposing power
models for men (dominance) and women (empowerment). Deutschman sees
empowerment as a “feminist alternative to the (masculinist) zero-sum model
of power”, but considers associating it with women problematic because
mainstream political scientists conflate empowerment, as a feminist concept,
4 She acknowledges that feminists are not the first, nor the only originators of the empower-
ment concept.

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 147
with empowerment as a female way of exercising power. The mainstream
discipline’s use of sex-dichotomous data in quantitative research (which con-
tinues) promoted a slide toward essentialism.
In theory, essentialism was supposedly averted by adopting Hartsock’s
‘feminist standpoint’, and the shift to ‘gender’. Deutchman (1996: 9) thinks
the increasingly conservative U.S. and British democracies produced essen-
tialist policies. Ideas associated with empowerment approaches, such as
about women’s innate peacefulness, could be used to support anti-feminist
policies. To support her anti-essentialist conceptualization of empowerment,
Deutchman (1996: 12/14) cites findings about power drive and style as evi-
dence that there are not gender differences in power behavior. If women had
access to the same power resources as men, and occupied the same positions
in the power structure, research suggests women’s power behavior would re-
semble men’s. Moreover, feminists need not “argue that women use power
differently ... to make the case for women’s increased power”.
Democratic Power, Governance and Leadership
Important approaches to power in feminist political science developed within
the debate about whether democratic states can become (more) women-
friendly. This debate reveals a fundamental divide between those who see no
essential barrier to women exercising democratic state power and those who
consider it inherently male-dominated. For the former, women’s current as-
sociation with empowerment results from being outsiders, from negative so-
cialization regarding power, and as a result of lacking power resources. The
latter believe even democratic state power excludes women. While some
women are elected, they do not in fact gain power; or else they gain power
but do not/cannot use it in the interests of ‘women’ as a group.
The approach to power developed by Nordic, feminist political scientists
is usefully compared to Deutschman’s U.S.-based model, which reflects a
low level of representation5 by women in the federal government of what is
still probably the most powerful state globally. Deutschman considers both
the empowerment model and the andocentric power-over model it opposes to
be problematic. But with the largest political presence6 in democratic state
politics globally, Nordic feminists do not view democratic power from the
perspective of outsiders. Nordic states are neither large nor very powerful.
Moreover, their general commitment to equality helps foster policies and
5 Women’s representation is no higher in the states, and no measure exists that includes all
levels.
6 Rwanda has a higher proportion reflecting population imbalance after the genocide.

148 Jill Vickers
programs which support women’s participation in paid work, and men’s par-
ticipation in parenting. Although the concept of the ‘women-friendly’ democ-
ratic state originated in Nordic countries, Finnish feminist Keränen (1990: 7)
believes mainstream, Nordic political science assumes “the perspective of the
powerful via its premises and perspectives”, reproducing the same conceptual
gulf as in the U.S. between mainstream (largely male) and feminist accounts
of power. Keränen argues that the mainstream framework makes women in-
visible despite the many Nordic women (her empirical focus is Finland) who
hold power. She suggests that this is because ‘modernist’ accounts of power
conceptualize the state as neutral, which creates an obstacle to ‘seeing’ patri-
archy. In short, an ‘ideological rupture’ is required before women can be-
come genuine power-holders.
Keränen explains that once women won the same legal rights as men,
ending overt discrimination, Finns assumed that equality was achieved. And
in the modernist paradigm, equality and difference are opposites. Modernists
assumed equality made men and women the same so they resisted re-
conceptualizing power by incorporating evidence that women retained differ-
ences which diminished their access to power (Parvikko 1990). Moreover,
women’s presence in high office could not change the structural factors limit-
ing women’s access to power as a group unless modernist practices of power
were also disrupted. Subsequent events did disrupt modernist approaches to
power in Finland. A government led by a feminist woman was elected (and
re-elected), which passed the 1995 Finnish Equality Act, requiring gender-
parity in all appointed public bodies, including cabinets. Nordic women also
promoted electoral quotas within parties to compensate for women’s differ-
ences in accessing power, electing more female legislators, who legislated for
quotas once they achieved the power to do so.
Norwegian women also co-founded their democracy, but until the 1970’s
lagged behind in office-holding (Skejie 1988). However, in 1985 they skillfully
engineered “a great leap forward” so that women held thirty-five percent of
legislative positions. And in 1986 a new Labor government led by a feminist
woman saw women take forty-five percent of the cabinet positions. Observing
this, Skejie (1987: 5) adopts Lukes’ ‘service conception’ of power as: “the abil-
ity to make a difference in the world”. She argues that while democratic office-
holding involves multiple dimensions of power, especially capacity, elections
confer a species of power over upon office-holders because some goals require
forceful implementation. Assuming that “politicians use their power to further
the interests of those they represent”, Skejie (1988: 85) theorizes that under a
proportional representation system, women office-holders best represent
women’s interests. She urges feminist political scientists to replace outsider
understandings of power, and adopt conceptualizations which explain how
women act when incorporated into democratic power.

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 149
The debate around democratic power also involves consideration of
whether it is inherently gendered, as Pateman (1988, 1989) and others claim.
Danish feminist political scientist Dahlerup (1987: 93) believes patriarchy
always involves women’s subordination by male power with women’s roles
receiving “fewer powers and prerogatives”. She claims there are enough
documented cases of systematically male-dominated societies to consider pa-
triarchy a universally-applicable concept, although not all societies are patri-
archal. Dahlerup (1987: 102-3) argues that “the oppression of women” de-
rives from a “gender-power system” which is “a complex system of interre-
lated structures and relations”. Interrelatedness makes gender-power systems
tenacious because improvements in one arena produce new power hierar-
chies, and forms of gender segregation, on which new hierarchies are built.
She hypothesizes that for change to occur women’s power must increase in
several arenas simultaneously. Dahlerup does not consider the concept of pa-
triarchy intrinsic to modern democratic states, claiming a patriarchal state
acts only in men’s interests, using power purely to oppress women. The fact
that Nordic states promote some of women’s interests refutes the thesis that
states are essentially patriarchal. Instead, Dahlerup conceptualizes social con-
flicts in democracies as manifested in gender/power systems. Powerful elites
control state agendas and promote gender power-sharing if they perceive this
is in their interests, as happens in the Nordic democracies.
In a somewhat similar vein, Connell (1987, 1990, 1994) incorporates the
Foucault/Butler approach to power, and conceptualizes each ‘gender regime’
as the “precipitate of social struggle” in an institution which is “linked to –
though not a simple reflection of – the wider gender order” (1990: 523).
Each gender regime has three sub- structures: 1) a gender division of labor;
2) a structure of power; and 3) the gendered patterned emotional attach-
ments. Connell (1990: 519) theorizes that “the state is constituted within
gender relations [and is] the central institution of gendered power”. She also
claims “gender dynamics [are] ... a major force in constructing the [liberal
] state” (emphasis added), which is both the modern world’s “central institu-
tionalization of gendered power” and the source of women’s civil and politi-
cal rights.
Connell theorizes that, while states are male-dominated historically, they
are not essentially patriarchal because gender regimes can be changed.
Unlike others who conflate ‘gender’ with ‘women’, Connell conceptualizes
struggles to constitute state power as involving competition among compet-
ing masculinities, as well as sexes. According to Connell (1994), the gender
structuring of state power occurs along two dimensions: 1) a center – periph-
ery power continuum; and 2) the degree of masculinization of state struc-
tures, from the most powerful and masculinized structures at the center of
liberal states (‘the directorate’, military, police, fiscal administration) to the

150 Jill Vickers
least masculine (and least powerful) peripheral or ‘non-governmental’ state
structures which manage welfare and education.
Duerst-Lahti (2006: 6) claims that it is “the desire of women to ... lead in
the public sphere that upsets culture and the gender power arrangements held
in place by public institutions”. Research about how women behave as lead-
ers in male-dominated arenas is important because democratic decision-
making still occurs within gender-power hierarchies which privilege men.
Studying women’s exercise of power as leaders reveals new insights about
power, and new concepts such as gender-power. Accounts of how women
perform leadership roles, and experience the gender-power privileges of mas-
culinity, disrupt many mainstream assumptions assuming that male rule or
leadership is natural or inevitable. Duerst-Lahti (2006: 11 ) observes “the
more power ... associated with a particular position, the less likely a woman
is to hold the position”, but globally the numbers of women in state leader-
ship roles increases.
Most feminist scholars have assumed that exercising democratic power
involves women being elected as legislators; more rarely being s/elected to
cabinet or to lead a government. Several approaches theorize the election of
women as a group based upon two paradigms: a normal integration model
and a discrimination model. The former assumes democracies respond to
women in the same way as to any group previously excluded from office-
holding. But Esptein and Coser (1980) show that in the early decades of the
second wave of feminist activism, the women who occupied powerful offices
did so more often because of their expertise than because they were elected.
The normal-integration thesis, which focuses on elected offices, predicts
women’s eventual incorporation as legislators, attributing their early virtual
absence to time-lags. Discrimination models, which also focus on elected of-
fices, assume barriers exist which inhibit the election of women as a specific
group. Dahlerup’s thesis, that increases in women’s presence must occur in
multiple arenas to effect structural change, suggests the importance of explor-
ing women in powerful offices gained because of expertise, as well as by
election.
There is a large gender literature on democratic leadership (Brown 1988;
Ferguson 1984, 1993; Kann 1991, 1998; Duerst-Lahi 1995, 2002, 2006)
which explores the advantages masculinity confers in terms of gender-power.
Duerst-Lahi explores women’s leadership power in both elected and un-
elected offices. Applying pioneer findings (Sayles 1979; Lips 1981; Keller-
man,1986) about the ‘masculinity dividend’ – an advantage men gain regard-
ing some forms of leadership – Duerst-Lahi (2006: 6) identifies those power-
bases which are easiest and hardest for women to enter. She concludes that
(in the U.S.) most women in power occupy positions gained through exper-
tise, but few hold elected positions (positional power). She finds that fewest

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 151
women command coercive power because masculinity is the litmus test for
the highest leadership positions. So, while leadership is not masculinized in
all arenas, positions of authority commanding military power are. Her gener-
alizations need testing in other democracies in which women leaders com-
mand military forces. Moreover, in less powerful democracies, coercive
power may be seen more as protective and less masculinized.
In the Butler/Foucault approach, leadership theorists conceptualize gen-
der power as the “power and power dynamics resulting from the practices of
people performing gender within the normative constraints gender modes
impose” (Duerst-Lahi and Kelly 1995: 20). Portraying gender power as “dy-
namic, fluid and situationally derived; determined by the particular context,
with consistent patterns within contexts”, Duerst-Lahi and Kelly (1995: 20)
foreground ‘fluid and changing’ gender-power relations and push institutions
into the background. A generalized masculinism is seen as contouring gender
power, but little attention is paid to different historical patterns. Power rela-
tions are seen as overwhelmingly male-controlled, so the norms and behavior
associated with leadership derive from male behavior in such roles, even
when women occupy them. Duerst-Lahi and Kelly see this as an intractable
problem for women who want to govern. But other empirical research sug-
gests structural characteristics including the size, power and extent of profes-
sionalization of political institutions, and types of electoral system also affect
women’s access to and ability to exercise leadership roles in different democ-
ratic states. Comparing such structural characteristics may make masculinism
seem less ‘intractable’ in some democracies, although probably not in the
US. Again, this points to the problem of disconnection.
Most feminist political scientists focus on legislatures as the site of
women’s political power, for example promoting quotas to increase their leg-
islative clout. But Australian feminists in the 1970’s entered the central bu-
reaucracy, under a new friendly Labour government, and initiated a ‘femoc-
rat’ strategy which influenced positive policies and programs for women.
Unlike US (radical) feminists for whom bureaucracy is a tool of patriarchal
domination, many Australian feminists considered advocacy for women
within ‘special women’s machinery’ a good strategy. With too few women
legislators because of an obstructive electoral system (for the lower house in
which government is based), some organized feminists were willing to work
with the ‘femocrats’ recruited by the government. Moreover, Australia’s fed-
eral bureaucracy had a culture supportive of interest advocacy which facili-
tated a femocrat strategy (Chappell, 2000). Working through this ‘special
machinery’, expanded and coordinated at state level, advantaged (white, ma-
jority) women.
Sweetman and Porter (2006) focus on minority women in their explora-
tion of power in an intersectional framework incorporating gender and other

152 Jill Vickers
“structures of constraint” (Folbre 1994) including race, class, disability, and
immigrant/ethnic or sexual-minority status. In intersectional accounts of
power, context is crucial (Crenshaw 1994) because ‘structures of constraint’
operate differently for the same group in different countries and times. For
example, lesbians and gays face a different ‘structure of constraint’ depend-
ing on whether or not homosexuality is legal. Where marginalized communi-
ties experience violence and deprivation, solidarity as a means of consolidat-
ing power is key to successful resistance, which goes beyond individual em-
powerment.
Intersectional accounts of power differ from those by heterosexual,
white, majority-culture scholars, especially when women choose “to pursue
the interests of the whole marginalized community, rather than ... their inter-
ests as women” (Sweetman and Porter, 2006: 174). Mainstream feminists of-
ten judge such women to be the misguided ‘dupes’ of male leaders and do not
distinguish their interests in power from marginalized women’s interests.
Mainstream feminists’ accounts portraying all women as equally powerless
and alienated from state power exacerbate the problem. Intersectional theo-
rists insist that for white heterosexual women, being less powerful than com-
parable men does not constitute being powerless; nor does it necessarily re-
sult in alienation from democratic state power. Intersectional approaches
challenge power concepts such as patriarchy, which assume the universal
primacy of gender-power relations, because race power and national power,
especially in the context of colonialism, affect minority women’s lives, and
most women’s lives in the global south, as profoundly as gender.
Feminist political scientists’ conceptualizations of power clearly are
much affected by the on-going debates about women’s engagement within
democratic states. Moreover, their views are affected as much by whether
they have experienced relations with a ‘women-friendly’ state as by ideology.
The fact that the research areas which also illuminate these debates were dis-
connected until quite recently has inhibited the organized capture of their key
insights by theorists. But the establishment of several international journals
and organizations focused on feminist political science has begun to erode
the internal theoretical disconnects.
Feminist Power Concepts in International Relations
In this section I explore feminist power concepts in international relations
(IR), which is arguably the most masculinist field in political science.
Tickner (1992) claims that feminists produce a “different kind of Interna-
tional Relations”, requiring a different understanding of power, while Stearns
(1998: 170) declares power an ‘essentially contested’ concept because the

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 153
“different life experiences of men and women give rise to different concep-
tions of power”. Believing men’s and women’s “alternate theorizations ... rest
on alternate epistemological and ontological bases”, most oppositional IR
scholars adopt feminist standpoint theory. Some explain men’s and women’s
different power behavior using a psycho-analytic approach – object-relations
theory – which attributes the wide-spread hostility and resistance to women
wielding power to the near-universal practice of women caring for young
children (e.g. Sterns, 1998: 21-22; 58-9). Still others adopt Elshtain’s account
of power, and her ‘maternalist thinking’ has considerable impact on feminist
IR theory. Elshtain’s (1987, 1990) maternalist accounts of war are not essen-
tialist; and do not attribute violence only to men, while assigning only peace-
ful, creative power to women. Her approach also helped open up the concep-
tion of ‘gender’ to include studies of masculinities in IR.
Feminist IR scholars critique mainstream accounts of how international
politics function. Peterson (1999) explores power understood as domination,
noting that mainstream IR foregrounds material, especially military, power
focusing on countries’ willingness to use it. She critiques this definition as
top-down because those on top have the most power resources, and coercive
because the ability to force compliance is made the sign of power. Peterson
(1999: 69) does not reject the mainstream definition, but deems it too narrow
for understanding world politics, because it neglects “how ... moral commit-
ments, religious beliefs, ethnic alliances, [and] ... ideologies ... shape how
power works and who rules the world”. It is masculinist because it assumes
power is based on physical strength, aggression, coercion and competition in
public-sphere relations, which men historically dominated.
Focusing on women’s roles in world politics, as heads of states and in-
ternational organizations, bureaucracies, legislatures and militaries, Peterson
documents the presence of women, who are invisible to mainstream IR. Si-
multaneously making them visible while highlighting their scarcity, she ex-
plores what limits women’s participation in roles that command power.
Without claiming that women ‘do’ power differently, or that the masculinism
she portrays is intractable, Peterson portrays power’s multiple aspects –
domination, resource and capacity – which fit together as an as-yet-unsolved
puzzle. Exploring how women get to the top in IR contexts, and finding most
do so by appearing as much like men as possible; or by appearing to be ‘tra-
ditional women’, Peterson (1996: 96) finds that to succeed they must not
politicize or “challenge the categorical distinction between femininity and
masculinity”.

154 Jill Vickers
Empowerment as Practice
The final areas considered are the women and development (WID) subfields
in comparative politics and development studies, in which feminist concepts
of empowerment have a somewhat different inflection than in feminist theory
generally. Indeed, Van Driel (2004) shows that empowerment means differ-
ent things in different contexts. In particular, it was appropriated by interna-
tional agencies and, since the mid-1990s, has become a buzzword in nation-
state and international development agencies (van Driel 2004: 42). The
meaning assigned by the World Bank or UN differs from WID practitioners’
meaning(s). So empowerment often means a resource that agencies distribute
to the most marginalized and powerless, but it can also mean something
women do for themselves – a concept consistent with neo-liberalism.
Kwok-Fu Wong (2003: 307-22) explores how the World Bank portrays
power. Despite claims to being power-blind, she finds power in its docu-
ments is usually ‘instrumental’, as a means of achieving ‘economic effi-
ciency’. Wong sees four dimensions in feminist empowerment concepts:
power to, with, over and from within. She believes the World Bank deliber-
ately appropriated power to and with to add positive connotations in its texts
on poverty, such as its 2000/2001 World Development Report, which in-
cludes empowerment to soften its instrumental portrayal of power. Wong
condemns its failure to include the ‘dark sides’ of power to and with; and
questions whether power over and from power within should be added to
conceptions of relations between power and poverty. But she also questions
the value of gender-specific power, as demanded by many WID scholars and
practitioners, given the importance of including both men and women in
Work Bank analyses of poverty.
While feminist development practitioners conceptualize empowerment
critically, concept-hijack (Rowlands, 1995: 101-107) on the part of powerful
international agencies and corporations can distort its meaning. Rowland re-
jects the (modernist) conception of power as a neutral tool, and differentiates
between power over, which she associates with men and domination, and
other forms of power. She uses the idea of internalized oppression to capture
subtle forms of power over. Stressing that empowerment includes both lead-
ership and capacity-building, Rowland (1998: 102) notes that power over is
assumed to be conflictual, while empowerment is portrayed as consensual,
with no conflicts of interests and with each group setting its own agenda but,
in the case of concept-hijack, this can mean that women with no power re-
sources are described as ‘empowered’. Rowland (1995: 103) concludes that
only feminist conceptions support the broadest interpretation of empower-
ment. She sees this as involving three dimensions: 1. personal action, in
which a sense of self, confidence, and capacity are developed, undoing the

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 155
effects of internalized oppression; 2. close relationships, in which the ability
to negotiate and influence relations and decisions are developed ; and 3) col-
lective action based on co-operation; and competition in conventional politi-
cal structures at all levels. In practice, she claims empowerment involves a
“process by which people, organizations or groups ... (a) become aware of the
power dynamics ... in their life context, (b) develop the skills and capacity for
gaining some reasonable control over their lives, (c) exercise this control
without infringing on the rights of others, and (d) support the empowerment
of others”. But without Janeway’s collective resistance in which the solidar-
ity of ‘the weak’ can challenge the dominant, empowerment seems indistin-
guishable from development, capacity building or participation. As Rowland
(1995: 106) concludes: “in spite of their appeal, these terms can easily be-
come one more way to ignore or hide the realities of power inequality or op-
pression”.
Goetz and Hassim (2003) challenge the appropriateness of the WID em-
powerment model for Africa, arguing that as employed by (Western) WID
workers, it discourages women from seeking nation-state power, steering
them exclusively to local, grass-roots, activism. They argue that in South Af-
rica, for example, the restructured nation-state (which women helped create)
under ANU governments offered the best opportunity for women’s empow-
erment, whereas civil society and local politics remain mostly under tradi-
tional male authorities’ control. (The theme of progressive central and non-
progressive regional or local governments is familiar, especially in federa-
tion.) Specifically, Goetz and Hassim (2003: 3) argue that political parties,
which WID practitioners condemn, are “islands of formal democratic com-
mitment in a sea of hostility to women’s demands in civil society throughout
Africa”. Concepts of empowerment which foster alienation from political
parties and state politics, while claiming only local, grass-roots projects are
truly democratic, is motivated by radical feminist ideology, and Manichean
dominance/empowerment models. Goetz and Hassim (2003) demonstrate that
approaches to power that valorize civil society as being friendlier to women
and more democratic than a modernized central state are misguided, when it
comes to Africa. This points to the problem of approaches that assume the
power dynamics of all democracies are the same. If women are excluded
from state politics, with reduced options, local, grass-roots activism may be
the only way women can have some control over their lives.
A final version of WID empowerment approaches emerged from radical-
ized development workers and peasants in Tapalchui, in rural Mexico. Their
model, with four types and three dimensions of power, conceptualizes em-
powerment as shaped in a shared, interactive process, in which modes of
power are used strategically. Townsend (1999: 23) notes that “in Spanish,
‘power’ has two meanings, one of strength/worth/authority and one of skills/

156 Jill Vickers
capacity”; whereas the development workers have a richer vocabulary. Con-
sequently, “the understandings ... Mexican rural women have of power are
much closer to the traditional Western interpretation than to Foucault’s”. The
development workers (Euro-American and Mexican academics) share ‘post-
liberal’ understandings of power “but everyone shared a basic dislike of insti-
tutional structures ... [which] tend to centralize power”. The academics con-
ceptualize horizontal, co-operative power networks; while the rural women
experience power over, resulting from economic disadvantage and physical
violence. To them, neither power nor gender is simply discursive, nor is (self)
empowerment a solution to poverty. Since poverty is structurally caused,
self-empowerment would have to occur on a wide scale to have much effect.
The model from Mexico incorporates concepts of power over, from
within, to and with at the personal, relational and group levels. Zapata’s (in
Townsend et al. 1999) describes academics and NGOs as ‘change-agents’,
and identifies group power in the community, at the regional level, and from
national governments to international organizations. Her multi-dimensional
account of power portrays a web of power-holders and oppositional forces,
and captures both foreground and background (structural) factors, unlike
multidimensional theories like Allen’s in which background factors are
barely visible. The peasant women are actors who build and challenge power
simultaneously. Empowerment requires expert advice and leadership by aca-
demics.
I have already noted a disconnect between the feminist theory surveyed
in Section two above and the empirical explorations of power in Section
three. The accounts in this section are not intended as empirical tests de-
signed to substantiate or refute propositions from the theoretical work on
power. Rather, the main reason for including this section is that feminist
theorists relate to feminists activists, mainly in the US, and to academic
women’s studies; while feminist political scientists relate to the mainstream
discipline, and in a few cases to mainstream power theorists. An exception is
the debate about the ‘women-friendly’ potential of democratic states which
runs parallel to conceptualizations of power by Brown, Mansbridge, Jac-
quette and Yeatman. There is some evidence of influence by Hartsock,
Elshtain and MacKinnon on US, feminist political scientists, especially in IR.
There is little evident of the power conceptions developed in the more
‘women-friendly’ democracies having any real influence on US feminist
scholars. So while there is disconnect between the field’s two wings, there
also is a disconnect among feminists working in English across the different
democracies.

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 157
Conclusion
Feminist theorists and political scientists agree that power is gendered, and
that all gender relations are constituted by, and manifest, power. This is the
fundamental proposition evident in all feminist approaches to power, regard-
less of context or ideology. It is also the proposition which mainstream power
theorists and political scientists resist. Feminist approaches vary in whether
they see power relations as basically the same in private and public spheres
or different. This results in distinct orientations regarding relations between
gender-power and democracy; about whether states are essentially or merely
historically patriarchal. If states are historically male-dominated, the empha-
sis is on how they can be restructured so that democratic power is shared be-
tween men and women. A question can also be posed as to whether democ-
ratic states can be made more ‘women-friendy’. Different views about the
‘women-friendly’ potential of democracies reflect both feminist ideology and
women’s different experiences with power. In less powerful democracies,
feminists more commonly believe that ‘women-friendly’ governments are
possible, and that democratic state power can be made to serve women’s in-
terests. In powerful and highly militarized democracies most women experi-
ence the state as dangerous and devoted to male interests, hence few consider
‘women-friendly’ democracy a possibility.
The influence of post-modern ideas about power is strong in feminist po-
litical theory, but not in the empirical wing. Radical feminism’s Manichean
dichotomy between male and female forms of power remains influential, es-
pecially in anti-violence movements because, even in supposedly peaceful
democracies, many women are raped, battered and killed by men, often their
intimate partners. Moreover, collective, mass rape remains a pervasive tool of
war, including civil wars. Consequently, the dichotomy between male domi-
nance and female empowerment still rings true for the many women who ex-
perience such violence or modify their behaviour for fear of it. As a result, a
gender gap in approaches to power persists, and concepts of power associat-
ing war and militarism with masculinity persist.
What is new are feminist theorizations of democratic states and of le-
gitimate coercion in democratic government. Widespread experience and fear
of violence is basic to understanding feminist approaches to power. So while
feminist political scientists understand that women have no real alternative
but to engage with democratic states and try to make them serve women’s in-
terests as citizens, Yeatman’s theory explains the difficulty posed by
women’s historic relations to coercion in crafting a feminist theory of democ-
ratic power. Mansfield argues that women must engage with democratic
states, while still considering them dangerous, and women must be prepared
to resist the misuse of power. If it proves possible to make democracies more

158 Jill Vickers
‘women-friendly’, as experiences in the Nordic countries suggests, women
must be prepared to share responsibility for how ‘their’ democratic states de-
ploy coercion. Majority feminists must acknowledge that they are not power-
less in the way portrayed by second-wave ideology. The question of whether
feminist scholars need a gender-specific approach to power remains unre-
solved, and is being actively debated. But since most mainstream theorists
still conceptualize power from the perspective of the powerful, feminists will
most likely continue to focus on how the weak experience power.
References
Acklesberg, M., 1997. Rethinking anarchism/rethinking power. In: M. L. Shanley and
U. Narayan, eds. Reconstructing political theory. University Park, PA: Pennsyl-
vania University Press.
Alcoff, L., 1988. Cultural feminism versus poststructuralism. Signs, 13(3), 405-
437.
Allen, A., 1998. Power trouble: performativity as critical theory. Constellations, 5(4),
456-471.
Allen, A., 1999. The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarity.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Arendt, H., 1969. On violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Bartky, S., 1988. Foucault, feminity and the modernization of patriarchal power. In:
L. Quinby and I. Diamond, eds. Feminism and Foucault. Boston: Northeastern
University Press.
Brown, W., 1988. Manhood and politics. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Brown, W., 1992. Finding the man in the state. Feminist Studies, 18(1), 7-34
Brown, W., 1995. States of injury: power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Bryson, L., 2000. Family, state, market and citizenship. In: W. Weeks and M. Quinn,
eds. Issues facing Australian families. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Butler, J., 1997. The psychic life of power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Chappell, L. A., 2000. Interacting with the state. International Feminist Journal of
Politics, 2(2), 244-275.
Chodorow, N., 1978. Mothering, object-relations and the female oedipal configura-
tion. Feminist Studies, 4(1), 137-158.
Connell, R. W., 1987. Gender and power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Connell, R. W., 1990. The state, gender, and sexual politics. Theory and Society,
19(5), 507-544.
Connell, R. W., 1994. The state, gender and sexual politics. London: Sage.
Crenshaw, K. W., 1994. Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. In: M. A. Finemand and R. Mykitiuk, eds. The
public nature of private violence. New York: Routledge.
Dahlerup, D., 1987. Confusing concepts – confusing reality. In: A. S. Sassoon.
Women and the state. London: Hutchinson.

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 159
Dahlerup, D., 1988. From a small to a large minority: women in Scandinavian poli-
tics. Scandinavian Political Studies, 11(4), 275-297.
Dahlerup, D., 2006. The story of the theory of critical mass. Politics and Gender,
2(4), 511-521.
Davis, K., Leijenaar, M. and Oldersma, J., eds. (1991). The gender of power. London:
Sage.
Delphy, C., 1970. Close to home: a materialist analysis of women’s oppression. Am-
herst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Delphy, C., 1977. The main enemy: a materialist analysis of women’s oppression.
London: WRRC Publications.
Deutchman, I. E. 1996. Feminist theory and the politics of empowerment. In: L. L.
Duke, ed. Women in politics: outsiders or insiders? Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice.
Dinnerstein, D., 1976. The mermaid and the Minotaur: sexual arrangements and hu-
man malaise. New York: Harper and Row.
Druhvarajan, V., and Vickers, J., 2002. Gender, race and nation. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Duerst-Lahti, G., 1995. Belle Moskowitz: feminine politics and the exercise of power
in the age of Alfred E. Smith. Women and Politics, 15 (2), 85-87.
Duerst-Lahti, G., 2002. Governing institutions, ideologies and gender: toward the pos-
sibility of equal political representation. Sex Roles, 47(7-8), 371-388.
Duerst-Lahti, G., 2006. The consequences of gender for women and political leader-
ship. Paper presented to the IPSA World Congress, Fukuoka, Japan.
Duerst-Lahti, G. and Mae Kelly, R., 1995. Gender power, leadership and governance.
Ann Arbour, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Dworkin, A., 1987. Intercourse. London: Secker and Warburg.
Elshtain, J. B., 1981. Public man, private woman: women in social and political
thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Elshtain, J. B., ed. (1982). The family in political thought. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Elshtain, J. B., 1987. Women and war. New York: Basic Books.
Elshtain, J. B., 1990. The problem with peace. In: S. Tobias and J. B. E. Savage, eds.
Women, militarism and war. MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Elshtain, J. B., 1992. Sovereignty, identity, sacrifice. In: V. S. Peterson, ed. Gendered
states. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Eisenstien, Z., 1981. Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Epstein, C. F. and Laub Coser, R., 1980. Access to power. London: Allen & Unwin.
Ferguson, K., 1984. Feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP.
Flammang, J., ed. 1984. Political women. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Figes, E., 1970. Patriarchal attitudes: women in society. London: Faber.
Firestone, S., 1970. The dialectic of sex. New York: Morrow.
Folbre, N., 1994. Who pays for the kids? London and New York: Routledge.
Fox, B., 1988. Conceptualizing ‘patriarchy’. La Revue Canadienne de Sociologie et
d’Anthropologie/The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 25(2),
163-182.

160 Jill Vickers
Goetz, A. M. and Hassim, S., eds. 2003. No shortcuts to power: African women in
politics and policy making. New York: Zed Books.
Goldberg, S., 1979. Male dominance: the inevitability of patriarchy. London: Abacus.
Harding, S., 1986. The instability of the analytical categories of feminist theory.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11(4), 645-664.
Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. B., 1983. Discovering reality. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Hartsock, N., 1983. Money, sex and power. New York: Longman.
Hartsock, N., 1996. Community/sexuality/gender: rethinking power. In: N. Hirsch-
man and C. Di Stefano, eds. Revisioning the Political. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Hartmann, H., 1981. The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism. In: L. Sargent,
ed. Women and revolution. Boston: South End Press.
Haste, H., 2000. Sexual metaphors and current feminisms. In: A. Bull, H. Diamond
and R. Marsh, eds. Feminisms and women’s movements in contemporary Europe.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Held, V., 1993. Feminist morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Janeway, E., 1981. Powers of the weak. New York: Morrow Quill.
Jones, K., 1993. Compassionate authority: democracy and the representation of
women. New York: Routledge.
Kann, M. E., 1991. On the man question. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Kann, M. E., 1998. A republic of men. New York: New York University Press.
Kanter, R. M., 1977. Some effects of proportions on group life. American Journal of
Sociology, 82(5), 965-990.
Kellerman, B., ed. 1986. Political leadership: a source book. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh
University Press.
Keränen, M., 1990. Finnish undemocracy. Helsinki: Finnish Political Science Asso-
ciation.
Kuhn, A. and Wolpe, A. M., 1978. Feminism and materialism. London: Routledge.
Laden, A. S., 2003. Radical liberals, reasonable feminists: reason, power and objectiv-
ity in MacKinnon and Rawls. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11(2), 133-
152.
Lerner, G., 1986. The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lipman-Blumen, J., 1984. Gender roles and power. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Lips, H., 1981. Women, men and the psychology of power. Englewood Cliffs: NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Lukes, S., 1974. Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan
MacKinnon, C., 1987. Feminism unmodified. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
MacKinnon, C., 1989. Toward a feminist theory of the state. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Mansbridge, J., 1994. Using power/fighting power. Constellations, 1(1), 53-73.
Mansbridge, J., 1998. On the contested nature of the public good. In: W. W. Powell
and E. S. Clemens, eds. Private action and the public good. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Mansbridge, J., 2003. Anti-statism and difference feminism in international social
movements. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5(3), 355-360

Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches 161
Meyer, J., 1991. Power and love. In: K. Davis, M. Leijenaar and J. Oldersma, eds.
The Gender of Power. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Mill, J. S., 1989. The subjection of women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mills, C., 2003. Contesting the political: Butler and Foucault on power and resistance.
The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11(3), 253-272.
Millet, K., 1969. Sexual politics. New York: Doubleday.
Munro, V. E., 2003. On power and domination: feminism and the final Foucault.
European Journal of Political Theory, 2(1), 79-99.
O’Brien, M., 1981. The politics of reproduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Oakley, A., 1972. Sex, gender and society. London: Temple Smith.
Oksala, J., 2004. Anarchic bodies: Foucault and the feminist question of experience.
Hypatia, 19(4), 97-119.
Owens, P., 2000. Millenial reflections on the 41st ISA Annual Convention. Interna-
tional Feminist Journal of Politics, 2(2), 286-290.
Parvikko, T., 1990. Conception of gender equality. In: Marja Keränen, ed. Finnish
undemocracy. Helsinki: Finnish Political Science Association.
Pateman, C., 1988. The sexual contract. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Pateman, C., 1989. Rethinking democracy. Sociology, 23(2), 321-323.
Peterson, V. S. and Runyan, A. S., 1999. Global gender issues. Boulder, CO: West-
view Press.
Phillips, A., ed. 1998. Feminism and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pierson, P., 2000. Path dependence, increasing returns, and the study of politics.
American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251-67.
Poovey, M., 1988. Uneven development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Risseeuw, C., 1991. Bordieu, power and resistance. In: K. Davis, M. Leijenaar and J.
Oldersma, eds. The gender of power. London: Sage.
Rowlands, J., 1995. Empowerment examined. Development in Practice, 5(2), 101-107.
Rowlands, J., 1997. Questioning empowerment. United Kingdom: Oxfam.
Rubin, G., 1975. The traffic in women. In: R. Reiter, ed. Toward an anthropology of
women. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Sanday, P. R., 1981. Female power and male dominance. Cambridge; New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Sawicki, J., 1998. Feminism, Foucault and subject of power and freedom. In: J. Moss,
ed. The later Foucault. London: Sage.
Scott, J. W., 1986. Gender: a useful category of historical analysis. American Histori-
cal Review, 91(5), 1053-1075.
Scott, J. W., 1988. Deconstructing equality versus difference, or, the uses of poststruc-
turalist theory for feminism. Feminist Studies, 15, 32-50.
Scott, J. W. and Butler, J., eds. 1992. Feminists theorize the political. New York:
Routledge.
Skjeie, H., 1988. The feminization of power. Oslo: Institute for Social Research.
Squires, J., 1999. Gender in political theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Squires, J., 2000. Feminism and citizenship. Political Studies, 48(3), 596-597.
Steans, J., 1998. Gender and international relations. Oxford: Polity Press.
Sweetman, C. and Porter, F., 2006. Gender mainstreaming: a critical review. Gender
and Development, 13(2), 2-10.

162 Jill Vickers
Tickner, A., 1992. Gender in international relation. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Townsend, J., Zapata, E., Rowlands, J., Alberti, P. and Mercado, M., 1999. Women
and power. London and New York: Zed Books.
Van Driel, F., 2004. Em-power-ment: a paradigm shift within women, gender and de-
velopment. Africanus, 34(1), 42-50.
Vickers, J., 1980. Coming up for air: feminist views of power reconsidered. Canadian
Women Studies, 2(4), 66-69.
Vickers, J., 1994. Notes toward a political theory of sex and power. In: H. Lorraine
Radtke and H. J. Stam, eds. Power/Gender. London: Sage.
Vickers, J., 2002. Thinking about violence. In: V. Druhvarajan and J. Vickers. Gen-
der, race and nation: a global perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Vickers, J., 2006. In search of women-friendly democracy. Dunton Research Lecture.
Carleton University, Ottawa.
Vickers, J., 2006a. The problem with interests. In: L. Chappell and L. Hill, eds. The
politics of women’s interests. London: Routledge.
Vickers, J., 2007. Bringing nations in. International Journal of Feminist Politics, 8(1),
84-109.
Walby, S., 1997. Gender transformations. London and New York: Routledge.
Wolffensperger, J., 1991. Giddens and the conceptualization of gender. In: K. Davis,
M. Leijenaar and J. Oldersma, eds. The Gender of Power. London: Sage.
Wong, K. F. 2003. Empowerment as a panacea for poverty. Progress in Development
Studies, 3(4), 307-322.
Yeatman, A., 1994. The personal and the political. In: N. Fraser and P. James, eds.
Critical politics: from the personal to the global. Melbourne: Arena Publications.
Yeatman, A., 1997. Feminism and power. In: M. L. S. and U. Narayan, eds. Recon-
structing political theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Yodder, J., 1991. Rethinking tokenism: looking beyond numbers. Gender and Society
5, 178-192

Chapter 6
The Political Sociology of Power
John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the theoretical and substantive research on power
within the field of political sociology. In particular the emphasis is placed on
classical Weberian and contemporary neo-Weberian understandings of power
relations, which on the one hand stress the coercive dimension of domination,
and on the other hand link power to development of modern state structures.
What distinguishes the Weberian position is its multidimensional understand-
ing of social life, where particular historical junctures determine whether po-
litical, economic or ideological power has the upper explanatory hand. In
other words this chapter analyses the workings of power in its three dominant
forms: political, economic and ideological.
Part one provides a sociological definition of power, briefly reviewing
the contribution of classical theorists, with an emphasis on Max Weber, who
specifies the principal forms of power. The second part explores in greater
detail the Weberian view of political power by focusing on theories of state
formation, war and nationalism. The work of leading scholars in the field is
summarily scrutinized and key theoretical trends are analyzed. The third sec-
tion is concentrated on economic power. In particular we look at the relation-
ship between capitalism and nation-states, the military origins of industriali-
zation, the collapse of command economies, and globalization. The fourth
section deals with ideological power. The chapter briefly explores the domi-
nant theoretical accounts of ideology and then focuses on the contours of the
neo-Weberian understanding of ideological power. The focus is on how ideo-
logical power operates in layers, so that nationalism emerges as a dominant
operative ideology of the modern age. The final part looks at the central ques-
tions that require further research and possible future preoccupations for the
political sociology of power.

164 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Power Defined, Its Forms Specified
A measure of consensus was reached roughly forty years ago as to the char-
acter of power. This consensus had genuine intellectual weight – for all that it
has recently been challenged – so spelling it out immediately will fast track
the argument of this chapter. Roughly speaking, a distinction was drawn be-
tween power over others and the power generated by agreement between ac-
tors in society.
The notion that power is a zero-sum affair in which an actor or institution
bends others in ways which they would not themselves choose has long roots.
In modern occidental thought, the ideas of Thomas Hobbes remain the exem-
plar of this position. German thought has made much of this position, and it
is clearly present in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche – and in the many soci-
ologists influenced, whether openly or not, by the great German thinker. Max
Weber stands in this company, and so too of course does Carl Schmitt. Two
particular ways of emphasizing this position spring to mind. First, the recep-
tion of Weber by Jurgen Habermas makes much of the way in which this tra-
dition was ‘decisionistic’. This is an accurate description. It is bolstered by a
second descriptive comment, by a great Weberian echoing the message of
Weber’s lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. When Raymond Aron sought a
way to distinguish himself from his contemporaries he stressed that politics
cannot be moral, for its language is violence, the bending of others to one’s
will. Let it be said immediately that no analysis of power can ever do without
such classical hardness.
But this zero-sum conception of power should certainly not rule the
roost. A tradition of thought founded by Durkheim, and with something of
an apogee in the work of Talcott Parsons, made much of ‘powering’, which
can be thought of in terms of the generation of energy when different actors
co-operate towards a single objective. Examples can drive the point home.
Marriage can take two forms. On the one hand, it can be so to speak a low-
intensity relationship in which each side protects its interests, blessed with
substantial powers of negative resistance. But some marriages move beyond
this stage to the creation of a more unified world in which more can be done
precisely because so much more is taken for granted. Much the same is true
of individuals: some happily have all elements of their character pointing in
the same direction whilst others are made less effective when, say, reason
and passion war inside their breasts. The same principle applies at the mac-
rostructural level. Much of erstwhile East and Central European socialist so-
ciety saw a good deal of inner emigration, that is, the protection of private
realms from state interference. We know how very weak this made these so-
cieties, as Gorbachev realized when trying to create – but from above! – a
civil society. He had realized that state strength depends upon a politics of

The Political Sociology of Power 165
reciprocal consent in which state and society interact with each other
strongly.
Classical research on power did not stop at this point. Quite as important
was the attention given to a further question. Bluntly, where does power
come from? What are its sources – and how have these changed over time? In
this area it always makes sense to contrast theorists who privilege one dimen-
sion of power from those who seek to produce multidimensional accounts.
Amongst the former group stand those who privilege economics (neoclassical
economics, Marxism), political domination (Oppenheimer, Ratzenhofer and
Gumplowicz), and ideology/discourse (much of the Enlightenment, Foucault
in recent years). This is of course an incomplete list, for others have stressed
the importance of other variables, from demography to industrialism, from
technology to nature. But the incomplete choice made here is deliberate. It is
derived from the most famous of all multidimensional theorists of modernity,
Max Weber, the locus classicus of whose views remains the passage in which
he distinguishes class, status and party – that is, economic, ideological and
political sources of power. The most sustained analysis of power in recent
social science derives very closely from this Weberian starting point. Mann’s
work-in-progress on The Sources of Social Power (1986, 1993) adds a fourth
source of power, the military, on the grounds that militaries have occasion-
ally – as in feudalism, and in the case of some officer corps in the latter part
of nineteenth century Europe – operated independently of state control. The
‘caging’ of such power – and of other sources of power – is an achievement
rather than a given. As importantly, this modern day Max Weber conceives
of ideological power in slightly different terms. Further he makes a series of
important analytic distinctions, some to be noted later and one of immediate
relevance – namely his insistence that power can be diffuse (as in much of
the spread of capitalism and in waves of religious conversion) or concen-
trated/coercive (as in armies and in the rules enforced by states). Finally,
Mann’s ambitions are a little larger than those of Weber in that he seeks not
just to distinguish different types of power and to describe their interactions
but, quite as much, to explain why a particular type of power dominates at a
particular historical period or juncture.
We will consider political, economic and ideological power in turn, put-
ting military power to one side given that its moments of autonomy in history
have been rare. It is worth highlighting once again the claims that are implicit
in this strategy. First, we do not assume that politics is the leading edge of
power at all times: to the contrary, a key intellectual task for social science
must be in identifying moments when it is primary. However, secondly, so-
cial science in the last forty years has massively increased its understanding
of political power. This allows us to offer an initial guiding generalization.
Political power is rather often the leading edge of social development.

166 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Political Power
Analysis of political power can follow developments within social science re-
search, for these have been exceptionally cognitively high-powered. We can
begin with the explanations for the rise of the modern state, pause for a theo-
retical breakthrough, and then consider in turn the ways in which states struc-
ture the entry of the people onto the political stage, first as classes and then as
nations.
Social science is subject not just to the vagaries of fashion but quite as
much to the influence of historical events. A major intellectual impact of the
Second World War was the downplaying of theorists concerned with vio-
lence and nationalism. The first and second worlds tended to concentrate on
social theories of politics, liberal pluralist on the one hand, Marxist on the
other. Perhaps the most fundamental development in political sociology in
the last forty years has been the recovery of an appropriate level of interest in
violence and its corollaries. A blunt way of making the point is by noting su-
perlative work done on state finances by comparative historical sociologists.
Until the late nineteenth century a single generalization holds true for all
states prior to that point in time, namely that they were but machines for war.
States in history have normally spent above eighty per cent of their budgets
on fighting and/or preparing to fight wars.
We now know a good deal about state formation, thanks to the work of
Baechler (1975), Tilly (1975, 1985, 1992), Skocpol (1979), Mann (1986,
1988, 1993), Downing (1992) and Ertman (1997) – all of whom acknowledge
debts to Hintze and Tocqueville. After the Fall of Rome Europe remained a
multipolar system, despite varied attempts to recreate a form of empire. This
meant that continual competition between states was mandated. In terms of
theory, this means that political sociology has taken into its very core the in-
sights of realism: lacking a sovereign, the anarchic – or at least, asocial –
world of states demands that states balance any hegemonic drive for over-
weening power, not least by rationalizing their own societies so as to keep up
with the leading edge of power. This is a harsh Darwinian world in which
failure – of which there was a great deal – meant death. But the other side of
the coin of destruction was, it must be firmly stressed, innovation. The fact
that no state was an island secure unto itself meant that civil, scientific and
military techniques spread rapidly. This was a world in which economic
forces necessarily gained a measure of autonomy: no state could control capi-
talist society as it emerged, and most sought to work with it so that the fiscal
advantages of economic growth could play their part in helping one to pros-
per within a geopolitically threatening world.
These comments on the growth of state power have led to cognitive ad-
vance by means of a key distinction between infrastructural and despotic

The Political Sociology of Power 167
power1 (Mann 1986, 1993). Mere despotism does not lend a state strength;
what matters quite as much is the ability to get orders carried out – something
which very often depends upon the presence of agents in society willing to
serve as transmission belts for state power. Most great empires of the past
were but puny leviathans, able to control rather little – dependent for survival
on blocking the emergence of alternative sources of power. Something simi-
lar was true for several years in the Soviet Union/Russia, at the end of Gor-
bachev’s period in power and for several years thereafter: orders issued at the
centre had little impact in the regions even though the infrastructural capacity
of the state had been of course been vastly enhanced by the technical means
characteristic of industrial society. In contrast, a non-despotic regime, first
able to co-operate with its society and then blessed with improved infrastruc-
tural powers is likely to be able to generate a great deal of power. Thus eight-
eenth century Britain was able to beat France so often because the upper
classes, confident that the state was their own, were prepared to tax them-
selves at such high levels. The lesson to be drawn from this is of course
reminiscent of the definition of power given at the start: power can increase
in quantity when co-operation and co-ordination can be arranged.
Let us turn to the intellectual advance made, as noted, in our understand-
ing of classes and nations. The argument to be made can nicely be advanced
by considering Weber’s political stances on socialism and nationalism.
Weber’s whole sociology was opposed to the views of Karl Marx, most
obviously at an analytical level because of his wholly justified awareness that
ideas and political power affect the historical record quite as much as do eco-
nomic factors. But he had very particular reasons for not accepting the views
of Marx on political change within capitalist society. Weber disputed the
view that socialism was the inevitable ideological product of a singular work-
ing class, a transnational force able to create a new world. It had become ap-
parent in his life time that there were working classes, that is, that workers
had different levels of consciousness in different countries. Something of a
range was apparent. One of his friends, Werner Sombart (1976), wrote a
book trying to explain why there was no socialism in the United States, as
was indeed very largely the case. Contemporary scholars have done a great
deal to allow us to understand the related British case, in which workers had
a measure of class loyalty together with the capacity for industrial action, but
virtually no interest in socialism. Weber knew the other end of the scale all
1 Mann distinguishes the despotic power of absolutist and authoritarian states from the infra-
structural power characterizing state formation in Europe and America from the mid-
nineteenth century, which begins to shape and penetrate the lives of citizens through social
innovations such as welfare, mass compulsory education, and public health services. There
is also a dimension of surveillance to this, which we discuss below in the section on eco-
nomic power.

168 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
too well. In Imperial Germany the workers supported the Social Democratic
Party, and had genuine political consciousness tinged with socialist ideals.
Where Germans were essentially respectable, Russian workers were, at times,
genuinely revolutionary – prepared at times to seize power in attempts to cre-
ate a new social order. Weber had no difficulty in explaining this variation.
Bluntly, human beings seek to escape fear, and certainly dislike the prospect
of being shot on barricades. Workers in the Anglo-Saxon countries were at
times militant at the industrial level, but they never took on the state. Why
should they have done? Early democracy and liberalism made it their state –
a state moreover, in part in consequence, which allowed them to organize so
as to pressure for higher wages from their employers. At the other end of the
scale stood states which excluded workers – partially and occasionally in
Germany, nearly absolutely in Russia – in such a manner that they had to
take on the regime, had to gain political consciousness, precisely because
trade union organization was effectively banned. Working classes gained, in
other words, their character from the nature of the states with which they in-
teracted. Awareness of this fact made Weber a liberal Machiavellian. Let the
workers in and give them a place in society, so as to dilute socialism! This
was practical advice, to give up power so as to retain it, but it most certainly
was not followed in Russia.
If Weber was, so to speak, ahead of the social understanding of his society
in this regard he was entirely of his place and time when considering national-
ism. His nickname when young was Polish Max, reminding us of his obsession
with the entry of cheap Polish labor to the East German Junker estates. He felt
that a strong nation – and the nation was his ultimate value – needed to be ho-
mogeneous. If this was relatively easy in Imperial Germany, it was of course
much harder in the composite monarchies of its rivals. The Tsars hoped that
they could so suppress the Ukrainians that they would be mere ‘little Russians’,
thereby making Russian-speakers a majority within the empire, able in conse-
quence to homogenize everyone into a genuine nation-state in which cohesion
in social and military affairs would be ensured. Austro-Hungary scarcely had
this option, at least in the Austrian lands in which German-speakers were but a
large minority. A general comment is vital at this point if we are to understand
the making of European modernity. Secessionist movements are especially
likely when nations feel themselves to be threatened. The absence of voice
within a polity makes exit an all-too-attractive option. Had the nations been let
in, by a liberal Machiavellian regime, they would have behaved as workers
eventually did in Europe – for the social psychology is the same – by giving
loyalty to something that they could influence. But few rulers realized that giv-
ing up some power would have created still more. Such a policy did not appeal
given the intensity of geopolitical struggles of the time. And of course, when
metropoles found that their centralizing, nationalizing drives bred nationalist

The Political Sociology of Power 169
resistance, they often came to fear that their enemies would find allies amongst
such disloyal subjects. Thus was born the world in which ethnic cleansing be-
came rational politics.
In 1907 Weber visited Vienna and was criticized after lecturing by the
new marginalist Austrian economists who objected to his imperialist politics.
For Weber was a ‘fleet professor’ believing that the wealth of a national
economy depended upon the possession of secure sources of supply as well
as captive markets. The Austrians resisted this, insisting that empire was ex-
pensive, and noting that Germany was becoming the leading economy in
Europe without the burden of such appendages. But Weber had a point on his
side. Perhaps in the future empires would become rational. To become genu-
inely interdependent meant opening oneself to the risk of starvation should
war come with England, for the Royal Navy might mount – and eventually
did mount – an effective blockade.
It is important to pause for a moment. Nationalism has no essence, merely
existences. Differently put, and we will elaborate this more extensively later,
nationalism is an especially labile force, taking its color from its surroundings.
European modernity saw a close link between imperialism and nationalism.
The extent to which this link might be broken will be at the centre of attention
when we turn to the possible politics of the twenty first century in the conclu-
sion. But provisional conclusions can be offered here about the role that politi-
cal power has played in the development of modernity. Bluntly, political power
has been the major force structuring much social development. States rose in a
condition of anarchy, with competition between them being so great as to
change the ways in which they organized their societies. The nation-state was
the moral project of modernity until 1945, at which time liberal ideologies be-
gan to structure world politics. We will return later to the condition of the na-
tion-state in the contemporary world, noting amongst other things that liberal-
ism in these matters in the advanced world has more to do with completed eth-
nic cleansing that with moral development. But our immediate task is different.
Has the world since 1945 become ever more dominated by economic power, by
forces that undermine the power of the nation-state?
Economic Power
The prevailing orthodoxy of recent years rests on two assumptions: the view
that the nation-state has outlived its historical role by proving inadequate in
handling the accelerated economic growth of late modernity; and the second
assumption: that the forces of global capitalism now dictate the rules of the
game whereby economic power dominates politics and culture. Neither of these

170 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
assumptions holds up to the empirical scrutiny. While economic power is and
remains an important aspect of social power, it is far from being the omnipotent
force portrayed so vigorously in works of the globalization theorists such as
Bauman (1998, 2002a), Sklair (1995, 2002), Friedaman (2003) or Sassen
(2006).
Firstly capitalism was always bigger than nation-states, and in this sense
its current global expansion is not an unprecedented novelty. Until the end of
the nineteenth century economic development was pursued through market
liberalization, with laissez faire policies seen as the only guarantor of speedy
development. Early capitalism was founded on the ideas of classical liberals
for whom mercantilist policies of state intervention and protectionism were
anathema. This was particularly relevant for Britain which has greatly bene-
fited from Smith’s ‘invisible hand of the market’, thus becoming the first in-
dustrialized nation-state. However by the end of the nineteenth century the
dominant laissez faire view had changed as industrialization seemed to be
possible via state power. As Gautam Sen (1984) shows, the spread of indus-
trialization was deeply linked to competitive relations among nation-states
whereby late developers were forced to industrialize in order to enhance their
military capabilities vis-à-vis first-comer states such as Britain. Two centuries
of intensive warfare have shaped the direction of industrialization by acceler-
ating the process of capital accumulation and by privileging the development
of the strategic heavy industries. The centrality of nation-states – or the geo-
political logic of a nation-state system – in this process was highlighted by
the almost identical economic policies of late developing states, regardless of
their professed ideologies. The Soviet Union developed in accordance with
the same militarist pattern, with the state favoring investment in strategic
heavy industries to provide security through enhanced military capability and
simultaneously improve the living standards of its population. While this top
down economic model proved beneficial in galvanizing development in the
early stages, the resulting inflexibility, evident in chronic shortages of goods
and a lack of innovation of ultimately led to the collapse of command
economies. Hence, on the one hand, economic power in general and capital-
ism in particular, and nation-states on the other have never been mutually ex-
clusive forces, as they inevitably influence each other and have deeply im-
pacted on each others expansion.
In fact the development of both capitalism and nation-states was rooted
in their dynamic and creative rivalry. As Tilly (1975), Downing (1992), and
Ertman (1997) among others have convincingly demonstrated, the birth of
the nation-state was directly linked to both the political and military competi-
tion of ruling elites, as well as the expansion of international trade. In con-
trast to the idea of isolated autarchies, the nation-state was always an integral
part of capitalist modernity. The post-Westphalian system of nation-states

The Political Sociology of Power 171
developed in response to a changing geo-political environment: by tightening
fiscal control and gradually extending citizenship rights in exchange for
greater political and military loyalty to the rulers (Mann 1993). Commercial
development and increased trade strengthened the capacity of the state, mak-
ing it a more powerful military machine. In other words, transnational eco-
nomic space is neither novel nor unconnected to the birth of the nation-state.
The administrative and territorial boundedness of early nation states always
had more to do with the rulers projected ideal than actual reality. In most re-
spects the rise in infrastructural and surveillance powers is something much
more akin to contemporary nation-states, as they have only recently been able
to fully police their borders, gather intelligence on the citizenry, tax at source,
and successfully implement territorial control. Hence rather than becoming
obsolete, the nation-state has actually become more relevant to economy as
their infrastructural powers have significantly increased in the late modern
era. The common misconception that the liberalization of markets automati-
cally leads to deregulation and a Hobbesian environment of chaotic insecurity
is countered by recent empirical research. As Steven Vogel’s (1996) impor-
tant study of economic reform patterns in such sectors as telecommunica-
tions, finance, broadcasting, transport and utilities in the US, UK, Japan,
France and Germany shows, freer markets have actually led to more adminis-
trative regulation. Despite loud proclamations to the contrary, in most cases
liberalization has not meant the loss of state autonomy. Instead most states
combine the opening up of markets with monitored re-regulation. As Vogel
(1996: 5) puts it “there is no logical contradiction between more competition
and greater government control… a movement aimed at reducing regulation
has only increased it; a movement propelled by global forces has reinforced
national differences; and a movement purported to push back the state has
been led by the state itself”. What this tells us is that economic forces and
markets do not work on their own. Instead economic impetus is released by
powerful states and even in such tight economic and monetary associations as
the European Union the calculations of leading states in negotiating political
and economic deals still remains central to any decision making process (Hall
2006). The onset of the 2008 world wide economic recession demonstrated
not only that the first, almost instinctive, reaction on the part of governments
(and popular opinion) was to protect their own national economic space, but
it also demonstrated the extent to which states are able and willing to inter-
fere and manage supposedly unregulated national markets.
Secondly, the view that the global economy now overshadows politics
and culture, thus making nation-states irrelevant, is also deeply problematic.
The argument that economic globalization is historically novel – that it
amounts to an unprecedented phenomenon – has been challenged by many
historical sociologists. For example P. Hirst & G. Thompson (1999), M.

172 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Mann (1997, 2003) and J.A. Hall (2000, 2002) among others have demon-
strated that existing levels of trade for North America, Japan and the Euro-
pean Union of 12% of their GDP are almost identical to levels reached before
WWI. Most so called transnational corporations are really national compa-
nies whose ownership, assets, sales and profits remain within their own na-
tion states. They chiefly rely on domestic human capital generated through
their own educational systems, existing national communications infrastruc-
ture and a substantial amount of state protectionism for the externally vulner-
able economic sectors (Carnoy 1993, Wade 1996). Technology is also pro-
duced primarily on the national level, while the overwhelming majority of
companies trade solely on national stock markets. Rather than been global,
world trade is distinctly ‘trilateral’ with the US, Japan and Europe producing
and consuming more than 85% of world trade (Mann, 1997, Hall 2000). Eco-
nomic globalization does not diminish the influence of the nation-states. In-
stead it is the most powerful nation-states that are the backbone of world
trade. As Mann (1997: 48) puts it: “capitalism retains a geo-economic order,
dominated by the economies of the advanced nation-states. Clusters of na-
tion-states provide the stratification order of globalism”. In addition nation-
states remain in full control of their population as human beings are much
less mobile than goods, money and services, and despite the expansion of in-
ternational law, the nation-state preserves not only the monopoly of violence
but also the monopoly of law over its territory (Hirst and Thompson 1999).
The standard globalization thesis is premised on an unsubstantiated form of
economic determinism, yet there is room to argue that the contemporary
world might not be as integrated as commonly thought.
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (2001[1944]) remains one of
the most profound of all analyses of the relations between economics and
politics. One thesis of that book is that capitalism disturbs social life so much
that eventually a movement will arise to protect society, thereby leading to
international trade rivalry and perhaps to war. This theory does not, as Po-
lanyi hoped, explain the origins of Europe’s disastrous twentieth century, but
its tenets continue to deserve consideration. The second thesis of the book
has perhaps still more interest. States create markets, in Polanyi’s view. This
insight does help to explain the origins of capitalism in British history, but it
is still more relevant to the international economy. At the end of the Second
World War crucial discussions took place between the British and the Ameri-
cans, in delegations headed by Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, as
to the form that the world economy should take. As America had the power,
quite naturally its preferences prevailed. The insistence that countries balance
their books has thereafter affected the political economy of the world, as the
varied structural adjustment programs designed in Washington so clearly
demonstrate. But the key point to be made here concerns the continuing

The Political Sociology of Power 173
power of the United States. The most powerful country in the world has not
balanced its own books for decades. To begin with this lack of balance was
relatively benign: America provided defense for capitalist society whilst
those protected held dollars so as to keep the world economy in balance. This
bargain became altogether less benign over time. Advanced countries had to
absorb the great inflations caused by the United States when it refused to tax
its people so as to fund a Great Society program and a war in South East
Asia. The crisis that developed at this time led to “closing of the gold win-
dow” in 1971 (Gowa 1983). But this did not lead to the United States balanc-
ing its own books. Very much to the contrary, the United States has borrowed
enormous sums from the rest of the world – with vital payments being made in
turn by Germany, Saudi Arabia and China. To mention China is of course to
bring to the fore the power of the huge American market, thereby to suggest
that a new balance has arisen in the world economy – with the United States
extracting resources less because of its provision of military services for its al-
lies than because it has served as the principal means by which peripheral coun-
tries have developed. The future of power relations depends upon these equa-
tions changing. It is very unlikely that advanced capitalist countries will chal-
lenge the United States in military terms, thereby making it likely that some
rents will continue to be extracted from them. But China may in the long run
challenge American hegemony – less perhaps because of its developing mili-
tary strength, much more as its own consumers start to provide a market large
enough to allow it to ignore the United States altogether.
Ideological Power
As ideology is one of the most contested concepts is social science it is essen-
tial to make clear form the outset what we mean by ideological power. Tradi-
tional views were heavily influenced by Marxist or structural-functionalist un-
derstandings, whereby ideology was understood either as an economic force
rooted in the contradictions of capitalism, or as an ingrained normative value
system: the indispensable glue of group cohesion. While Marxist inspired
views, such as those of Lukacs (1971), Althusser (1994) or Goldmann (1955),
analyzed ideology through the paradigm of ‘commodity fetishism’ as a form of
(false) class consciousness, a potent symptom of malaise that shapes human re-
lations in capitalism, for functionalists, such as Parsons (1991), Shills (1968) or
Geertz (1964) ideology was a functional necessity of social equilibrium. Both
of these interpretations have proved to be highly problematic. Whereas Marxist
views lean towards economic determinism by overemphasizing class relations
and capitalism at the expense of other sources of social conflict, and thus view

174 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
ideological power as a form of social pathology, functionalists are victims of
cultural determinism by ignoring individual choice, agency, coercion and the
material realities of asymmetric power relations. As the experience of the So-
viet-type states shows only too clearly, transforming the economic foundations
of social order does not automatically lead to either the disappearance of social
antagonisms or the obliteration of the need to justify one’s political action. On
the contrary such conditions are particularly fertile for the proliferation of ideo-
logical practices. Similarly, subscribing to a singular value system does not
prevent conflict emerging between or within the societies. The examples of so-
cial orders propped up by heavy ideological scaffolding, such as communist or
Islamist regimes prove this point conclusively. Commitment to a common
normative ideology did not prevent the emergence of fierce interstate wars be-
tween the three communist states – Vietnam, Cambodia and China in the late
1970s, or civil wars orchestrated by Islamist fractions in Afghanistan during the
1990s or present day Somalia.
In contrast to these two conventional views we adopt what is essentially a
neo-Weberian understanding of ideological power. That is, we see ideology as
a relatively universal and multifaceted social process through which individual
and social actors articulate their beliefs and behaviors. It is a form of ‘thought-
action’ that penetrates most of social and political practice and which is con-
veyed through the distinct arrangements of a particular social order. Its contents
often surpass experience as they are, for the most part, non-testable, offering a
transcendent grand vista of collective authority. Ideological messages are con-
structed to make potent appeal – in the form of advanced ethical norms and su-
perior knowledge claims – to individual or group interests, or to popular emo-
tions in order to justify actual or potential social action. Ideology is a complex
process whereby ideas and practices come together in the course of legitimizing
or contesting power relations (Malešević 2006, 2010).
What is distinctive about this position is its universalism, its deliberate
attempt to transgress the evaluative and normative nature of traditional ap-
proaches and its emphasis on the links between collectively shared beliefs
and social action. Following Weber, a champion of principled value neutral-
ity who was also acutely aware that absolute neutrality is unachievable, we
start from an objectivist view of how social values are formed, articulated
and disseminated. Not only is it that Weber (together with Mannheim) antici-
pated the self-defeating basis of Marxist view of ideology, as the way it was
conceptualised could easily be applied to Marxism itself2 (McLellan, 1991:
31), but more importantly he also offers what amounts to a concept which is
2 This is most succinctly formulated in Weber’s (2004:266) well known statement that ‘the
materialist interpretation of history is not a cab which may be boarded at will, and it makes
no exceptions for the bearers of revolutions’

The Political Sociology of Power 175
capable of transcending the narrow historical and geographical borders of
capitalist Europe. Hence instead of an overemphasis on the fetishism of
commodities and the structure and organisation of capitalist economy, which
in the Marxist tradition is interpreted as the backbone of ideological/false
worldviews, Weberian epistemology operates with a concept of collectively
shared values and practices which is empirically applicable in pre-capitalist,
non-capitalist and non-Occidental environments. Shared belief systems are
not narrowly tied to distinct modes of production, and so one is able to ob-
serve and analyse the workings of ideological power in social environments
and historical epochs where economy does not function as an autonomous
sphere. For example binding the origins of dominant values to specific modes
of production tells us little about the impact of shamanic and animist beliefs
and practices in everyday life of Siberian Chukchis, South American Shaur
and many similar contemporary or pre-historic societies. Perhaps more
importantly, Marxism has great difficulty in explaining the mechanisms of
ideology formation, dissemination and reception in a profoundly modernist
context where economy is in the firm grip of politics, such as the former state
socialist world, many post-colonial developmental autocracies, and some
military juntas. Furthermore, in contrast to the economistic particularism of
Marxism, the universalism of this approach is better equipped to deal with
the sudden and unprecedented shifts in collective belief systems. Any attempt
at producing a sociologically meaningful explanation of the transformation of
dominant normative ideology in post 1989 China for example – a move from
a rigid Maoist Leninism towards some form of post-Marxist developmental
nationalism – requires much more than a simple focus on the ownership of
the means of production.
Secondly, unlike conventional functionalist and Marxist views that per-
ceive ideology in opposition to science and truth, this approach offers a dis-
tinctly sociological approach that goes beyond a truth/false dichotomy by fo-
cusing on the social role of distinct value systems. Not only is it that distin-
guishing between false and true beliefs/consciousness is all but impossible,
with most ideological contents composed of a priori normative statements
(i.e. “there is no other God then Allah”; “imperialism is the highest stage of
capitalism”), but even when one is in position to plausibly demonstrate that
certain beliefs and practices are empirically untrue (i.e. that “ritualistic tribal
dance and song bring rain” or that “the CIA runs the world”), this provides
no explanation for their popularity. Instead of a normative concern with right
and wrong, the focal point of analysis here is why and how different collec-
tive beliefs sustain a variety of socio-political orders. As Weber (1978)
shows, the fact that most Roman soldiers were stringent followers of the Cult
of Mithra is directly related to the bureaucratic organisation of the Roman
Empire’s military structure. What is sociologically interesting here is not

176 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
whether Mithraism was based on factual events, true historical experiences or
just principles, but why and how it generated so much support among a par-
ticular social strata in Roman society. Once we establish, as Weber does, that
the material and ideational organisation of Mithraism rested on a hierarchy of
(seven) religious ranks and initiation ceremonies which was almost identical
with the Roman military organisation, then we know a great deal more about
the sociological links between shared values and social structure. Such an ap-
proach to the study of ideological power does not exclude the possibility of
inherent conflicts within and between different collectivities or the possible
manipulation of some at the expense of others (i.e. in this context the instru-
mental use of Mithraism by Roman patricians and military leaders). Rather,
instead of taking this social condition as given it treats it as a research ques-
tion that remains open to empirical research. Hence instead of normative pre-
scription and a false consciousness thesis one moves towards more open
models of ideological power.
Finally, and sociologically speaking most interestingly, is the link be-
tween ideology and social action, particularly between dominant value sys-
tems and different collective status positions. Unlike most theories of ideo-
logical power (including functionalism, but also R. Barth’s (1993) structural-
ism, Mannheim’s (1936) sociology of knowledge, and Žižek’s (1989) La-
canianism), that operate at the macro-structural level and largely neglect
agency, our view is grounded in the analysis of social action. This is not to
say that agents are not present in other approaches, they clearly are – prole-
tariat and bourgeoisie in Marxism, the subject of Žižek’s theory, which takes
the wholly negative form of a ‘lack’ or ‘void’, Geertz’s view of human be-
ings as ‘symbolic animals’ and so on – but none of these approaches starts
from the actions of social agents to explain the workings of ideological
power. Instead they work in the opposite direction, thus giving ideology too
much of a determinist character. In contrast to this Weber (1949) clearly dif-
ferentiates between the human and extra-human environment arguing that
unlike physical objects from nature social structures remain much more con-
tingent and unpredictable. Hence social science is unable to provide absolute
laws and ultimate truths. Instead he found the value of social science in the
study of human action: it is social relations that constitute social structures.
As Rex (1980: 119) points out, in this approach social structures are viewed
as “arising from the continuity in time of interlocking patterns of interaction”,
meaning that external, structural constraints are the creations of human be-
ings and can be changed by human action. In other words, far from being an
omnipotent supra-human force that “constitutes human beings as social sub-
jects” as perceived by Althusser (1994), ideology is a product of human ac-
tion and is susceptible to change as social relations and social structures
transform. So what one finds in Weber is a strong ‘elective affinity’ between

The Political Sociology of Power 177
dominant value systems and practices and the structural position of particular
social groups. More specifically different ideological beliefs and practices are
linked to different group status situation: the Calvinist work ethnic finds its
support base among middle class entrepreneurs (Weber, 1976), the metaphysi-
cal doctrine of Confucianism oriented to adjustment to the existing world is a
dominant value system of civil servants in pre-modern China (Weber, 1951),
peasants tied to natural cycles and “so dependent on organic processes” are
focused on nature and ancestor worship thus sustaining beliefs in magic and
anthropomorphic deities (Weber, 1978: 468-9), the out-worldly and strictly
hierarchical nature of Hinduism corresponds to the intellectualist and apoliti-
cal orientation of Brahmins (Weber, 1958) and so on.
While this understanding of ideological power shares a great deal with
some other contemporary views such as those of Michael Freeden (1996) or
Raymond Boudon (1989), what is missing in their accounts is the recognition
that ideological power is often grounded much more in folk ideologies than
in sophisticated ideas derived from philosophical doctrines. In other words,
Freeden and Boudon link ideologies too strongly to science and social and
political theory thus paying insufficient attention to popular articulations of
official ideas. To fully comprehend the impact of ideological power it seems
crucial to distinguish between normative: the officially institutionalized nar-
rative, and the operative: the form particular doctrine takes in the contingen-
cies and fluctuations of everyday life (Malešević 2002, 2006). The two layers
can overlap, express similar or even identical values and ideas, but more of-
ten than not they tend to be composed of differently articulated concepts. As
normative layers often derive their authority from science or advanced ethical
theory they are bound to speak in the language of universalist rationality and
moral impartiality. In contrast to this, operative layers focus on a particular
audience and are thus likely to address individuals and groups as members of
a very specific interest and emotionally-bound collective by using a narrow
language that addresses a ‘we’ or ‘us’. For example, while all communist re-
gimes subscribed to proletarian internationalism in their official doctrine,
thus focusing on the revolutionary universalism of class struggle, their opera-
tive ideologies tended to infuse these ideas with a hefty dose of nationalism
and self-interest by attributing a privileged role not so much to the ‘interna-
tional worker’ but to ‘our heroic people’. As Malešević (2006: 94-106) shows
there is no substantial difference it this respect between such normatively dif-
ferent political orders as Islamic Iran under Khomeini, Communist Yugosla-
via under Tito and liberal democratic Britain of today. Despite the incom-
mensurability of normative doctrines, on the operative level they all espouse
a strong institutionalized nationalist rhetoric.
And this leads us directly to what has proved to be the most significant
operative ideological power in modernity – nationalism. As already noted na-

178 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
tionalism has a unique chameleon like ability to adapt to its surrounding envi-
ronment as well as to metamorphose from one form into another. What is
particularly distinct about the modern age is its propensity towards cultural
homogeneity, or as Gellner (1997) put it “the marriage of culture and state”.
Although some scholars such as Hastings (1997), van den Bergh (1981) and
more recently Roshwald (2006) argue that nationalism has roots in the an-
cient world, most sociological accounts rightly link the birth of nationalist
ideology with the arrival of modernity, and more specifically with the French
and American revolutions and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Gellner (1964,
1983) demonstrated convincingly that the feudal agrarian world was politi-
cally, economically but also culturally too hierarchical and stratified to pro-
vide for a substantial degree of cultural uniformity. Any attempt to fulfill the
central tenant of nationalism – one culture/one state – had to wait for the arri-
val of modernity, as illiterate peasants do not make good nationalists. The
emergence of nationalism as a popular doctrine of state legitimacy goes hand
in hand with gigantic structural transformations: the expansion of formal ra-
tionality of the bureaucratic state, developed and supervised mass educational
systems, democratization and secularization of the public space, standardiza-
tion of vernacular languages, universal literacy, advanced division of labor,
constitutional order, universal conscription and developed communication and
transport systems. While nationalist ideology started off as a minority view
articulated in the small circles of romantic intellectuals and other cultural and
political elites, it gradually became a mass phenomenon. Initially incorporat-
ing the middle classes of 19th century Europe and North America, with the
extension of the franchise and the total wars of the 20th century it became the
dominant ideological power of the modern era. The decolonization processes
of the second half of 20th witnessed the spread of this one nation/one state
doctrine throughout the globe, thus cementing nationalism as the truly domi-
nant worldview of modernity. As a result nationalist discourse dominates the
political life of such impoverished, remote and isolated states as North Korea,
Myanmar or Cuba, as well as the wealthiest societies of Europe and North
America. In the modern world no serious political force can afford to be
delegitimized be being perceived of as insufficiently patriotic – this applies
with equal measure to political groups in Iran and the USA. Hence we would
argue that nationalism in all its diverse incarnations remains the most impor-
tant form of ideological power in the modern age. While it might be said that
in much of the developed world nationalism has acquired a less visible and
routinized shape, this does not make it any less potent or vituperative. On the
contrary, as both Bourdieu (1990) and Billig (1995) have demonstrated, fa-
miliarity and enhabitation make ideological action normal, natural and thus
extremely forceful. When particular beliefs and actions are taken as given
and self-evident they require little in the way of popular justification. As

The Political Sociology of Power 179
such, this form of doxic experience operates as banal nationalism, and is
thereby prone to legitimizing diverse forms of political action, many of which
are anything but benign.
The recent proliferation of Islamist and other religiously articulated po-
litical movements might give impression that religious belief systems retain
their primacy in the same way that they dominated much of the world before
the modern era. Journalistic clichés have insisted on a similarity between the
mobilizing power of jihad in the early days of the Ottoman Empire and con-
temporary terrorist cells. However as extensive empirical research on Islamist
suicide bombers demonstrate persuasively, this is far from actual reality
(Pape 2006; Gambetta 2005; Gambetta and Hertog 2009). Rather than being
grounded in religious zealotry or a fanatical search for an afterlife, most indi-
viduals involved in these movements are driven by profoundly non-religious
motives such as social status, relative deprivation or micro-group solidarity3.
As Pape (2006: 21) emphasizes, Islamist suicide bombings are “not isolated
or random acts by individual fanatics but rather occur in clusters as a part of
larger campaign by an organized group to achieve a specific political goal”.
This is not to say that all ideological power in modernity is necessarily secu-
lar. It is obvious that many social movements, civil society groups, political
organizations, and governments employ profuse religious rhetoric. The cru-
cial point is that unlike their medieval doctrinal predecessors who inhabited a
non-secular political environment, contemporary religious ideologues operate
in a highly secularized, that is post-Machiavellian or post-Nietzschean, world
that gives them no other option but to act through and within secularized so-
cial and political categories. In this way political Islam, just as the Christian
Identity movement in the US, is not a religion but first and foremost a politi-
cal movement with relatively clearly defined political ambitions. Despite the
nominal commitment to doctrinal orthodoxies – often articulated through
rhetoric of what awaits the believer in the afterlife – such movements are es-
sentially focused on the realization of concrete political goals in this life. In
this way they are not very different from other ideological movements: they
devise political blueprints, focus on the political mobilization of masses,
spend energy and resources on building potent organizations, develop tech-
niques for the mass persuasion and political justification of their actions.
To sum up, the history of the modern age testifies that ideological power
retains its potency and much of its autonomy. However its effectiveness is of-
ten determined by its organizational infrastructure, that is, its proximity to
3 Gambetta and Hertog’s (2009) research indicates that a large majority of violent Islamists
possess university degrees with unusually high proportion of engineers. Their explanation
points in direction of engineers’ relative deprivation in their countries of origin and a par-
ticular corporatist and mechanistic worldview that characterises a large proportion of those
found in engineering professions throughout the world.

180 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
concrete political organizations such as states, political parties, social move-
ments or militant groups. Hence, more often than not, the spread of ideolo-
gies entails the preeminence of political power.
Conclusion: The Future of Power
The exercise of power changes according to historical circumstance. The
claim that has been made in this chapter is that for much of modern history
political power had the upper hand over economic and ideological power.
That is, the behavior of states, above all their propensity to fight each other,
has had a determining impacts on the historical record. In conclusion, let us
ask if this is likely to continue. Two considerations need to be addressed.
First, has the role of state competition, not least in terms of the violence that
it has hitherto involved, declined to such an extent that the world has
changed. Second, it is necessary to distinguish between different social
worlds. The simple answer to the first question is a resolute no: despite the
fashionable views that see globalization as undermining the capacity of states
to act as autonomous and potent political, economic and ideological agents,
state competition remains a crucial mechanism of social power. Geopolitical
stability and economic prosperity is underpinned by military strength on the
part of the European Union, Japan and the US, all of which benefit from
American military preeminence in the North, while China, Russia and Iran
among others seek to expand their own zones of economic influence on the
back of their military capacity. Although in much of the northern part of the
globe ‘hard geopolitics’ has given way to ‘soft geopolitics’ (Mann 1997) and
‘geo-economics’, organized violence continues to be the decisive means of
international politics. Despite the relative restraint of nuclear weapons, war-
fare has not vanished from the geopolitical radar: from Afghanistan and Paki-
stan to Iraq, Somalia, DR Congo or Yemen organized violence retains its po-
litical influence. Recent debate has focused on whether these wars are his-
torically novel and unprecedented (Kaldor 2001; Bauman 2002b; Munkler
2004). For example Kaldor (2001) argues that unlike the ‘old’ wars of 19th
and early 20th centuries which were fought by sovereign states with clearly
defined political goals, contemporary ‘new wars’ are the product of global
neo-liberal economic conditions whereby declining states lose the legitimate
monopoly of violence. As a direct consequence, criminal warlords privatize
the means of violence and use the remnants of collapsing state structures to
wage predatory and genocidal wars on civilians, with the aim of acquiring
personal wealth and dominance. Critics of this argument have demonstrated
that many of these claims about the novelty of current wars are empirically

The Political Sociology of Power 181
untenable. Many of the methods, strategies, means and tactics employed in
these wars are part and parcel of all civil wars (Lacina and Gleditch 2005
Newman 2004). Late 20th and early 21st century warfare is no more brutal,
does not involve more civilians nor does it cause more casualties than previ-
ous wars (Kalyvas 2001; 2006; Newman 2004). In addition the causes and
goals of these wars have proved not to be particularly unique (Malešević
2008). In other words even when organized violence entails non-state actors,
state competition determines the outcomes of such wars. Despite the fact that
both Somalia and DR Congo are by most accounts ‘failed’, non-functioning
states where civil wars are rampant, the direction and spread of these violent
conflicts has been shaped by the involvement of regional and global state ac-
tors. For example the outcome of the Second Congo war (1998-2003), often
referred to as Africa’s World War, was determined by the involvement and
the geopolitical calculations of eight African states and 25 armed groups
(Malešević 2008: 98).
Let us turn our attention finally to the different social worlds of the early
twentieth century, moving in turn from the centre to the periphery. The core of
capitalist society now seems secure in its liberalism. Some lessons have been
learnt. For one thing, the link between nationalism and imperialism has been
broken, in large part as the advanced world has advanced so much without im-
perial possessions – thanks, rather, to trading with each other. For another,
there is a good deal of recognition that integrating nations and classes does
most to contain them. Self-congratulation about the national principle should
not be overdone. It has been easy for Europe to become liberal after massive
ethnic cleansing has taken place (Mazower 2000; Mann 2005). Finally, the fu-
ture of this part of the world does depend considerably on what happens in the
United States – the country which did most to establish liberalism on firm foot-
ing and whose behavior in the near future is likely to have the greatest impact
on the political economy of the first part of the twenty first century.
Perhaps just a decade ago, enlightened opinion felt that the historic sec-
ond world of state socialism had permanently been consigned to history, with
the likelihood that the societies involved would move ever close to liberal
capitalism. Both these statements do apply to most of Central and East Cen-
tral Europe. But only the first applies to the country which matters, Russia. It
is increasingly clear that we have here a society not unfamiliar to us from the
past – an authoritarian capitalist state hungry for power. If the roots of Rus-
sian strength are rather fragile, resting as they do on the provision of oil and
gas to Western Europe, the roots elsewhere are rather powerful. This applies
to China, poor still but developing fast, and far more likely to copy an au-
thoritarian capitalist route than to somehow become a liberal democracy.
These states seek regional hegemony, through semi-coercive means likely to
be backed up in time by means of increasing military power.

182 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
A third type of political economy is markedly different. The intellectual
consensus of a decade ago that had expected state socialist societies to be-
come liberal quite often sought to diminish the powers of predatory states in
Africa. Predation can indeed be a problem, but the view in question was ter-
ribly naïve in not realizing that state power of the right sort – the ability to
monopolize violence and to provide security and education for a national way
of life – desperately needed to be built. African states were in any case weak.
The norm of non-intervention had been strictly followed because all borders
were recognized to be ridiculous; whilst this was understandable, it did pre-
vent state and nation building by the traditional and horrible European route,
that is, by co-ordinating society in order to fight a rival (Herbst 2000). Struc-
tural adjustment programs which weaken states still further can be disastrous,
leaving rulers barely able to see outside their capitals, prone to being over-
thrown by gangs of young soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. Similarly the
rise of Islamic and other religiously framed violence represents a relatively
novel historical development which in part is fueled by the historical decline
of the Marxist inspired ideologies of decolonization and development, and in
part by the relative deprivation of the rising middle classes unable to realize
their potentials in the authoritarian context of economically impoverished
states. Although the proliferation of new technologies with a global reach has
enabled more intensive interaction and better coordination between groups
that share similar jihadist and other radical ideologies their long term political
impact remains modest. Despite the occasional spectacles of terrorists bomb-
ings which spread temporary fear the outcomes of such actions are usually
counterproductive to the terrorist intentions as rather than weakening the ca-
pacity of nation-states in the West (and other part of the world) they in fact
legitimize the further increase in the latitude of surveillance, policing, border
controls, and other infrastructural powers of the modern states.
Much of what has been said to this point is in essence depressing. His-
tory is unlikely to lose its bite; politics will retain visceral intensity. But it
would be a mistake to ignore one key change, blessed with a crucial example,
that suggests that the developing world may show the world a better way than
that of Europe, purportedly the heart of modernity. European states at the end
of the nineteenth century were so involved in geopolitical conflict that they
sought to homogenize their territories, convinced that national unity led by a
centralized state would increase their powers. This mind-set produced the
world of ethnic cleansing, in part consequence and in part cause of the hor-
rors of the dark continent of the twentieth century. Illuminative work by
David Laitin (1989; 1998) suggests that an alternative and wholly better route
may at least sometimes be available. Laitin works on language rather than re-
ligion, it should ne acknowledged, suggesting that his optimism must be
taken with some caution – for one can speak several languages but not easily

The Political Sociology of Power 183
belong to more than a single monotheistic religion. Nonetheless, he points
out that India has managed to create a system of political loyalty without full-
scale homogenization. To be a fully functioning Indian citizen one needs to
speak three plus or minus one language. Differently put, one needs the two
languages of the state– English and Hindi – and to this must be added a third
for the language of one’s provincial state. One falls back on two languages if
the provincial state is Hindi-speaking, but must go to four if one is a minority
within a non-Hindi speaking region. The point here is that states may – in the
absence of sustained geopolitical conflict – become less centralized, more
federal and consociational. The manner in which power is exercised will mat-
ter in the future a very great deal. If there is much to fear, at least there are
some better options whose salience we can try to increase.
References
Althusser, L., 1994. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: S. Zizek, ed.
Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.
Baechler, J., 1975. The origins of capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barthes, R., 1993. Mythologies. London: Vintage.
Bauman, Z., 1998. Globalization: human consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z., 2002a. Cultural variety or variety of cultures? In: S. Malešević and M.
Haugaard, eds. Making sense of collectivity: ethnicity, nationalism and globaliza-
tion. London: Pluto Press.
Bauman, Z., 2002b. Reconnaissance wars of the planetary frontierland. Theory, Cul-
ture and Society, 19(4), 81-90.
Billing, M., 1995. Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Boudon, R. 1989. The Analysis of Ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P., 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Carnoy, M., 1993. Whiter the nation-state? In: M. Carnoy, ed. The new global econ-
omy in the information age. College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Downing, B., 1992. The military revolution and political change. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Ertman, T., 1997. Birth of the leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freeden, M., 1996. Ideologies and political theory: a conceptual approach. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Friedaman, J., ed. 2003. Globalization, the state and violence. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Gambetta, D. and Hertog, S., 2009. Why are there so many engineers among Islamic
radicals? European Journal of Sociology, L(2), 201-230.
Gambetta, D., 2005. Can we make sense of suicide missions? In: D. Gambetta, ed.
Making sense of suicide missions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geertz, C., 1964. Ideology as a cultural system. In: D. Apter, ed. Ideology and discon-
tent. New York: Free Press.
Gellner, E., 1964. Thought and change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

184 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Gellner, E., 1983. Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gellner, E., 1997. Nationalism. London: Phoenix.
Goldmann, L., 1955. The hidden god. London: Routledge.
Gowa, J., 1983. Closing the gold window: domestic politics and the end of Breton
Woods. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hall, J. A., 2000. Globalization and nationalism. Thesis Eleven, 63, 63-79
Hall, J.A., 2002. A disagreement about difference. In: S. Malešević and M. Haugaard,
eds. Making sense of collectivity: ethnicity, nationalism and globalization. Lon-
don: Pluto.
Hall, J.A., 2006. L’Europe des patries, or megalomania breeds ruritanians. In: R.
Rogowsk and C. Turner, eds. The shape of the New Europe. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hastings, A., 1997. The construction of nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Herbst, J., 2000. States and power in Africa: comparative lessons in authority and
control. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hirst, P. and Thompson, G., 1999. Globalization in question. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kaldor, M., 2001. New and old wars: organised violence in a global era. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Kalyvas, S. N., 2006. The Logic of violence in civil war. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Kalyvas, S. N., 2001. ‘New’ and ‘old’ civil wars: a valid distinction? World Politics,
54(1), 99-118.
Lacina, B. and Gledistch, N.P., 2005. Monitoring trends in global combat: a new data-
set of battle deaths. European Journal of Population, 21(2-3), 145-166.
Laitin, D., 1998. Identity in formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the near
abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Laitin, D., 1989. Language policy and political strategy in India. Policy Sciences, 22
(3-4), 415-36
Lukacs, G., 1971. History and class consciousness. London: Merlin Press.
Malešević, S., 2002. Ideology, legitimacy and the new state. London: Routledge.
Malešević, S., 2006. Identity as ideology: understanding ethnicity and nationalism.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Malešević, S., 2008. The sociology of new wars? Assessing the causes and objectives of
contemporary violent conflicts. International Political Sociology, 2(2), 97-112.
Malešević, S., 2010. The sociology of war and violence. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Mannheim, K., 1936. Ideology and utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mann, M., 1986. The sources of social power I: a history of power from the beginning
to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann M., 1988. States, war and capitalism: studies in political sociology. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Mann, M., 1993. The sources of social power II: the rise of classes and nation-states,
1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mann, M., 1997. Has globalization ended the rise and rise of nation-state? Review of
International Political Economy, 4 (3), 472-496.

The Political Sociology of Power 185
Mann, M., 2003. Incoherent empire. London: Verso.
Mann, M., 2005. The dark side of democracy: explaining ethnic cleansing. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mazower, M., 2000. Dark continent: Europe’s twentieth century. New York: Vintage
Books.
Mc Lellan, D., 1991. Ideology. London: Open University Press.
Munkler, H., 2004. The new wars. Cambridge: Polity.
Newman, E., 2004. The ‘new wars’ debate: a historical perspective is needed. Security
Dialogue, 35(2), 173-189.
Parsons, T., 1991. A tentative outline of American values. In: R. Robertson and B.S.
Turner, eds. Talcott Parsons: theorist of modernity. London: Sage.
Pape, R.A., 2006. Dying to win: why suicide terrorists do it. London: Gibson Square
Books.
Polany, K., 2001. The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rex, J., 1980. The theory of race relations: a Weberian approach. In: M. O’Callaghan,
ed. Sociological theories: race and colonialism. Paris: UNESCO.
Roshwald, A., 2006. The endurance of nationalism: ancient roots and modern dilem-
mas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sassen, S., 2007. The sociology of globalization. New York: W.W. Norton.
Sen, G., 1984. The military origins of industrialisation and international trade ri-
valry. London: Pinter.
Shils, E., 1968. The concept and function of ideology. International Encyclopaedia of
the Social Sciences, 7, 66-76.
Sklair, L., 2002. Globalization: capitalism and its alternatives. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Sklair, L., 1995. Sociology of the global system. New York: Prentice Hall.
Skocpol, T., 1979. States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France,
Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press.
Sombart, W., 1976. Why is there no socialism in the United States? New York: Sharpe.
Tilly, C., ed. 1975. The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Tilly, C., 1985. War making and state making as organized crime. In: P. Evans., D.
Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol, eds. Bringing the state back in. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Tilly, C., 1992. Coercion, capital and European states. Oxford: Blackwell.
van den Berghe, P.L., 1981. The ethnic phenomenon. New York: Elsevier.
Vogel, S., 1996. Freer markets, more rules: regulatory reform in advanced industrial
countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wade, R., 1996. Globalization and its limits: reports of the death of the national econ-
omy are greatly exaggerated. In: S. Berger and R. Dore, eds. National diversity
and global capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
M. Weber., 2004. The vocation of politics. In: S. Whimster, ed. The essential Weber.
London: Routledge.
Weber, M., 1978. Economy and society. New York: Bedminster Press.
Weber, M., 1976. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen and
Unwin.

186 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Weber, M., 1958. The religion of India. New York: Free Press.
Weber, M., 1951. The religion of China. New York: Free Press.
Weber, M., 1949. Methodology of the social sciences. New York: Free Press.
Žižek, S., 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

Chapter 7
Globalization and the Transformation of
Power
Philip G. Cerny
Introduction
Both the concept and the realities of power in international relations and
world politics have evolved significantly since the middle of the 20th century.
Whether this process involves a fundamental transformation in the character
of power in the world is hotly debated. In this chapter, the outlines of some of
the major trends will be traced through and their implications explored. The
main conclusion, nevertheless, will be that these changes do indicate that
such an overall transformation is taking place. This is particularly true in
terms of the way both academic observers and practitioners have long seen
power in international relations as being essentially distinct in its structure
and functioning from power at other levels of politics, economics and society
– what has been called the “inside-outside distinction” (Walker 1993) or the
“levels of analysis distinction” (Hollis and Smith 1990). Globalization is not
only eroding and blurring this distinction but also generating new patterns of
power that involve deep-seated changes in the ways actors behave and struc-
tures develop in a more complex and interdependent world.
In particular, this chapter challenges the traditional notion at the heart of
modern state-centric social science and the disciplines of Political Science
and International Relations, namely Max Weber’s contention that the state
holds the “monopoly of legitimate violence” in the world. I argue that, on the
contrary, (a) the state no longer holds a monopoly of violence in world poli-
tics, whether legitimate or not, and (b) state violence is increasingly seen as
fundamentally illegitimate in key contexts, to some extent domestically but
especially internationally. As a result, state violence is increasingly (although
not totally) ineffective and counterproductive in a world characterized by a
“new security dilemma” (Cerny 2000a). Both power over and power to, often
fused in the way that power is perceived in the international context, need to
be fundamentally rethought in this environment.
The chapter is made up of five sections, in turn focusing on:
• the centrality of power in the traditional understanding of international
relations;

188 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
• the structure and dynamics of the traditional paradigm itself;
• the major dimensions of change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
especially the impact of globalization;
• how some practitioners of power at the foreign policy level are attempt-
ing to take some of those changes on board, especially through the notion
of “soft power”; and
• the changing dynamics of both power to and power over in several cru-
cial issue-areas in contemporary world politics.
Globalization in this context involves a disarticulation of power relations cut-
ting across the old international system of sovereign nation-states (Cerny
2000b), in turn leading to the emergence of a “multi-nodal” politics (Cerny
2009) that not only undermines the capacity of states to behave as “unit ac-
tors” (Waltz 1979) exercising sovereign power, but at the same time also em-
powers non-state actors – and some state actors in certain bounded issue-
areas – to engage in crosscutting, cross-border political processes, especially
those characterized by transnational and “glocal” (i.e., linking the global and
the local) characteristics. Political power at the level of world politics is thus
becoming less like old-fashioned “power politics” or Realpolitik, and more
like the domestic politics of:
• interest group pressure, competition and conflict;
• the clash of ideologies and social values;
• the construction of – and resistance to – evolving norms and rules of the
game; and
• an uneven but growing “civilianization” of power relations.
More controversially, I argue that, paradoxically, while these crosscutting
processes can be destabilizing at some levels, they are likely to be broadly
stabilizing at system level.
The Centrality of Power in International Relations
The concept of power has traditionally played a crucial role in the analysis of
International Relations and World Politics. It has been seen as the key factor,
variable, driving force or “currency” in relations among states. Indeed, this
role has been seen by many observers since Thucydides as the defining at-
tribute of the international system itself. This interpretation of the role of
power is derived from the understanding that no seriously effective level of
organized, authoritative or legitimate governmental or socio-political struc-
ture exists above the level of the state that does not itself emanate from, and

The Political Sociology of Power 189
in the last analysis remain responsible to, autonomous sovereign states. In
other words, there is no genuinely supranational overarching power structure
or political process in world politics. Therefore, in order to explain what hap-
pens in world politics – as distinct from politics within states – it is necessary
to privilege (a) power-seeking actions of states (taken as structurally coherent
“unit actors” in and of themselves: Waltz 1979) and of “state actors” (actors
acting through or on behalf of states, mainly politicians and bureaucrats) and
(b) structured, ongoing relations of power between and among states, over
the claims of other potential actors or causal variables. This interpretation is
usually labeled the “realist” – or, in a revised version that has become wide-
spread in academic International Relations since the 1970s, “neorealist” –
paradigm, derived originally from the thought of such political theorists as
Machiavelli and Hobbes and central to the 19th century German concept of
Realpolitik.
In this understanding of the world, there is no agreed, overarching politi-
cal forum in which individuals, economic interests and social groups can sys-
tematically and effectively express their views and pursue their goals – in
other words, engage in collective action – other than by going through the
level of the state and of those international institutions and international re-
gimes and less formal processes licensed by sovereign states and ultimately
constrained by them in terms of the basic structural dynamics of the system.
In the words of Aristotle, “justice” and “friendship” on a social level can only
exist within the politeia or political community. Aristotle argued that people
are essentially “social animals”; however, that sociability stops at the border,
or the proverbial “water’s edge”. All other people and communities are by
definition outsiders – foreigners – and relationships with them, even if they
are relatively peaceable most of the time, are in the last analysis, when exter-
nal threats to the polity are perceived, dominated by asocial relations of force.
Therefore, despite claims that an “international society” or “world society”
has developed that includes and sometimes transcends the power-based rela-
tions of states (Bull 1977; Hurrell 2007); despite assertions that the world or-
der is essentially rooted in capitalist economic structures (Gill and Law
1987); and despite the hypothesis that a “global civil society” is developing
from below, indeed relations of power among states are still seen to consti-
tute the bottom line of world politics.
As a result, traditional analyses of international relations assert, such
goals as justice, fairness, equality, democracy, redistribution and the like are
ultimately trumped by power rivalries and only stabilized by balances of
power among states (Little 2007). Indeed, the very definition of power in the
international arena power is constituted by the relative power of states vis-à-
vis each other – even if exercised by states themselves in some sort of collec-
tive fashion through inter-state institutions and bargaining. Power as such in

190 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
the international arena therefore concerns the relative power of different
states, rooted in both direct relations of force and, more indirectly, the re-
sources, political, economic and social, necessary for the potential use of
force. And because states as endogenously entrenched collective action or-
ganizations have clear, historically, geographically, economically and so-
cially derived imperatives and priorities in the international arena – the core
of which are national defence and the promotion of “national interests” in the
wider world – these imperatives and interests will trump any international or
transnational “public good” or “general interest” when push comes to shove.
Power in its international manifestation has therefore been seen since
Ancient Greece as fundamentally distinct from its internal or domestic mani-
festation. Power as a means to pursue the “highest good” within the polity
(Aristotle again) is, in contrast, externalized in the form of the state’s power
to pursue national interests over, above and against the national interests of
other states in an anarchic world. Higher ends like social justice, economic
welfare or even civil peace itself are subordinated to the underlying require-
ments of survival, national self-interest and “self-help” (Waltz 1979). Those
higher ends are not forgotten, but are only effectively operationalized interna-
tionally through the medium of state action – where they are subordinated to
underlying relations of force and potential force. Indeed the dominant power
imperative of world politics therefore prioritizes and privileges qualitatively
different kinds of ends, requires quite different means, and justifies radically
different standards of conduct by actors – such as killing and repressing ene-
mies – from government leaders down to ordinary people, especially, but not
exclusively, when they become soldiers.
However, this traditional conception of power has always had a range of critics:
• believers in transcendent religious, spiritual, moral and/or ethical values,
whether metaphysical or humanistic;
• economic liberals, who see market forms of exchange as entailing im-
peratives of growth, efficiency and prosperity that ultimately expand
onto a transnational or global scale;
• Marxists, who, in contrast, see the same capitalism as creating ever-
evolving means for an increasingly internationalized ruling class to ex-
pand its domination, and ultimately look to its replacement by socialism;
• liberal democratizers who seek to expand democracy not only within a
growing number of nation-states but also across borders in more democ-
ratic and/or pluralistic institutions, legal principles and political processes
(Held 1995); and
• political science pluralists who see political behaviour as increasingly
driven by transnational interests, values and identities rather than merely
domestic ones (Cerny 2006a, 2010a).

The Political Sociology of Power 191
Today, realism and neorealism are being challenged and revised in the light
of these critiques. In particular, each of the critiques does not merely involve
interpreting the deep-rooted and historically robust debates about interna-
tional politics in general as reflected in the history of political philosophy
since Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Smith, Marx and the rest.
In addition, and more importantly for this book, each critique also carries
with it an underlying understanding of how the structure of the international
system has been undergoing fundamental change and transformation over
time – particularly in the light of developments in the late 20th and early 21st
century, usually called globalization. All sorts of economic, political and so-
cial relationships that cut across borders are today seen from a range of di-
verse perspectives as undermining – or at least potentially undermining – the
“realist” inside/outside distinction that has been constituted historically not
only through international relations theory but also through practices of war,
diplomacy, economic competition and the like.
In these critiques, the world is seen as being constituted more and more
through revived, emerging and even hegemonic cross-cutting linkages and
loyalties of friendship, justice, class, economic self-interest, identity and/or
belonging – the traditional stuff of domestic political philosophy and poli-
ticking. These increasingly dense linkages do not merely constrain the ac-
tions of states but, more importantly, enable social, economic and political
actors to develop modes of “transnational” action, creating webs of collec-
tive action that differ not merely in degree, but also in kind, from the crude
relations of force characteristic of traditional international relations. States
are being cut across, run around, manipulated and re-shaped by complex
transnational and “glocal” (global-local) linkages that are transforming state
behaviour itself.
The Traditional Conception of Power in International
Relations
Earlier modes of all of these trends have existed since time immemorial. In-
deed, the era of a clearly defined “system of states” – an historically con-
tested concept, normally dated back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia but in
many ways more recent – and of the “high nation-state” from the mid-19th to
the mid-20th centuries has been relatively short in the longue durée of history.
In Roman times, the inside/outside distinction was symbolized by the god
Janus, the god of the city. Janus, whose statue was placed at the city gates,
had two faces, looking in opposite directions – one looking inside the city,
and one looking outside, the first seeking to nurture social bonds, solidarity

192 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
and community, the second prepared to fight invaders and pursue the city’s
external interests against aliens by force. This division of world politics into
inside and outside requires a dual role for the state and state actors, today of-
ten called “two-level games” (Putnam 1988). There are four main ways in
which power is seen as different in the international context from power in
domestic political systems.
The first derives from the oft-noted statement that there is no world gov-
ernment, no overarching authority structure or supranational political proc-
ess to define norms, make decisions, and impose sanctions on those trans-
gressing those norms or defying those decisions. States and state actors can-
not appeal to a higher authority either to pursue their own goals or to prevent
others from pursuing theirs. As in Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, the in-
ternational world is a potential “war of all against all”, in which potential
“defection” – the willingness and incentive to opt out of cooperative ar-
rangements when a state’s fundamental national interests are seen to be
threatened – is the “default” state of affairs. This kind of self-regarding im-
perative is furthermore said to be the only legitimate course of action in a
world made up of sovereign states accountable only to their own “people”.
Only actors who effectively pursue the genuine national interests of their
states can be truly moral as well as practical (Morgenthau 1949; Pin-Fat
2005).
The second dimension, which follows from the first, is that the goals pur-
sued by states will be fundamentally different on the “outside”, or interna-
tional level, in contrast to those that state authorities and political actors pur-
sue “inside” the domestic political system. It is not only exceedingly difficult
but regarded as illegitimate for states to impose their social values on other
independent sovereign states. Pursuing and enforcing norms of social and
economic justice, the distribution and redistribution of wealth or other re-
sources, and furthering elemental social bonds among “the people” can only
be done within states – unless there is a process of alliance, emulation or in-
teractive economic growth in which other states voluntarily adopt the same
values. In other words, in Aristotelian terms, the principles of “justice” and
“friendship” only operate within states; all others are outsiders.
This dimension therefore rests on an apparent philosophical paradox.
Each state is entitled to possess a different internal moral, ethical and socio-
economic system, although the extent of this autonomy is historically uncer-
tain. Indeed, in this context what one might call moral realists argue para-
doxically that peace can only be promoted through non-interference and mu-
tual recognition of the ultimate sovereignty of states to determine their own
priorities and national interests. The existence of a plurality of different
kinds of states with different values and interests can therefore be seen to be
a guarantee of a kind of state-based pluralism based on mutual recognition

The Political Sociology of Power 193
of those differences (Hurrell 2007), almost a kind of vertically containerized
international multiculturalism. The Peace of Westphalia was in fact funda-
mentally a religious truce between Protestant and Catholic European mon-
archs after centuries of religious warfare and complex institutional conflicts
between monarchs (and between them and the Papacy), with each agreeing
not to interfere in the others’ choice of religion within their “own” states.
This principle was later extended to other choices, including modern ideolo-
gies.
Nevertheless, such sovereign autonomy often masked desires for con-
quest, as demonstrated by the history of European imperialism and colonial-
ism, while Nazis, Fascists and Communists attempted to spread their values
forcefully by conquering or promoting revolution in other states. In this
sense, therefore, the notion of power as sovereign autonomy on the one hand
and power as the use of force to pursue national interests on the other has al-
ways represented a complex dialectic or contradiction within the traditional
conception of power in world politics – one which was summed up by the
Roman writer Vegetius in the famous maxim: “If you want peace, prepare for
war.” As has often been pointed out, however, preparation for war often leads
to the vicious spiral known as the “security dilemma” (Herz 1950), poten-
tially leading to arms racing and the possibly unintended outbreak of war.
Thus the history of the modern world has been one of an unstable dialectic of
war and peace stemming directly from the clash of national interests not only
with each other but also with outwardly-oriented, even universalistic, ideo-
logical goals.
The third dimension, again following from the first two, is that power is
organized differently within the state’s internal domain from its external en-
vironment. Neorealists in particular label “inside” politics as “hierarchical”,
in the sense that there is some sort of vertical, centralized structure that can
be either authoritarian or liberal democratic, or all shades in between. In prin-
ciple, however, more domestically liberal and pluralist forms of this centripe-
tal state allow competing actors to co-exist with each other, relating and in-
teracting through a range of “horizontal” processes such as elections, shared
and/or competing economic interests, multiple social institutions including
churches, families, etc. Different groups, factions, individuals and interests
accept (at least up to a point) common “rules of the game” and conflicts are
resolved through common procedures and processes, whether through politi-
cal institutions and parties, courts and the legal system, rule-governed bu-
reaucracies, and/or shared social norms.
Nevertheless, whether hierarchical or pluralistic, the role of power within
a state tends to concern the use of power as a means to a “higher” end rather
than an end in itself – power to is ostensibly meant to trump power over. Al-
though power struggles, corruption and domination by particular individuals,

194 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
groups and classes over others is ever crucial to domestic policy processes
and institutions, one of the main trends of the past few centuries in developed
countries, and today increasingly in developing countries (although there are
always steps backward too), has been the institutionalization of power as a
stabilizing force. Power over has moved from the foreground – as it has been
when tribal elites, medieval nobles, mafias and “warlords” of various stripes
have used brute force for the direct expropriation of wealth and assertion of
control – to the background. This primacy of power to is an essential part of
what is generally accepted to constitute progress, modernization or develop-
ment, only seen as legitimate when it is applied in the service of social stabil-
ity, development, social values and the “public interest”, and exercised
through constitutionally constituted forms such as the “police power”, courts,
political institutions, rights, and the like.
However, it is often said that “politics” of this sort nevertheless “stops at
the water’s edge”. Because the international system is, in contrast, “anarchi-
cal” – a description accepted by a range of different approaches to Interna-
tional Relations, meaning not chaotic and disordered but simply without an
effective overarching system of government or governance – the state is
dominated by the imperatives built into the international system itself to act
as if it were a single, fused unit in foreign policy. The “outside” state, if it is
to be effective, needs to act as if it were genuinely organized “vertically” –
both an effective “container” in its external environment (see Brenner, Jes-
sop, Jones and MacLeod 2003) and also an efficient endogenous command
system for coordinating and mobilizing potential domestic material and hu-
man resources for the pursuit of power on the international level. Not only is
the state, to use Waltz’s term, required to act as a “unit actor” vis-à-vis other
states analogously organized, but leading politicians have to act like “states-
men” representing a holistic “national interest”.
The outward-facing state is thus primarily organized through command
hierarchies like armed forces, intelligence agencies and foreign policymakers,
rather than competitive political processes or economic markets. This capac-
ity has often been seen to be stronger in authoritarian than in democratic
states or in states with strong, autonomous executives – as in the “unitary ex-
ecutive” theory of the George W. Bush Administration (Savage 2007). It is
also at the core of contemporary debates about transatlantic relations,
summed up in the statement that “Americans are from Mars; Europeans are
from Venus” (Kagan 2003; cf. Sheehan 2008). The result, as noted by
Rosenau, is to separate out in organizational terms domestic policymaking –
left to “parochial” interests and actors – from foreign policy, which is effec-
tively the preserve of “cosmopolitan elites” (Rosenau 1961). Thus there is a
continual tension within even the most democratic of polities between ac-
countability and transparency, on the one hand, and control and secrecy, on

The Political Sociology of Power 195
the other. The effect is to create a kind of dual state, reflecting the Janus im-
age mentioned earlier.
The fourth dimension, then, that of raw power – the use of force and vio-
lence and the primacy of power over – is seen as the “currency” of world
politics. The influence of a particular state depends upon its basic stock of
potential power resources or “capabilities”, its ability to mobilize people and
resources to fight, and its capacity to use – or threaten – force in order to im-
pose its will beyond its borders. The concepts of “resources” and “capabili-
ties” in this context are extremely fungible, however. As the Russian Empire
learned in 1905 and 1914, having the biggest fleet and the largest army are
not much help against a better organized and more highly motivated oppo-
nent. “Hard” capabilities themselves are often difficult to assess and measure
except in the heat or wake of actual battles. For example, guerrilla warfare
has classically been able to counter much larger conventional forces; the ap-
parent technological superiority of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan
today is sometimes said to be a de facto disadvantage against the improvised
methods of insurgents; and major weapons systems like nuclear missiles may
be only useful to the extent that they are not used, as in the doctrine of deter-
rence and “mutually assured destruction”.
Even more problematic are the “softer” capabilities of strategic planning,
tactical skill, efficient organization, communication, and the general psycho-
logical state of the armed forces. However, these are themselves dependent
upon the existence not only of an economic infrastructure that can provide
the required finance, technological and production capabilities, workforces,
etc., to supply the armed forces with effective equipment and weaponry, but
also of a social and human infrastructure – the sense of identity, loyalty and
belonging to the “nation” rather than to ethnic, family or religious ties, war-
lords or mafias, particular subnational or cross-national geographical regions
and the like. And political resources are necessary too – reliable and effective
leadership, legitimate and efficient political institutions, and inclusive politi-
cal processes. The effective building, marshalling and use of traditional forms
of power are thus highly problematic.
In the traditional understanding of international power relations, then, the
international system itself is defined as a structure of relative power. Alliances
are precarious: a Chinese proverb has it that: “The enemy of my enemy is my
friend.” Balances of power are ultimately contingent. They emerge from wars,
and conditions change over time. Even when there is relative peace and stabil-
ity, balances are maintained by underlying relationships of force. However, of-
ten the very use of force has counterproductive effects: where miscalculated
aggression leads to defeat; where overambition leads to “imperial overstretch”
(Kennedy 1987); where “planning for the last war” proves useless in the face of
technological and organizational advances; where force triggers multiple layers

196 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
of conflict such as civil wars; where domestic opposition leads to defeat at
home; and where the very structure and foundations of the state are threatened
with destabilization, disintegration and state failure.
Beyond Anarchy and Hierarchy: Crosscutting Forms of
Power in the World Order
The traditional conceptualization of power has nevertheless been challenged
at many levels. “Idealists”, “liberal internationalists” and “liberal institution-
alists” argue not only that growing interdependence among states since the
First World War has led to the development, however uneven, of a range of
institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization,
but also that a raft of smaller specialized regimes, along with transgovern-
mental networks, together constitute an important and relatively autonomous
superstructure that increasingly leads to cooperative outcomes (Keohane
1984; Ruggie 1993; Slaughter 2004). Marxists have of course long argued
that the inherently internationalized infrastructure of capitalism, rooted in the
relations of production, constitutes an authoritative socio-political superstruc-
ture too – a superstructure that in the era of globalization takes on an even
more transnationalized form which Gill calls the “new constitutionalism”
(Gill 2003). Postmodernists perceive a fragmentation of traditional “narra-
tives” of the state and the states system, but with no emerging alternative
conception of power except the interaction of micro-“circuits of power”
(Foucault 1980). Economic liberals and neoliberals argue that transnational
market forces and new forms of market friendly regulation at multiple levels
– transnational, regional, national and local – are creating a range of norms,
practices, policies and institutional reforms that spin new webs of power
within and below – as well as across – borders.
Indeed, the “global” is sometimes not seen as a distinct level at all, but one
which is immanent and embedded in the local, whether in terms of the organi-
zation of geography and space (Brenner, Jessop, Jones and MacLeod 2003) or
the dynamics of social and political relations at the micro-level (Sassen 2007) –
the macrocosm within the microcosm. Transnational pluralists assert that those
interest groups with the most clout today are those that can coordinate a range
of multi-level transnational linkages (Cerny 2006a). And constructivists and
other ideas-oriented theorists argue that transnationally oriented ideologies, es-
pecially neoliberalism, are becoming increasingly embedded and hegemonic,
shaping globalization on the one hand (Cerny 2008a) but also engendering po-
tential resistance on the other (Gills 2000, 2010). In all these cases, analysts ar-
gue that the traditional inside/outside distinction and the vertically organized

The Political Sociology of Power 197
forms of power intrinsic to it are being not only eroded but also systematically
cross-cut by horizontal linkages, organizational forms and power relationships,
whether political, social or economic, in increasingly complex forms of trans-
national interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1977; Halperin 2007; Cerny
2008b). This increasingly “multilayered”, “multi-level” or “multi-nodal” struc-
ture requires a reconfiguration of all four dimensions of power discussed ear-
lier.
In terms of the first dimension, debates focus more and more on whether
some sort of system of global governance is in fact emerging (Prakash and
Hart 1999). This does not constitute the equivalent of world government. On
the one hand, the underlying structures of international regimes, institutions
and processes are still highly intergovernmental. They are set up by states,
their decisionmaking members are appointed by states, their voting arrange-
ments most of the time reflect the relative power of states – often as deter-
mined by funding arrangements which give sometimes disproportionate
power to the largest donor governments – and governments are often not
bound by their decisions and have at least some sort of powers of veto and/or
are able to dilute and avoid complying with institutional decisions. On the
other hand, nevertheless, the crystallization of new formal and informal proc-
esses is widely seen to enable the development of cooperative arrangements
that are (a) not as subject to defection as in the case of direct intergovernmen-
tal relations, (b) not as dominated by purely national interests as unmediated
foreign policymaking processes are, and (c) not as dependent on self-defense
and self-help as neorealist unit actors would be.
In some cases, institutionalized processes have become relatively inde-
pendent from the control of states, especially where autonomous legal proc-
esses give decisionmakers formal insulation from governments. Probably the
most advanced of these regimes is the World Trade Organization’s Dispute
Settlement Mechanism. Of course, even here there are limitations. Only
member states have legal standing to bring actions against other states for
violating the requirements of membership by imposing trade protection
measures, and there is no process for directly compelling compliance with the
decisions of WTO panels – the only sanction is to permit the injured party or
parties to impose retaliatory measures. However, outside groups and organi-
zations are widely consulted in the dispute settlement process – for example,
some international organizations have formal observer status – and compli-
ance can usually be negotiated rather than imposed, often before a formal ad-
judication is reached (Wolfe 2005). The clamor of states to join the WTO be-
yond the original 123 who participated in the Uruguay Round negotiations
indicates that there is a strong consensus among the overwhelming majority
of states that the benefits of membership and compliance with the rules sig-
nificantly outweigh the costs.

198 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
In contrast, most international regimes are less inclusive, more con-
strained by member governments, and/or much narrower in their remits.
States often engage in “venue shopping” or “forum shopping” to find the or-
ganization they think will most likely support their national position. But the
fact that they participate in such processes on a regular basis and formulate
strategies and tactics around such international and transnational “rules of the
game” is a strong indicator that states themselves generally act to reinforce
rather than to undermine the process, sometimes called “pooling sover-
eignty”. The development of international regimes is often seen as having
reached some sort of “critical mass” towards developing a more coherent
form of global governance with significant supranational potential, at least in
specific, but often structurally important, issue-areas. The main variable pro-
pelling this process is usually seen to be the nature of the policy issues and
challenges that face both states and international organizations today – chal-
lenges like global economic growth, climate change and pollution, cross-
border civil and insurgent wars, increasing relative inequality, and the grow-
ing public salience of poverty and uneven development, not to mention a
range of significant issues concerning particular transnationally networked
economic sectors, cross-cutting transportation and infrastructure issues, tech-
nological changes with global implications such as governing the internet,
and the like. The enmeshing of public and private sector organizations, espe-
cially in issue-areas requiring international regulation, further reinforces the
formal and informal roles of international regimes, not to mention regional
organizations including the semi-sovereign European Union, has taken re-
gime development and institutionalization to a very high level on a range of
issues, rules and practices. (However, other regional organizations have
proved much weaker and more internally conflict-prone.)
These characteristics of a wide range of international regimes are there-
fore widely thought to be leading to ever-increasing potential “absolute
gains” for participating actors, rather than the zero-sum “relative gains” of
autonomous nation-states pursuing their national interests in the traditional
way (Keohane 1984). In other words, new if still embryonic forms of transna-
tional quasi-authority are emerging that are increasingly rooted in cross-
cutting, post-national forms of legitimacy that are less dependent upon na-
tional structures of accountability. However, operating in such a changing
world is also leading to new problems of management and control, what Lake
has called “the privatization of governance” (Lake 1999; Kahler and Lake
2003) and the increasing importance of “private authority” in international af-
fairs (Cutler et al. 1999; Ronit and Schneider 2000; Hall and Biersteker
2003). Institutions and processes of global governance do not, of course, have
the direct sanctioning power that has been at the core of state development
and power in the modern era, not to mention their lack of legitimacy. Never-

The Political Sociology of Power 199
theless, the inside/outside distinction is being increasingly, and systemati-
cally, transgressed in many significant ways, and states themselves are being
enmeshed in transnational webs of power.
In terms of the second dimension, the goals of social, political and eco-
nomic actors increasingly reflect social, economic and political values other
than mere national defense, the pursuit of national interests or the position of
the state in an international pecking order as determined by relations of force
and balances of power. In particular, the increasing integration of transna-
tional economic markets has led to the emergence of cross-border interest
groups, both formal and informal, including groups representing such eco-
nomic or “sectional” interests as multinational corporations; financial market
actors, banks, accountants, auditors, investors, bondholders, and today social
groups affected by the US subprime mortgage crisis; coalitions of farmers,
small businesses and the like affected by the need to operate in global mar-
kets; and even trade unions and other social groups affected by global eco-
nomic change (Cerny 2010a). Furthermore, international awareness of and
concern about issues of social justice, poverty and the power of abusive
and/or corrupt elites have led to the rapid growth of “value” groups (Key
1953) or “advocacy networks” (Keck and Sikkink 1998), now widely re-
ferred to as “global civil society”, often with close relationships with more
socially-oriented international regimes.
Among the most potent themes of global civil society groups are human
rights and human security. These groups have been successfully redefining
two of the most important social and political issue-areas of the modern
world for the traditional legitimation of nation-states themselves – stemming
from the Enlightenment – as having a primordially international and even
global dimension. Human rights are now seen as inherently international and
the “responsibility to protect” civilians is increasingly salient. Thus the very
concept of security has made a qualitative leap beyond the rather crude and
often stalemated 20th century notion of “collective security” represented by
the League of Nations and the United Nations. At the forefront some of the
most significant of these changes have been environmental groups, not only
transcending the nation-state but calling for global solutions to deal with a
growing, imperative crisis. Cross-cutting forms of power and influence are
therefore being used more and more to pursue goals of fairness (Kapstein
2006), transnational economic regulation (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004),
“green” environmental policy (Kütting 2004), human rights, multicultural-
ism, corporate governance (Gourevitch and Shinn 2005), criminal behaviour
by governments (the International Criminal Court), the excessive use of force
(the Ottawa Convention on the banning of landmines), and many others, in-
cluding democratization. The pursuit of social justice and even social and
economic redistribution now requires the linking of local, national, regional

200 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
and international interest and value groups across borders and the building of
transnational coalitions (Tarrow 2005).
In terms of the third dimension, in turn, power is clearly increasingly be-
ing organized in cross-cutting, transnational ways. Transnational circuits of
power are increasingly organizing around sectors and issue-areas rather than
around holistic national interests. In economic sectors characterized by the
growing significance of multinational or transnational corporations, the abil-
ity of these corporations to coordinate their own actions across borders –
whether in pressing for regulatory changes, playing off tax jurisdictions, etc.
– is just the tip of the iceberg. Even small firms that seem ostensibly “local”
are not immune, being dependent upon “foreign” raw materials, export mar-
kets, investment finance, migrant labor and the like, and increasingly both
form parts of wider networks and coordinate their actions. Even the organiza-
tion of the world of work – once embedded in the nation-state based Fordist
factory system – increasingly depends upon flexible, complex transnational
economic activities and circuits of political-economic power. As a result, or-
dinary people are becoming enmeshed in international production processes,
technological developments, markets, and consumer preferences (Hobson
and Seabrooke 2007).
Less formal networks and more formal interaction among firms, “private
regimes”, “alliance capitalism”, and the ability of non-state actors in general
to develop a range of formal and informal interconnections have led to sig-
nificant degrees of policy convergence both across states and in terms of
shaping the evolution of global governance more broadly (Higgott, Underhill
and Bieler 1999). The linking of financial markets and institutions across
borders has led to far-reaching changes in market organization, including
cross-border mergers and convergence of practices (Underhill, Blom and
Mügge 2010). Financial crises have played a large part in catalyzing these
organizational changes, especially since 2007. Significant issue-areas such as
the organization of financial markets, accountancy, auditing and corporate
governance have led to ongoing negotiation processes among firms, private
sector organizations representing particular industrial, financial and commer-
cial sectors, as well as governments and international regimes (Mügge 2006,
2010). Not only have government agencies redefined their aims and objec-
tives in the light of transnational experience – interacting increasingly
through “transgovernmental networks” among governmental agencies and
public/private policy communities (Slaughter 2004) – but value-oriented as
well as sectoral pressure groups organized across borders have, as noted
above, also come to the fore in a number of key issue-areas such as the at-
tempt to expand “corporate social responsibility” agreements and standards
(Lipschutz 2005). Thus, the organization of power is increasingly horizon-
tally stratified according to issue-area. Indeed the “splintered state” (Machin

The Political Sociology of Power 201
and Wright 1985) or “disaggregated state” (Slaughter 2004) is itself charac-
terized by horizontal cross-border power relationships.
The fourth dimension – the use of force and violence – has also under-
gone fundamental change (Cerny 2000a). The end of the Cold War did not
result so much from the breakdown of a particular balance of power as from
the increasing ineffectiveness of interstate balances of power generally to
regulate the international system. This change has entailed not merely the re-
placement of interstate competition for military security by new forms of in-
terstate competition, e.g. for “economic security” or even what Nye has
called “soft power”, which is merely a mode of projecting traditional nation-
state forms of power by different means (see below). Rather it involves a
much more far-reaching realization that security based on the simple interac-
tion of unitary nation-states itself is becoming a cause of even greater insecu-
rity. This risk is represented not only from above by a general threat of un-
controllable nuclear annihilation – the core problematic of the bipolar balance
of the Cold War itself – but also from below, by the rise of civil wars, tribal
and religious conflicts, terrorism, civil violence in developed countries, the
international drugs trade, state collapse, etc.
The provision of security itself as a public good – the very raison d'être
of the Westphalian states system – can no longer be guaranteed by the system
of states. Changing payoff matrices are creating a range of incentives for
players, especially non-state players, to defect from the states system itself
unless restrained from doing so by the constraints of complex interdepend-
ence. Attempts to provide international and domestic security through the
state and the states system are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Such at-
tempts both lead to increasing “imperial overstretch” and provoke severe
backlashes at both local and transnational levels – what has been called
“blowback” (Johnson 2004) – creating a double bind for states seeking to ex-
ercise traditional forms of power. These backlashes interact with economic
and social processes of complex globalization to create overlapping and
competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities,
and new sources of endemic low-level conflict.
A combination of economic interpenetration and low-level conflict –
along with the post-Vietnam “body bag syndrome” in the most powerful
countries (including the United States in the wake of the Iraq War), leading to
popular revulsion at more ineffective forms of state-based military action –
are taking over the kind of systemic regulatory role played by interstate con-
flict and competition in the Westphalian system. These factors increasingly
constrain and counteract traditional forms of power projection – without,
however, replacing them with an effective mechanism for resolving the prob-
lems of ethnic conflict, state failure, local or regional economic crises, etc., in
the developing world. “New wars” and low-level conflicts can escape or un-

202 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
dermine the constraints of balances of power, big power intervention, U.N.
peacekeeping and formal international borders. Emerging mechanisms of
stabilization are therefore highly uneven, riddled with structural tensions, and
suboptimal in terms of effective governance, although in quite different ways
from traditional balances of power and the old inter-state “security dilemma”.
The future of military force as the bottom line of power is thus being
questioned once again, but in a rather different way from earlier forms of ex-
tra-governmental pacifism and antiwar protest. As noted above, a rather dif-
ferent model of the pursuit of power by states themselves has potentially been
emerging as the result of long term change in and experience of international
war and power relations over the past 50-100 years. In particular, there has
been a transformation in European attitudes and foreign policy across the
board as the result of having been the cradle of two devastating world wars
and the geographical epicentre of the Cold War. This transformation involves
a shift toward a combination of demilitarization and multilateralism – rein-
forced by the regionalism of the European Union and primordially rooted in
the experiences of European nation-states (Sheehan 2008; Moravcsik 2007) –
along with what has been called “civilianization”. In particular, Europe’s
identity as a new model “civilian superpower” (Galtung 1973), reflected not
only in the foreign policies of Germany and other states but also in the atti-
tudes of elites and mass publics (Harnisch and Maull 2001), is an expression
of a widespread normative perspective that the use of force in international
relations is just as immoral and counterproductive as the use of force by pri-
vate actors domestically. The use of traditional forms of power by states is
becoming increasingly delegitimized. The drive for American hegemony and
empire that was represented by the George W. Bush Administration may
prove to be the “last hurrah” for the use of traditional state-based methods of
power and force in the international arena.
From “Hard” to “Soft” Power?
Joseph Nye is famous for coining one of the most significant terms in 21st
century political and international policy discourse: “soft power” (Nye 2004,
2011). Today it appears in newspapers and magazines, on television, in
speeches and documents by public officials and policymakers from Washing-
ton to Beijing, and, of course, in academic debates about the nature of power
itself, not only for understanding the changing world system, but also for pre-
scribing a new approach for foreign policymakers, especially in the United
States. Soft power as a concept is immensely appealing, especially to a range
of critics of dominant types of 20th century Realist and Neorealist approaches

The Political Sociology of Power 203
to politics and international relations. Nevertheless, even “soft” or “cosmo-
politan” power theorists like Nye and Gallarotti see a key role for hard
power, both in the absence or failure of soft power resources and/or in some
sort of orchestrated “smart power” strategy in which both carrots and sticks
are used alongside what Nye calls “attraction” and Gallarotti calls “endear-
ment” (Gallarotti 2010). Indeed, both authors emphasise that it is crucial to
use both hard and soft power in strategic and, especially, tactical tandem. In
this context, economic power is rightly seen not merely as structural power or
as a positive-sum, soft power game, as is so often the case with other writers,
but also as having key hard power elements, involving threats and coercion
as well as growth and development. Furthermore, Nye combines economic
power with military power in a sort of soft version based on evolving norms
of “protection” and “assistance”.
However, soft power – even in its amalgamation with hard power into
smart power – remains vague and contested. In the first place, soft power is ex-
tremely complex as an instrument or power exercise or power projection. It in-
habits a life-world that is difficult, perhaps impossible in many circumstances,
to manipulate. It inheres in social bonds, socialisation, everyday perceptions,
culture and discourse – all often quite difficult to define, much less control.
“Attraction” and “endearment” are essentially emotional and psychological at-
titudes and responses. Policymakers can follow them and try to capture them,
but they do not own or control them. Foreign policy is at the mercy of sociol-
ogy and anthropology, not the other way round. Attempts to conceptualize soft
power in the context of traditional, state-centric notions of power (see Kearn
2011) are thus highly problematic. Second, such imagery is often vague and in-
effable. To try to capture and operationalize it in concrete policy terms can be
extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. Third, attempts to do so can be
counterproductive if seen as misinterpreted or propagandistic. Backlashes can
be the result, negating the policies. And finally, “beauty is in the eye of the be-
holder”. Soft power depends not on top-down imposition but on bottom-up
spontaneity on the part of the so-called “target(s)”.
Nevertheless, soft power and smart power are increasingly important in to-
day’s world. The role of hard power is diminishing:
• the advent of nuclear weaponry has made all-out warfare between major
powers unthinkable;
• developing technologies of warfare give the advantage to small, cheap
and nasty weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that can
negate many if not all of the high-tech weaponry of Donald Rumsfeld’s
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA);
• local populations resent outsiders and can easily be mobilised to oppose
intervention;

204 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
• collateral damage, especially civilian deaths, create new resentments and
hatreds;
• religious, ethnic and other bonds cannot easily be integrated into stable
pluralistic political processes;
• democracy cannot be imposed from the outside by force;
• the spread of information sources and networks enables opponents to con-
trol the images of what is happening better than imposed military forces;
• economic growth, social development and modernisation in general are
undermined by violence and destruction, raising the costs of counterin-
surgency strategies and tactics to unacceptable levels; and
• support from home populations cannot be taken for granted or easily mo-
bilised except in the immediate aftermath of a widely perceived crisis –
the significance of what in the Vietnam era was called the “body bag
syndrome”.
Backlashes of all sorts of kinds against aggressive or assertive foreign poli-
cies are growing, from both outside and inside – what Gallarotti calls the
“power curse” (Gallarotti 2009).
Along with the structural and historically evolving constraints on the use
of hard power, however, the legitimacy and credibility of a state’s foreign
policy increasingly depend on soft power. As Gallarotti writes: “It has be-
come and is continuing to become a ‘softer world’” (Gallarotti 2010: 38). Po-
litical legitimacy derives from economic growth, not from divine right or tra-
ditional elite domination. And that legitimacy, in turn, derives from liberal
democracy. Of course, democratic transitions can be highly problematic, es-
pecially where there is no peaceful alternation between “government” and
“opposition” (Ionescu and de Madariaga 1968) and where winners seek to
exclude and even destroy losers, as in the Iraqi notion of sahel (Wong 2007).
Nevertheless, since the late 19th century, democracy has been on an uneven
but ineluctable trajectory to ideological and institutional hegemony. Once
democratic forms have been tasted, even if they have failed, people remem-
ber having had a say in their governments and want it back, and people who
do not have it generally wish they did. The postwar settlement in Western
Europe was not merely the result of the victory of the Allied Powers, but of
socialisation and the evolution of popular attitudes. The same can be seen,
however unevenly, in developing countries today, for example in the Jasmine
Revolution in Tunisia.
Furthermore, the realisation that economic growth and eventual prosper-
ity is possible has created what Gallarotti elsewhere has called the “prosper-
ous society” (Gallarotti 2000). Although for most of the 20th century the
quest for development, growth and prosperity was divided among alternative
ideological pathways – capitalism, fascism and communism – the basic truth

The Political Sociology of Power 205
of Fukuyama’s “end of history” (1992) was that only capitalism has “deliv-
ered”. Fascistic quasi-capitalism went up in flames in the 1940s and Soviet
Communism collapsed from inside in 1989. Of course, democratic capitalism
has not solved a whole series of problems such as inequality, and the concept
of “neoliberalism” remains highly controversial in a world where the spread
of capitalism has had serious downsides in particular places and circum-
stances. Nevertheless, the only serious alternative to neoliberalism as it has
evolved over time (Cerny 2008a) is something generally along the lines of
the “Beijing Consensus” (Halper 2010), with a modified authoritarianism
promoting gradual marketisation and pluralisation of the economy and, to a
limited extent, of society. As Nye points out in several sections of The Future
of Power, China’s soft power is the main challenger in today’s world to the
soft (and perhaps also, to some extent, hard) power of the United States.
In this context, “smart power” is becoming less and less the orchestration
of hard and soft power and more fundamentally soft in nature. Nye empha-
sizes the concept of “co-optive power” – the ability of policymakers to win
over other states’ policymakers, and of course mass publics too, to share the
preferences of the state which is attempting to change other states’ behav-
iours. The instruments of co-optive power are many, varied and complex,
and, as pointed out above (and see below), highly problematic to actually use
in any coherent way. But they are “where it’s at”. There is a growing impera-
tive to attempt to use soft power and, of course, smart power, or else lose out.
Hard power needs to take the ultimately more limited form of protection,
however difficult that can be – as attested by the constraints experienced by
various attempts at “humanitarian intervention” in recent years – and, more
importantly, assistance, which overlaps into the soft power of development
aid and the like. Attraction is increasingly crucial. Without it, other forces of
attraction such as localism, ethnic cleavages, religious identities – especially
newly discovered fundamentalisms – will prove more powerful. If you can-
not co-opt others, your foreign policy will ultimately fail.
But then comes the real problem, which is the other face of the hard
power dilemmas enumerated above in this review. How do you do it? Nye
certainly believes it can be done. He calls his approach “liberal realism”. In
his concluding chapter (Nye 2011), he outlines “An American Smart Power
Strategy” in five steps. The first step is to have a thoroughgoing and clear re-
view of objectives. In particular, in conceptual terms, there is the need to up-
grade the role of “values” and not just focus on national “interests”. In this
particular case, the focus should be on the provision of public goods to the in-
ternational system. He specifically mentions six categories. The first three are
a reprise of Britain’s 19th century hegemonic legacy: the maintenance of a
balance of power; an open economic system; and the preservation of an in-
ternational “commons”, including seas. The other three are more recent lega-

206 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
cies: support for international regimes and institutions; international devel-
opment; and playing the role of a mediator and convenor of coalitions. All
desirable things to aim for, of course.
The second step is more straightforward and concrete in principle – to
identify and “inventory” the resources available to policymakers, both in the
way of constraints and opportunities – but fearfully complex in practice.
These include a careful tally of military strengths and weaknesses, but also a
pragmatic understanding of where the opposition will come from; the eco-
nomic position in a changing world; and the underlying possibilities of soft
power – i.e., what types of “attraction” can be called upon and used by poli-
cymakers. However, given that earlier in the book Nye has critiqued the very
concept of “resources”, such an inventory is highly problematic from the
start. In particular, soft power may be a resource, but how can it be used by
policymakers? I will deal with this question later.
The third step is even more problematic – “an assessment of the re-
sources and preferences of the targets of attempts at influence”, i.e. under-
standing attitudes and, in particular, examining the roles of non-state actors in
other countries. Misunderstandings and misperceptions of this sort are many
and inevitable, as history shows. The fourth step is essential – whether to
choose “command power” or “co-optive power” in different situations, ad-
justing tactics to fit the circumstances. This is perhaps the most challenging
step, and I will return to it below. The fifth step is to try to assess – or guess –
what the outcomes of different tactics would be. It is necessary for American
policymakers to realise that: “The number one power does not have to man
every boundary and be strong everywhere” (2011: 227). Nye explicitly re-
turns to the model of the Eisenhower Administration and argues for “a return
to traditional prudence” (2011: 228).
All of this seems extremely sensible in ideal type policymaking terms,
given the constraints and opportunities of the current international situation.
However, it underplays two crucial factors. The first, which Nye stresses but
in my view overestimates, is the capacity of governments in general and the
United States government in particular to develop the critical and coordinat-
ing capacities to undertake this project. Policymakers may agree on the desir-
ability of such a soft power dominated strategy, but the constraints are huge.
As Nye himself writes, “…many official instruments of soft power – public
diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disas-
ter relief, military-to-military contacts – are scattered around the government,
and there is no overarching strategy or budget [emphasis added] that even
tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching smart power
strategy” (2011: 226). Neither is there a viable conception of how to relate to
non-state actors, especially as NGOs are far more trusted than governments
(much less, business, banks or the media) today (Financial Times, 25 January

The Political Sociology of Power 207
2011). Nye sees the possibility of “network power” – using the United States’
key position in a wide range of networks – as providing the potential leverage
for continuing clout. However, actors in those networks, including for exam-
ple transnationalised financial markets, often are in a position to manipulate
and make end runs around the United States government (and other govern-
ments too, of course) for their own purposes, rather than the other way round
(Cerny 2011).
Furthermore, the United States in particular, as I have argued for many
years, increasingly suffers from having an outdated political system, domi-
nated by “checks and balances”, chronic gridlock, multiple competing agen-
cies (including at state level), a dysfunctional party system and a populist,
backlash dominated mass politics. The American political system is shot
through with “political entropy” (Cerny 1989), making coherent policymak-
ing extremely difficult, especially on an everyday basis. To expect the United
States to develop a coherent smart power strategy and to implement it sys-
tematically may be hoping too much. Of course, this sort of constraint applies
to other major “powers” too. The European Union suffers dramatically at
times from the fact that it is only semi-sovereign and that the ultimate deci-
sionmakers are nation-state actors with competing interests. It is quite an
achievement for the EU to have become as effective as it has been, given
these constraints. In fact, much of the EU’s success has come from a particu-
lar kind of soft power, or reverse hard power – the evolution of its member
states from the ultimate hard power states that had created two world wars
into what have been called “civilian states” (Sheehan 2008). Europe’s inad-
vertent soft power threatens no-one, but the soft power of European civilisa-
tion, the retreat from empire in the middle of the 20th century, and its eco-
nomic success (despite the current sovereign debt crisis) have made it into a
model for the rest of the world. China, for all its strengths, is still largely an
underdeveloped country in many ways and is likely to face both growing in-
ternal crises as its economy expands and external crises as its regional mili-
tary-political role evolves.
In other words, the problem of the future of power is not one that prom-
ises to maintain or reinforce the role of states as such in a states based sys-
tem. Nye talks about “power diffusion”, but in the last analysis he sees this as
something that needs to be controlled by the US. His main chapter on this is
about “cyberpower”, which despite its positive elements in diffusing power,
is seen as primarily a threat to effective foreign policymaking. But the notion
that non-state or cross-border webs of power – including Slaughter’s “trans-
governmental networks” – may be increasingly challenging the sovereign
autonomy of states per se, while given occasional lip service, is relegated to
the background in the sort of policy oriented terms in which Nye thinks. Thus
although some commentators might think Nye provides a basis for a strategic

208 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
restoration of American influence, even a new, rejigged, soft power based
American hegemony, his “liberal realist” approach is ultimately old wine in
new bottles.
Of course, better to have a nicey-nicey United States pursuing interna-
tional public goods than a Dick Cheney style “New American Century”. But
if those public goods are difficult to attain – as financial regulatory conver-
gence is difficult to attain despite the Dodd-Frank Act (Acharya, et al. 2010)
and the advent of the G20 and the Financial Stability Board – and if the veto
power of the Tea Party controls the domestic shots, then not only is an effec-
tive American “soft power” strategy unviable, it may not be normatively
good for the rest of the world – or even for itself. John Winthrop’s (and
Ronald Reagan’s) “shining city upon a hill”, the ultimate basis for American
soft power attraction and endearment, may not be so shiny or so “attractive”
in the future. To paraphrase Dean Acheson, the United States has lost an (in-
formal) empire but has not yet found a role. Nye’s smart power strategy is
unlikely to be enough for America to reinvent one as power in the future
drains away from the states system itself. Power in Nye’s analysis has, for
example, little room for Foucault’s decentralised and fragmented “circuits of
power” (Foucault 1980). With hindsight, then, it may well be too late to re-
capture American hegemony, despite our new understanding of soft power.
After all, in Hegel’s words: “Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of
Minerva spread its wings and fly.”
Conclusion: Globalization and the Transformation of
Power
The role of state power as the crucial building-block of the international sys-
tem is being undermined and transformed by fundamental structural shifts
that are empowering a wider range of actors and enmeshing states in complex
“webs of power.” While this new power structure presents serious new chal-
lenges for the stability of world politics, they are fundamentally different
from the challenges presented in the international system of the 19th and 20th
centuries. They involve, in particular, an increased focus on globally inter-
connected economic growth and development in a more open world econ-
omy, the transnationalization of social bonds, the pluralization and flexibili-
zation of ideology, a “civilianization” of world politics, and an uneven but
unremitting shift toward pluralization and democratization in the structure
and operation of political institutions and processes.
The key to understanding the role of state power in the 17th-20th centuries
was the multifunctionality of the state itself. In a series of policy arenas or is-

The Political Sociology of Power 209
sue-areas “state actors” could coordinate their actions through “institutional
economies of scale”. The state appeared to be the “natural” unit of politics.
Central among these arenas were:
• War and violence (Weber’s “monopoly of legitimate violence”), espe-
cially the industrialization of warfare;
• Economic policy and Second Industrial Revolution (“Fordist”) industrial
organization and technology;
• Social inclusion, cultural bonds, common welfare (“peasants into
Frenchmen”);
• Ideology (economic liberalism, socialism, etc., co-opted into national-
ism); and
• Institutional organization and accountability (the domestic “political sys-
tem”).
However, all of these have begun to shift in deep structural ways.
In the first place, then, the era of industrial warfare between states (from
Clausewitz and “total war” to nuclear deterrence) is over. Civil wars, transna-
tional ethnic and religious wars, guerilla wars, etc., are simply quagmires for
external interventionist states. The Vietnam-style “body bag syndrome” op-
erates at home. Technological change reinforces this shift, with big weapons
systems unfit for purpose; small-scale technology like IEDs and robots can
be used most effectively by small groups. The future for effectiveness of na-
tion-states themselves lies with becoming multilateralist “civilian states”, i.e.
in developing more complex forms of interaction and cooperation. At the
same time, most violence today concerns struggles for (and against) greater
participation in political processes and for more comprehensive economic
development – the “revolution of rising expectations” – rather than “realist”
struggles for national power in a zero-sum international system.
Second, international production chains, multinational corporations, in-
formation and communications technology, and the transnationalization of
markets increasingly limits states in their use of both macroeconomic and
microeconomic policy. The “Competition State” – prioritizing international
competitiveness – and the “Regulatory State” replace most direct interven-
tion (Cerny 2000c, 2010b). Indeed, the economic role of the state today is to
support activities that can be effective in a global context. “Neoliberalism”
is not so much a form of laissez faire capitalism as one of pro-competitive
regulation in a more open world political economy, as presaged by the Or-
doliberals of the 1930s and 1940s (Foucault 2008). However, “compensating
losers” from globalization becomes increasingly important, requiring the
maintenance of a more targeted welfare state and micro-interventionist in-
dustrial policy – what I have called “social” and “managed” neoliberalism
(Cerny 2008) – to counteract domestic backlashes and market failures. At

210 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
the same time, political and bureaucratic actors have learned – up to a point
– how to deal with financial crises without letting them turn into new de-
pressions (although they are still learning, and it is a controversial process).
“Complex interdependence” (Keohane and Nye 1977) is increasingly a fact
on the ground.
Third, the character of social bonds is also changing. Migration, diasporas,
and the “fragmegration” (Rosenau 1997) of McLuhan’s “global village” are
leading to a world characterized by a “majority of minorities” rather than con-
tainerized, pseudo-natural “national culture societies” (Znaniecki 1952). Inter-
est groups are increasingly crosscutting (although we often underestimate how
they always have been: Kotkin 1992); the capacity to coordinate their activities
across different levels of governance and geographical areas is what gives them
“clout”. Multiculturalism – in the inclusive rather than the “enclave” sense – is
messy and creates conflict as well as new identities, but it also creates greater
cross-cultural awareness and increases the possibilities for peaceful coexis-
tence. Although transnational “civil society” is weak, it is increasingly per-
ceived as playing a core role in this process. We may not be heading toward a
“global village”, but a multi-level, multi-nodal system of crosscutting social
bonds and the awareness of their increasing ubiquity is emerging.
Fourth, ideologies are being transformed too. Nationalism is challenged
from both above and below, partly by awareness of “globalization” and a
consciousness of wider political, social and economic processes I have else-
where called raison du monde (Cerny 2010a), and partly by populist and es-
pecially pro-democratic backlashes such as the recent Jasmine Revolution in
Tunisia. “Nations” as ideal-type sociological units, always problematic in
practice – the nation-state has always been an unfinished political project in a
more complex world – have become increasingly artificial political con-
structs unsuited to 21st century realities. Nationalism is no longer just about
the nation-state as such, but is hijacked domestically by radical subnational
movements that paradoxically undermine the state, while wider social
movements become transnationalized. At the same time, neoliberalism is be-
coming an increasingly pluralized and flexible paradigm, and its emphasis on
openness and economic growth is being appropriated in a range of different
circumstances by a growing number of interest and value groups.
Finally, the 21st century is a century of institutional pluralization. Multi-
level governance, the proliferation of international regimes, attempts to coordi-
nate policy through bodies like the G20 (however redundant and powerless),
regional institutions, sub-state bodies (“the re-scaling of statehood”: Brenner
2004), and the increasing density of “transgovernmental networks” (Keohane
and Nye 1977; Slaughter 2004) – all enmesh the state in webs of power that
can lead to policy incoherence and political gridlock, yet require imaginative
rebuilding. At one level, competing institutions and overlapping jurisdictions

The Political Sociology of Power 211
dominate – what has been called “neomedievalism” (Cerny 1998). At the same
time, however, institutional practices and political processes are becoming
more and more inextricably intertwined across borders, and a significant
amount of convergence is emerging, sometimes planned but often inadvertent,
in response to increasingly transnational crises and challenges.
In the last analysis, then, a whole range of political, sociological and
economic “spaces” have opened up that undermine the multifunctionality and
centrality of the nation-state and fundamentally transform political power it-
self. These shifts are particularly important insofar as attempts by nation-
states possessing traditional economic and military “capabilities” – especially
so-called “hegemons” – are less and less able to translate those capabilities
into real power over and/or power to (Cerny 2006b). Even traditionally
“powerful” states thus face the possibility of growing “entanglement” rather
than the capacity to effectively pursue national interests – themselves more
problematic to define and implement in the first place. The downside is that
crosscutting problems and challenges are more complex and some may be
endemic, including ethnic conflict, cross-border wars, and the destabilization
of pseudo-nationalistic authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes. How-
ever, the upside is that a growing awareness of the global/transnational di-
mension of these issues is crystallizing, along with more flexible and cross-
cutting political processes and a wider (if still just emerging) range of instru-
ments to respond to these challenges. New world wars between states or even
all-encompassing Cold Wars are virtually impossible. Alain Minc has re-
ferred to this condition as one of “durable disorder” (Minc 1993). Neverthe-
less, within limits, the traditional international predominance of power over
may be tempered by the increased prospects for positive power to in crucial
issue-areas, especially those with transnational or global scope.
Power at the international level has traditionally been seen as constituting
the underlying structural dynamic of the international system – beyond and
outside the bounds of domestically rooted relationships of “friendship” and
“justice”, and ultimately manifested in the real or latent use of force, i.e.
through war or the threat of war, embodied by and embedded in nation-states,
the fundamental building blocks and unit actors of international relations.
Today, a process of the reconfiguration of power cuts across state borders.
Power is increasingly embedded in new but still embryonic forms of world
politics; reflects the sort of higher normative values that domestic actors have
always pursued at home (Rothman 2011); is shaped by transnational interests
and global civil society rather than interstate conflict; is organized through
transnational and transgovernmental networks rather than unified foreign pol-
icy elites and military command structures; and is informed by a growing
sense that the use of force is becoming increasingly counterproductive in an
international system characterized by complex interdependence – and indeed,

212 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
that international power must be “civilianized” and domesticated, less about
power over and more about power to, in order to be both effective and le-
gitimate in a globalizing world.
References
Acharya, V.V., Cooley, T.F., Richardson, M.P. and Walter, I., eds. 2010. Regulating
Wall Street: the Dodd-Frank Act and the new architecture of global finance. Ho-
boken, New Jersey: Wiley.
Brenner, N., 2004. New state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of state-
hood. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brenner, N., Jessop, B., Jones, M. and MacLeod, G., eds. 2003. State/space: a reader.
Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Bull, H., 1977. The anarchical society: a study in world politics. Basingstoke: Mac-
millan.
Castells, M., 1996. The rise of the network society. Oxford and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
Cerny, P. G., 1989. Political entropy and American decline. Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 18(1), 47-63.
Cerny, P. G., 1998. Neomedievalism, civil wars and the new security dilemma: glob-
alization as durable disorder. Civil Wars, 1(1), 36-64.
Cerny, P. G., 2000a. The new security dilemma: divisibility, defection and disorder in
the global era. Review of International Studies, 26(4), 623-646.
Cerny, P. G., 2000b. Globalization and the disarticulation of political power: toward a
new middle ages? In: H. Goverde, P.G. Cerny, M. Haugaard and H.H. Lentner,
eds. Power in contemporary politics: theories, practices, globalizations. London:
Sage.
Cerny, P. G., 2000c. Restructuring the political arena: globalization and the paradoxes
of the competition state. In: R. D. Germain, ed. Globalization and Its critics: per-
spectives from political economy. London: Macmillan.
Cerny, P. G., 2006a. Plurality, pluralism, and power: elements of pluralist analysis in
an age of globalization. In: R. Eisfeld, ed. Pluralism: developments in the theory
and practice of democracy. Opladen: Barbara Budrich.
Cerny, P. G., 2006b. Dilemmas of operationalizing hegemony. In: M. Haugaard and
H. H. Lentner, eds. Hegemony and power: consensus and coercion in contempo-
rary politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books on behalf of the International Po-
litical Science Association, Research Committee No. 36 (Political Power).
Cerny, P. G., 2008a. Embedding neoliberalism: the evolution of a hegemonic para-
digm. Journal of International Trade and Diplomacy, 2(1), 1-46.
Cerny, P. G., 2008b. Neoliberalism and place: deconstructing and reconstructing bor-
ders. In: B. Arts, H. van Houtum and A. Lagendijk, eds. State, place, governance:
shifts in territoriality, governmentality and policy practices. Berlin: Springer.
Cerny, P. G., 2010a. Rethinking world politics: a theory of transnational neoplural-
ism. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Political Sociology of Power 213
Cerny, P. G., 2010b. The competition state today: from raison d’état to raison du
monde. Policy Studies, 4(1), 5-21
Cerny, P. G., 2011. Saving capitalism from the capitalists? Financial regulation after
the crash. St. Antony’s International Review, 7(1) (in press).
Cutler, A. C., Haufler, V. and Porter, T., eds. 1999. Private authority and interna-
tional affairs. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Foucault, M., 1981. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-
1977. C. Gordon, ed. New York: Longman.
Foucault, M., 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-
1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fukuyama, F. 1992. The end of history and the last man. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Gallarotti, G. M., 2000. The advent of the prosperous society: the rise of the guardian
state and structural change in the world economy. Review of International Politi-
cal Economy, 7(1), 1-52.
Gallarotti, G. M., 2009. The power curse: influence and illusion in world politics.
Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner.
Gallarotti, G. M., 2010. Cosmopolitan power in international relations: a synthesis of
realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism. Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Galtung, J., 1973. The European community: a superpower in the making. London:
HarperCollins.
Gill, S., 2003). Power and resistance in the new world order. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Gill, S. and Law, D., 1987. The global political economy: perspectives, problems and
policies. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Gills, B. K., ed. 2000. Globalization and the politics of resistance. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Gills, B. K., ed. 2010b. Globalization in crisis. London: Routledge.
Gourevitch, P. A. and Schinn, J., eds. 2005. Political power and corporate control:
the new global politics of corporate governance. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Hall, R. B. and Bierstecker, T. J., eds. 2003. The emergence of private authority in
global governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halper, S., 2010. The Beijing consensus: how China’s authoritarian model will domi-
nate the Twenty-First century. New York: Basic Books.
Halperin, S., 2007. ‘Horizontal’ connections and interactions in global development.
In: P. Wagner and N. Karagiannis, eds. Varieties of world-making: beyond glob-
alisation. London: Liverpool University Press.
Harnisch, S. and Maull, H. W., eds. 2001. Germany as a civilian power? The foreign
policy of the Berlin republic. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Held, D., 1995. Democracy and the global order: from the modern state to cosmopoli-
tan governance. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Herz, J. H., 1950. Idealist internationalism and the security dilemma. World Politics,
3(2), 157-80.
Higgott, R., Underhill, G.R.D. and Bieler, A., eds. 1999. Non-state actors and author-
ity in the global system. London: Routledge.

214 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Hobson, J. M. and Seabrooke, L., eds. 2007. Everyday politics of the world economy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hollis, M. and Smith, S., 1990. Explaining and understanding international relations.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hurrell, A., 2007. On global order: power, values and the constitution of interna-
tional society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ionescu, G. and de Madariaga, I., 1968. Opposition: past and present of a political in-
stitution. London: C.A. Watts.
Johnson, C., 2004. Blowback: The costs and consequences of American empire. 2nd
edition. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Jordana, J. and Levi-Faur, D. eds. 2004. The politics of regulation: institutions and
regulatory reform for the age of governance. Cheltenham, Glos.: Edward Elgar.
Kagan, R., 2003. Of paradise and power: America and Europe in the new world or-
der. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kahler, M. and Lake, D.A., eds. 2003. Governance in a global economy: political au-
thority in transition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kapstein, E.B., 2006. Economic justice in an unfair world: toward a level playing
field. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kearn, D.W., 2011. The hard truths about soft power. Journal of Political Power,
4(1), 65-85
Keck, M.E. and Sikkink, K., 1998. Activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in in-
ternational politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kennedy, P., 1987. The rise and fall of the great powers: economic change and mili-
tary conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House.
Keohane, R. O., 1984. After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political
economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J. S., 1977. Power and interdependence. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Key, V.O., 1953. Politics, parties, and pressure groups. New York: Thomas Y. Cro-
well.
Kotkin, J., 1992. Tribes: how race, religion and identity determine success in the new
global economy. New York: Random House.
Kütting, G., 2004. Globalization and the environment: greening global political
economy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Lake, D.A., 1999. Global governance: a relational contracting approach. In: A.
Prakash and J. A. Hart, eds. Globalization and governance. London: Routledge.
Lipschutz, R.D., 2005. Globalization, governmentality and global politics: regulation
for the rest of us?, with James K. Rowe. London: Routledge.
Little, R. 2007. The balance of power in international relations: metaphors, myths
and models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Machin, H. and Wright, V., eds. 1985. Economic policy and policy-making under the
Mitterrand presidency, 1981-1984. London: Frances Pinter.
Minc, A., 1993. Le nouveau moyen âge. Paris: Gallimard.
Moravcsik, A., 2007. Make way for the quiet superpower: the year ahead offers the
perfect chance to remake transatlantic relations. Newsweek (international edi-
tion), 31 December 2007.

The Political Sociology of Power 215
Morgenthau, H.J., 1949. Politics among nations: the struggle for power and peace.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Mügge, D., 2006. Private-public puzzles: inter-firm competition and transnational pri-
vate regulation. New Political Economy, 11(2), 177-200.
Mügge, D., 2010. Widen the market, narrow the competition: banker interests and the
making of a European capital market. Colchester, Essex: ECPR Press.
Nye, J. S. Jr., 2004. Soft power: the means to success in world politics. New York:
Public Affairs.
Nye, J. S. Jr., 2011. The future of power. New York: Public Affairs.
Pin-Fat, V., 2005. The metaphysics of the national interest and the ‘mysticism’ of the
nation state: reading Hans J. Morgenthau. Review of International Studies, 31(2),
217-236.
Prakash, A. and Hart, J.A., eds. 1999. Globalization and governance. London:
Routledge.
Putnam, R. D., 1988. Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games.
International Organization, 42(2), 427-460.
Ronit, K. and Schneider, V., eds. 2000. Private organisations in global politics. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Rosenau, J. N., 1961. Public opinion and foreign policy: an operational formulation.
New York: Random House.
Rothman, S.B., 2011. Revising the soft power concept: what are the means and
mechanisms of soft power? Journal of Political Power, 4(1), 49-64.
Rosenau, J. N., 1997. Along the domestic-foreign frontier: exploring governance in a
turbulent world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruggie, J.G., ed. 1993. Multilateralism matters: the theory and praxis of an institu-
tional form. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sassen, S., ed. 2007. Deciphering the global: its scales, spaces and subjects. London
and New York: Routledge.
Savage, C., 2007. Takeover: the return of the imperial presidency and the subversion
of American democracy. New York: Little, Brown.
Sheehan, J. J., 2008. Where have all the soldiers gone? The transformation of modern
Europe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Slaughter, A.M., 2004. A new world order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tarrow, S., 2005. The new transnational activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Walker, R.B.J., 1992. Inside/outside: international relations as political theory. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Waltz, K. N., 1979. Theory of international politics. Boston: Addison Wesley Long-
man.
Wolfe, R., 2005. See uou in Geneva? Legal (mis)representations of the trading sys-
tem. European Journal of International Relations, 11(3), 339-365.
Wong, E., 2007. Iraq’s curse: a thirst for final, crushing victory. New York Times (3
June).
Znaniecki, F., 1973. Modern nationalities: a sociological study. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press.

Chapter 8
Concluding Reflections
Kevin Ryan and Mark Haugaard
In the introduction we argued that while the concept of power unifies the
study of politics, there is no singular essence of power. Rather, power consti-
tutes a family resemblance concept. Whether identified as an asymmetrical
relationship, an act of coercion, or a process of empowerment (to name but
three examples), the study of a particular instance or manifestation of power
is inevitably part of a rich and complex tapestry whereby actions, relations,
and processes interweave. While a single thread can be pulled from the
weave for the purpose of posing discipline-specific questions, it is a mistake
to equate such threads with the essence or totality of power. However, a
multi-faceted understanding of power can enable analysts to converse across
the boundaries of their respective disciplines, and thus to identify central
questions and problems that can serve as the basis of future research.
In social and political theory, Chapter 2, we learn how the power debates
have moved from an emphasis upon decision-making and nondecision-
making to social structures and the constitution of subject identities. As we
noted in that chapter, on an empirical level it is correct to say that the consti-
tution of particular social subjects inevitably entails power over, but if we as-
sume that this is normatively reprehensible by default, then everything from
parenting to schooling becomes an insidious form of domination. Philip
Pettit’s (1997) theory of republicanism, which on a normative plane shares
much with the work of Steven Lukes discussed in Chapters 2 and 4 above,
provides an interesting perspective on this question, and one that enables us
to build on our earlier discussion and sketch the current co-coordinates of
power when viewed through the lens of social and political theory.
Pettit distinguishes freedom, as he understands it, from the idea of ‘nega-
tive’ freedom, or non-interference, which was theorised as such by Isaiah
Berlin (1958), but which Pettit traces to the historical inroads made by liberal
political thought, particularly from the late eighteenth century onwards.
Against the idea of freedom as non-interference, Pettit proposes a conception
of freedom as non-domination, which entails the absence of arbitrary inter-
ference, but not necessarily the absence of all forms of interference. For

218 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Pettit, the enforcement of laws that secure the freedoms enjoyed by citizens
may have the effect of constricting “the range and ease of undominated
choice”, but the republican apparatus of state ensures that constraints of this
kind are forced to track the interests and ideas of citizens, and thus this type
of power over does not amount to domination (Pettit, 1997: 93). Lukes seems
to agree when he argues that “there is no reason for supposing that the power-
ful always threaten, rather than sometimes advance, the interests of others”
(2005: 83), and he draws on the work of Thomas Wartenberg (1990) to sug-
gest that legislation requiring the use of seat-belts is an example of ‘benefi-
cent’ power, as is parenting, teaching, and therapy. Although paternalistic,
these asymmetries of power – configured as relationships of dependency –
are not an ‘invasion of freedom’; on the contrary, they empower the depend-
ent party (Lukes, 2005: 83-85).
By allowing for a type of power over that furthers the interests of those
over whom power is exercised, both Pettit and Lukes theorise domination as
a specific type of power over: for Pettit, to be dominated is to be at the mercy
of another who has the capacity (not necessarily exercised) to interfere with
your freedom to choose, and to do so on an arbitrary basis (1997: 52). For
Lukes, to be dominated is to be prevented from living as “your own nature
and judgment dictate” (2005: 73, 85), and for both Pettit and Lukes domina-
tion is inherently contrary to the subaltern actor’s interests (Pettit, 1997: 52
and Lukes, 2005: 86). The question of ‘interests’ thus enables both Pettit and
Lukes to split power over into two broad types, one benevolent and the other
malevolent, which in turn enables them to present the relation between free-
dom and domination as one of opposition.
The opposition between freedom and domination can be challenged from
the constitutive perspective. It could be argued that power produces and
shapes the very interests and ideas that are embodied by free citizens and
tracked by the coercive powers of the state. David Archard’s observation
concerning power exercised over children on the basis of ‘hypothetical con-
sent’ is relevant here (Archard, 2004: 80-1). This is a situation where coer-
cion is justified on the basis that the child would in fact consent if only she
understood that is was in her best interests to do so. The person or agent ex-
ercising power ‘knows’ that it is in the child’s interest, and ‘knows’ that the
child will one day come to accept and appreciate the constraints and controls
to which she is now subject. Perhaps this type of power relation is necessary
in order to ‘socialise’ the child; perhaps it will ultimately empower her. But
we should not underestimate the implications of what Archard calls ‘self-
justifying paternalism’, whereby power produces an adult who approves of
how she has been brought up (Archard, 2004: 81). Freedom is coercively de-
nied to the child on the basis that she will willingly practice a particular type
of freedom as an adult, and in this way paternalism engineers its own retro-

The Political Sociology of Power 219
spective approval. Even if this does not invalidate the idea of beneficent
power over, it certainly complicates the relationship between freedom and
domination. As pointed out by Amy Allen, “how free can we ever hope to get
from the kinds of relations of domination that are constitutive of our identi-
ties…?” (Honneth, Allen and Cooke, 2010: 159).
The challenge of the constitutive view of power raises for the domina-
tion/freedom opposition is not incontestable. If power constitutes predisposi-
tions could it not be the case that certain forms of subject positions empower,
by giving greater choices, than others? For instance, in his analysis of relig-
ion and democracy, Habermas (2008) has argued that the emergence of Axial
age monotheistic religions provided actors with universal normative perspec-
tives, which is a precondition for the absence of domination in Pettit’s sense.
Recently, Haugaard (2010) has argued that the emergence of academic disci-
plines in the 19th century created social agents who learned to view the same
referent with different signifiers, according to specific academic disciplines –
natural sciences, moral philosophy, history and so on. Being socialized into
such multiple descriptions of the world opens social agents to the possibility
that there are not singular correct interpretations of the world, which has
emancipatory potential.
Among social and political theorists, the relation between power over
and power to remains a complex and contested field of study which, as we
noted in the conclusion to Chapter 2, is fertile ground for researchers inter-
ested in combining the conflictual, consensual, and constitutive language
games. Further considerations can be derived from a brief survey of the other
chapters comprising this volume.
In his chapter on power in political anthropology (Chapter 3), John
Gledhill charts the development of resistance theory. Influenced by Foucault,
but also aware of the limitations of a strictly Foucauldian analytics of power,
whereby ‘culture’ can become a cage that allows no scope for innovation on
the part of actors, political anthropologists have produced a number of impor-
tant studies examining the complexity of power relations in concrete situa-
tions where there may be no straightforward opposition between domination
and resistance. Those who are at the sharp end of asymmetrical power rela-
tions do not always ‘resist’ in the sense of ‘speaking truth to power’. Rather,
it may be the case that strategies, mechanisms, and technologies of coercion
are appropriated and deployed for reasons that can only be understood if
close attention is paid to the experience of subalterns and the manifold ways
that subaltern populations engage with power.
Bracketing (for the moment) that fact that, from a normative perspective,
this increasingly sophisticated ethnography of power can be extremely per-
plexing, we can note that, on an explanatory plane, it is broadly commensu-
rate with Stewart Clegg’s chapter on organisation power (Chapter 4). Clegg’s

220 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
analysis of the foundations of organisation power shows clearly just how
deeply entwined is the historical constitution of specific social subjects –
along with particular desires, preferences and categories of meaning, or what
Pettit and Lukes refer to as interests – with disciplinary techniques and appa-
ratuses. Linking the individual body to the social body, and ultimately to the
body politic, is the power of organisation. According to Clegg, we should
understand organisations to be arenas of negotiation and contestation, so that
relations within and between organisations are shaped by strategies and
struggles. To become more powerful entails acting upon the actions of other
actors, though not necessarily through coercive forms of control. The most
effective exercise of power is not one that forbids and says ‘no’, but one that
guides, directs, and facilitates. Power flows through circuits that empower ac-
tors, but in order to participate in the pursuit of shared goals, these empow-
ered actors also submit to discipline. Within the scope of Clegg’s analysis,
this is not necessarily the basis of normative critique. Instead the principal
concern is to better understand how power over merges with power to.
Feminist research (Chapter 5) moves us squarely into the realm of nor-
mative analysis, though there are important divergences in this field, de-
pending on whether the question of patriarchal power is viewed from the
perspective of what Jill Vickers presents as a ‘modernist project’, concern-
ing the exclusion and oppression of women, or a ‘post-modern project’, the
aim of which is to destabilize gendered categories such as ‘woman’ and
‘man’, and thus subvert historically and culturally constituted power rela-
tions. The key difference, and it is by no means trivial, is between a norma-
tive critique that aims to achieve gender justice, and a critical enterprise that
seeks to keep gender in a state of incompletion and fluidity. Between these
broad approaches is a variety of ways of thinking about the relative salience
of conflictual, consensual, and constitutive power. For example, among
those participating in the consciousness-raising groups that characterised
second-wave feminist activism, consensual decision-making was framed as
‘politics without power’. In attempting to renounce power, these activists
somehow managed to overlook the fact that mutual empowerment is itself a
mode of power, and while it is described as power to and power with, it in-
evitably involves a degree of power over. More recently, feminist theorists
have confronted the implications of a feminist politics that can have the ef-
fect of reinforcing, even reifying, gendered categories that are insufficiently
attuned to differences concerning class, ‘race’, ethnicity, and sexuality. To
insist on a singular and uniform category of subject such as ‘women’ may
have the effect of foreclosing on other, alternative ways of doing gender – of
enacting or performing gendered identities, desires, and imaginaries that are
not (yet) discursively codified. These divergences need not lead to an im-
passe however, or to incommensurable paradigms, as Vickers’ discussion of

The Political Sociology of Power 221
the otherwise very different ‘multidimensional’ approaches of Allen and
Mansbridge attests to.
A multidimensional approach is also prominent in John Hall and Siniša
Malešević’s chapter on the political sociology of power (Chapter 6). Their
neo-Weberian approach is tailored to bridging what they identify as a long-
standing distinction within this sub-discipline: between those who equate
power with naked coercion or power over, and those who emphasise the
power produced by people working in concert power to or with. Encompass-
ing these two broad modalities of power, their approach is given analytical
flexibility and precision by following Michael Mann in his re-working of
Weber, and analysing the political, economic, and ideological sources of so-
cial power, as well as the circumstances that give rise to one of these sources
becoming dominant. Given the violent history of modern-state formation and
inter-state rivalry, Hall and Malešević’s notion of a ‘liberal Machiavellian re-
gime’ is interesting not simply in terms of how it manages to grasp the nettle
of state power, but also in the way it opens a potential avenue of debate with
normative IR theory. In short, we are reminded that power increases not in
accordance with the presence of despotic power, but through the develop-
ment of infrastructural power: through cooperation and coordination, which
connects up with Clegg’s argument concerning power as the foundation of
organisation. In the idea of infrastructural power we glimpse one possible fu-
ture for world politics; one which is possible but by no means inevitable, and
probably unlikely given Hall and Malešević’s not entirely optimistic progno-
sis.
Hall and Malešević’s argument concerning the continuing centrality of
the state enters into an interesting dialogue with Phil Cerny’s discussion
(Chapter 7) on how globalization is transforming the behaviour of states in an
increasingly interdependent world, so that ‘soft’ and ‘smart’ power – as op-
posed to ‘hard’ power – become increasingly salient in the world political
arena. Cerny challenges the post-Westphalian assumption that international
power concerns sovereign territorial states and combines this with a nuanced
concept of power framed by the related notions of multi-nodal systems and
transnational pluralism. Arguably there is a parallel between the move of the
power debates from Dahl, to Lukes, Hayward, Foucault and Allen, which en-
tailed a gradual move from action, to system, to ideology and then to the con-
stitution of agency itself. In IR we move from states, to global systems and
then to modes of power that are constitutive of reality. The exercise of power
does not simply take place within a system and between actors, it constitutes
the predispositions of those actors and, in so doing, shapes the types of struc-
turation practices that they are predisposed to.

222 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
In conclusion, taking a broad perspective on the power family members, the re-
lationship between power over and power to can be examined in a variety of
ways depending on how the particular unit (or units) of analysis is specified,
and whether the emphasis is on freedom, domination, discipline, resistance,
empowerment, or some combination of these key concepts. By crossing disci-
plinary boundaries in examining such questions, it is out hope that this book
will provide students of power, whatever their field of expertise, with new per-
spectives and conceptual tools that will assist them in their own research.
We would like to finish by pointing out that the approach to the study of
power presented in this book is the product of long-term collaboration among
colleagues in IPSA Research Committee 36 (RC36: Political Power), and we
welcome inquiries from readers interested in the activities of the RC, as well
as the Journal of Political Power, Routledge, which is the official journal of
RC36.
References
Archard, D., 2004. Children: rights and childhood. 2nd edition. London and New
York: Routledge.
Berlin, I., 1958. Two concepts of liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J., 2008. Between naturalism and religion. Trans. C. Cronin. Cambridge:
Polity.
Haugaard, M., 2010. Democracy, political power and authority. Social Research,
77(4), 1049-1075.
Honneth, A., Cooke, W. and Allen, A., 2010. A conversation between Axel Honneth,
Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfurt am Main, 12 April 2010. Journal of Po-
litical Power 3(2), 153-170.
Lukes, S., 2005. Power: a radical view. 2nd edition. Basinstoke, Hampshire: Pal-
grave-Macmillan.
Pettit, P., 1997. Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wartenberg, T. E., 1990. The forms of power: from domination to transformation.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Index
Note to index editor: I assume names will be added automatically. While
these concepts and topics are based upon my reading of the chapters
some are also ones that one would expect in this book. However, as I
have not run the latter, there may be some that do not have any hits. I
was not sure if countries and organizations were added automatically, or
not. So, I have included the main ones, just in case.
M H
activism
Africa
agency
agenda setting
agent-structure problem
agonism
America
anarchy
anarchic world
antagonism
anthropology
archaeology
authority
authoritarianism
autonomy
balance of power
biopower

224 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
BRIC countries
Brazil
Britain
bureaucracy
capital
capitalism
China
Christianity
commodities
community power
Congo
civilizing process
circuits of power
class
class consciousness
coercion
collective action
colonization
conflict
consensual power
consensus
consent
consociational democracy/society

The Political Sociology of Power 225
constraint
constructivism
culture
decision
decision-making
decolonization
deconstruction
delegation
democracy
Denmark
despotism
difference
discipline
disciplinary power
discourse
discourse analysis
disempowerment
dispositional power
domination
economic power
elections
elites
elitism

226 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
emancipation
empire
empowerment
episodic power
episteme
ethics
Europe
European Union (EU)
exclusion
exploitation
faces of power
see also dimensions of power
false-consciousness [or false consciousness]
family resemblance concepts
federalism
feminism
feudalism
Finland
first dimension of power
First World War
foreign policy
France
free-rider [or free rider]

The Political Sociology of Power 227
freedom
fourth dimension of power
functionalism [also functionalists]
game theory
genealogy
gender
Germany
globalization
glocal(ization)
God
government
governmentality
habitus
hard power
hegemony
hermeneutics
history
Holocaust
ideal speech
ideology
ideological power
identity
industrialization

228 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
infrastructural power
illegitimate power
India
individualism
institutions
institutionalism
interests
international relations
international politics
issues
issue areas
Islam
Iraq
Iraq war
Israel
Italy
Japan
Jihad
Journal of Political Power
justice
knowledge
language
language games

The Political Sociology of Power 229
leadership
legitimation
legitimacy
legitimate
liberal
liberalism
liberty
liquid modernity
luck
management
markets
Marxists
military power
minorities
monarchy
modernity
nation
nationalism
nation state [also nation-state]
neoliberalism
neorealism [also neorealists]
networks
nondecision-making

230 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
norms
Nordic countries (see also Scandinavia)
normative political theory
organizations
original position
originality
Panopticon
parties
parliament
patriarchy
pluralism
political science
political power
political sociology
polyarchy
positive-sum power
postmodernism
postmodernity
postmodernists
power to
power over
power with
predation

The Political Sociology of Power 231
predatory state
prison
prisoner’s dilemma
rationality
rational choice
realism
realists
Realpolitik
Regime
reification [also reify]
resistance
resources
revolution
rules
Russia
Scandinavia (see also Nordic countries)
science
second dimension of power
second-wave feminism
Second World War
security
sexuality
signification

232 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
socialism
socialization
social capital
social contract
social movements
soft power
sociology
Somalia
sovereign power
Soviet Union (see also USSR)
structure
structuration
subjects
subjectification
subjection
supranational
superstructure
surveillance
Sweden
symbolic capital
system
systematic luck
tacit knowledge

The Political Sociology of Power 233
three-dimensional power
three dimensions of power
third dimension of power
time
terrorists/ism
torture
truth
trust
two-dimensional power
see also second dimension of power
universalism
unconscious
United States (US or USA)
USSR
values
value neutrality
violence
vote
voting
war
welfare
Weberian
Westphalia (treaty of, peace of)

234 John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević
Women
World Trade Organization (WTO)
zero-sum power