Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
examine social power explicitly. So, too, will the major cases explored in
THE NATURE OF SOCIAL POWER
Definitions
'Like love, we experience power in our everyday lives, and it has real effects
[on us] despite our inability to measure it precisely' - so writes the polit-
ical theorist Joseph Nye (2011: 3) in his recent book
The future of power
.
Power is tangible but often difficult to quantify, except perhaps in situations
where the powerless have so little opportunity to think, speak or act of their
own volition that they perceive themselves as (or are considered by oth-
ers to be) dominated, oppressed or enslaved.
Contra
Nye, some argue that
these situations are the only ones where we can legitimately talk of power
relationships between people. Here power is equated with such things as
intimidation, threats of violence or the use of physical force. According to
this view, women coerced into prostitution and drug dependency by crimi-
nal gangs are one of the many present-day social groups who are, regrettably,
victims of power relationships.
Study Task:
Do you think 'social power' is synonymous with the capacity
of a person or institution to control others through the exercise of physical
force or the threat thereof? Are there examples you can think of where force
was not used but which, in your view, appear to involve the exercise of
social power? Conversely, think of situations where you feel social power is
not operative.
Many analysts of social power regard a focus on 'extreme' cases as unduly
limiting. Like Nye, they prefer an ecumenical definition of social power as
'the capacity to produce a change' (Miller, 1992: 241) or 'a relation in which
one agent or agency somehow affects the attitudes or actions of another'
(Ball, 1992: 14). The latter is more inclusive because it allows for the log-
ical converse of the former: the recognition that social power is also the
capacity to
prevent
or
slow down change that might otherwise occur
(see
Box
6.1).
Interpreted in the broadest sense, this means that power, which exists
in a great many forms, is possessed by a wide range of people and insti-
tutions, and isn't only synonymous with things like coercion; however,
because this definition risks being rather
too
inclusive, we might add that
power entails the capacity to produce (or prevent)
significant and/or endur-
ing changes
(rather than trivial or evanescent ones). Typically, this capacity
arises because a person, group or institution possesses a large amount of
material or symbolic resources compared with most other sections of a
society.
