No abstract

While Lukes’ view of power as an ‘essentially contested concept’ is a move in the right direction, it does not go far enough because it falls short of arguing for a plural view of power. Power constitutes a ‘family resemblance concept’, with family members forming complex relationships within overlapping language games. Members include, among others: episodic power, dispositional power, systemic power, power to, power over, empowerment, legitimate power and domination. This argument does not entail relativism or that ‘anything goes’, as all usages have to be justified as ‘conceptual tools’, whereby pragmatic criteria of usefulness, rather than essence, define better or worse usage. When moving language games, the relationship between signifier and referent changes, which leads to confusion, unless the family resemblance nature of power is understood. In the literature, the most significant confusion has taken place between sociological analytic and normative political theory language games.

In this article it is argued that social power can be created based upon either the reproduction of social order or coercively but that in complex societies the former is the more important. Building upon the ideas of a number of authors - including Arendt, Parsons, Barnes, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg - a typology of seven forms of power creation is developed in a manner which allows for diverse phenomena from previously divergent perspectives to be woven together into a theoretical whole which renders them commensurable. At the foundational level, social order presupposes the recreation of shared meanings which enable actors to act in collaboration in a way which they could not otherwise do. This observation is used as the basic premise from which to re-examine the reproduction of social order and the relationship between power, structure and knowledge. Among other things, this allows the author to render Lukes' `false consciousness' argument commensurable with Foucault's power/knowledge hypothesis.

No abstract

This article theorizes the four dimensions of power, which builds upon the work of Dahl, Lukes, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Giddens, among others. The four dimensions correspond to four aspects of social interaction. The first dimension refers to the agency-energy aspect of interaction. The second concerns the structural components. The third concerns the epistemic element of interaction. The fourth relates to the social ontological elements of social subjects. The theory has implications for both normative and empirical research. Normatively the theory provides a pragmatist poweroriented way of building democratic theory. Empirically the theory provides a power-oriented conceptual map of everyday interaction.