Being Sociological
Chapter 4
Controlling
Power: Dictionary definitions
Three dictionary definitions of power are directly
relevant to sociological thought:
• ‘The ability to do or act’;
• ‘Political or social ascendancy or control’;
• ‘Authorization, delegated authority’.
(New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, 2004)
So, sociologically, what is power?
Within the workings of the sociological imagination
(Mills, 1959) the idea of power is valued for its
capacity to explain everything, from the nature of
democracy to the quality of doctor-patient
interaction in a medical consultation.
‘…power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it
can be dull and routine… It is systematic and it is
particularistic and it is often both at the same
time’ (Avery Gordon, 1997).
Power is an abstract notion; we see
power not as a thing, but as manifested
through its effects.
Three theoretical approaches
Devised in different times and places, each
approach represents an attempt to understand the
social conditions under which their producers lived
and wrote.
• The first treats power as a quantifiable commodity;
• The second is concerned with legitimate and
illegitimate claims of power;
• The third (based on the work of Michel Foucault)
considers the rise and exercise of modern
disciplinary power, summed up by the principle of
panopticism.
• Most of our everyday assumptions about the nature
of power treat it as something that can be measured
through ideas of quantity.
• In this way of seeing, the quantity of power any one
of us has is always determined by how much is held
by someone or something else.
• This assumes that there is a limited, finite amount of
power available within a society or within the world,
and that it will always tend to be unequally
distributed.
Power and force
• …‘the chance of a man or a number of men to
realise their own will even against the resistance
of others’ (Weber, 1978: 926);
• The application of power is therefore a form of
coercion.
• Power in these terms means the ability to
compel people to do or refrain from doing things
against their own will.
Sociology and the study of power
• Much research has traced the operation of unequal
power between racial majorities and minorities,
colonial and metropolitan subjects, men and
women, and different sexual identities and
practices.
• Power is at work through socially structured and
culturally shaped patterns of stratification.
• Two aspects of social life where power inequalities
are still strongly marked throughout the world are
national legal systems and the global distribution of
poverty.
Power and the law
The claim to treat everyone equally lies at the heart
of law’s claim that it has a legitimate right to demand
our obedience. In the liberal democracies of the
western world it is known as the ‘rule of law’ and
believed to guarantee justice for all. Critical sociolegal scholars have, however, demonstrated just
how unequally legal systems may, in certain areas,
treat women, homosexuals, racial and ethnic
minorities, people with disabilities, and poor people.
Power and poverty
• Poor people overwhelmingly report the
multidimensional effects of being poor and
powerless: hunger, the psychological dimensions of
dependency, shame, humiliation, and the material
deprivations of living without access to roads,
transportation, clean water, education, and health
care.
• Poverty creates a powerlessness that renders
people unable to help themselves, compelled to rely
upon largely ineffective state aid and the limited
support that NGOs (non-government organizations)
can provide.
Power, seen as a resource, has a
central place in accounts of how
politics, particularly (but not
exclusively) in democratic political
systems, actually work.
Power and leadership: Max Weber
(1864-1920)
When power is defined as ‘created through
authorization or delegated authority’ this captures
the idea of something that individuals and groups
have and use because they have a generally
recognized and accepted right to do so. This
conceptualization is generally associated with the
sociology of Max Weber.
Because his particular interest in power came
out of a desire to understand the nature of
political leadership, Weber thought of power as a
capacity to be exercised over others. He defined
it as ‘the probability that one actor within a social
relationship will be in a position to carry out his
own will despite resistance, regardless of the
basis on which this probability rests’ (Weber,
1978: 53).
Domination
Because Weber thought the way power was generally
understood was not clear enough for good social
theory, he preferred to use a different word –
‘domination’. So, using this word, he defined a more
sociologically specific form of power: ‘the probability
that a command with a given specific content will be
obeyed by a given group of persons’ (Weber, 1978:
53). His examples of dominance describe three kinds
of legitimate power:
•Charismatic;
•Traditional;
•Rational/legal.
• Charismatic leaders hold their position by virtue of
some special quality – sacredness, revelation, or
heroism, for example – that is theirs alone, and they
are obeyed because their followers believe this
leadership can transform their own lives.
• Traditional leaders are seen as legitimate through
the ‘loyalty and fidelity’ felt by subjects toward their
master’ (Parkin, 1982: 81), and their authority rests
in their occupation of the designated position;
therefore, hereditary absolute monarchy and
chiefship are both traditional forms of dominance.
In the third form of leadership, present in most
contemporary western societies, a legitimate
ruler/leader’s claim is grounded in law. The ruler’s
dominance is based in the fact that they were
appointed under impersonal legal rules that
specify the proper conditions and processes for
appointment of legitimate rulers/leaders.
Democratic election is a specific form of such
rules and processes and elected presidents and
prime ministers claim obedience from their people
on the basis of lawful appointment as leader.
Criticisms and Influence of Weber
• J. M. Barbalet (1985: 535) has described Weber’s overall
treatment of power and resistance as ‘sketchy,
contradictory and poorly grounded in general sociological
principles’.
• Nevertheless his ideas about the nature of legitimate rule
still influence present-day analyses of political and legal
power.
• The notion of the right to exercise power is intimately
connected with the conditions under which a nation state
may be governed as a democracy.
• In particular, it is associated with the consent that citizens
give when they accept their government’s right to control
many aspects of their lives, particularly payment of taxes
and obedience to laws.
Legitimacy and globalized power
There is wide sociological understanding that
information and capital now flow so freely and
widely within an international sphere that there
has been a significant change in the degree of
autonomy and power enjoyed by individual nation
states.
Network society and the network
state
• Castells (2004:304) describes these as new social
phenomena, the result of conflicting trends of
globalisation and assertions of identity:
‘…[t]he instrumental capacity of the nation-state
is decisively undermined by the globalization of
core economic activities…of media and electronic
communication…of crime…of social protest,
and…of insurgency in the form of transborder
terrorism’.
Power, globalisation and crime
Castells argues that the power of the nation-state is
also subverted through globally linked organized
crime that generates a criminal economy of a size
and power that conditions economic and political
international relations and deeply penetrates to
eventually destabilize national states.
Carolyn Nördstrom (2000: 36) refers to ‘international
shadow powers’ that operate on a scale ‘capable of
shaping world economies and policies’ yet who
remain largely invisible to popular knowledge and
sociological analysis. By this she means the shadow
networks of goods and services that operate outside
formal state and legal channels in war zones and
international non-state trade in legal and illegal
commodities:
‘[These networks] fashion economic possibilities, they
broker political power and, importantly, they constitute
cultures, for these networks of power and exchange are
governed by rules of exchange, codes of conduct,
hierarchies of deference and power – in short, they are
governed by social principles, not merely the jungle law
of tooth and claw (Nordstrom, 2000: 37).
In pursuit of an extended notion of power that
includes ‘informal’, non-state sources and locations
of power and recognizes organized international
crime as an economically significant part of global
power, Nördstrom describes the situation in
Angola…In this society where one side controls the
main centres of population, roads, airports and oil
production, and the other the rural, food-producing
areas, legal and illegal trade merge.
Illicit transactions and development are closely
linked with political power as people gain the wealth
from the former to move into legal enterprises,
gather economic power and social status, and be
elected to political positions.
‘The number of people involved can rival
populations of states. The revenues generated
can far surpass the GNP of smaller nations’
(Nördstorm, 2000: 44)
• The lines between legitimate and illegitimate
power, legal and illegal transactions, and public
and private power, are now, it seems,
irretrievably blurred. This raises interesting
questions about the relationship between these
shadow global networks that operate on the
boundaries of criminality and the ability of
nation-states to maintain legitimacy and
sovereign status.
• ‘Organised crime is now a huge presence in the
global economy’ (Glenny, 2011: 26)
Michel Foucault and ‘disciplinary
power’
• ...‘a technical mutation’ in the exercise of power
which Foucault (1979:257) dates to the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
• This resulted in a new ‘physics’ of power in which
we see the origins of today’s surveillance society.
• Foucault describes this as a transformation in
social control from public punishment of the body to
private punishment of the mind and soul.
What did this mean?
• A regimen of rules and regulations covering
every facet of existence;
• Development of detailed records, individual
dossiers, new classificatory systems and
timetables, all of them underpinned by constant
supervision.
Power and knowledge
The knowledge generated by various academics,
authorities and experts provided the means to
control and correct the behaviours of those
populations labelled deviant.
In his writings Foucault focussed on the prison.
Architecture would be a core element of control.
Buildings would be containers and correctors of
behaviour. Foucault called this new form of
domination by surveillance panopticism.
Panopticism
Panoptic structures like prisons were built to see in.
Prisoners (or soldiers, workers, patients or pupils)
were arranged so as to be constantly viewed.
‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and
who knows it, assumes responsibility for the
constraints of power; he makes them play
spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in
himself the power relation in which he
simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the
principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault,
1979:202-203).
Technologies of power and technologies of
self
• Foucault regarded panopticism as a technology of
power. He defined technologies of power as those
activities which dominate, objectify and ultimately
determine individual behaviour.
• He was mindful of technologies of the self, ‘which
permit individuals to effect...a certain number of
operations on their own bodies and souls...so as to
transform themselves in order to attain a certain
state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality’ (Foucault, 1997: 177).
Foucault felt that the development of the western
subject could not be understood without attending
to technologies of power (which are negative and
repressive) and technologies of the self (which are
positive and liberatory).
The Punitive Society (1997)
• Foucault described a new physics of power,
involving two optics, mechanics and physiology.
The new optics concern continual surveillance.
Everything is seen, recorded and filed. This is what
Foucault means by panopticism.
• Mechanics refers to confinement. Closed systems
like prisons and workhouses could be interpreted as
warehouses for surplus humanity, containing those
considered useless or threatening to the social
order: criminals, the workshy, the mad, the poor and
the rebellious.
For Foucault the industrial take-off of the West
required the accumulation of people as well as
capital. The development of industrial capitalism
‘would not have been possible without the controlled
insertion of bodies into the machinery of production
and the adjustment of the phenomena of population
to economic processes’ (Foucault, 1990: 141). Thus
the Industrial Revolution was also a political
revolution, resting on a new way of controlling
people.... Panopticism was a way to create model
citizens and workers.
Prior to Foucault, the exercise of power was seldom
discussed: ‘power in its strategies, at once general
and detailed, and its mechanisms, has never been
studied’, much less the mutual imbrications of
knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980: 51).
Discussion Point 1
• It surprised many to see an international drug
trafficker placed on Forbes’ first ever ‘World’s Most
Powerful’ list in 2009. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán,
head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, came in
at number 41.
• Forbes determined the power of individuals by
considering four dimensions: the extent of their
influence, their financial resources, the number of
different spheres they influence and the extent to
which they use the power they have.
Questions
• Do you agree with Forbes’ way of determining
power?
• What would legalizing drugs do to shadow
powers?
• In addition to wealth, what do shadow powers
generate?
Discussion Point 2
• Hyper-panoptic scholars: argue that new
technologies intensify panoptic abilities,
automating, observing, tracking and storing as
never before.
• Post-panoptic scholars: assert that in true
Foucauldian fashion power meets resistance.
Surveillance remains partial and fragmentary.
There is no all-seeing eye of power.
Synopticism
• There is an approach which accepts the idea of
panopticism but supplements it with its antithesis,
synopticism. This is tied to the development of the
mass media. With the media panopticism finds its
precise reversal: the many watch the few. Think of
the regurgitated surveillance footage served up as
Reality Television entertainment or endless
iterations of Big Brother-format programmes. These
have profound disciplinary effects.
• For Thomas Mathiesen (1997) synopticism is one of
the primary mechanisms through which the modern
soul is governed. To say that we live in a
surveillance society is not entirely accurate, for ours
is a viewer society.
Questions
• Do modern technologies make the exercise of
power – or resistance to it – easier?
• Do you live in a post-panoptic or a hyperpanoptic society?
• Which makes more sense: surveillance society
or viewer society?