Peter Emmerson PhD

Traditionally, sociological discussions of power reference Marx’s formulation that in
capitalist societies power resides with the ruling class through their ownership of the
means of production (Giddens and Held, 1982). However, probably the most influential
model of power is that of Weber which is a critique of Marxian economic determinism –
he described it as follows:

We understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize
their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are
participating in the action. (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1970, p.180)

Thus, for Weber, power can be individual as well as communal, functioning as part of the
increasingly rational process that is capitalism, and the bureaucratic legal framework
which legitimates the use of power to gain compliance. However, Weber was aware that
supernatural irrational ways of thinking and acting such as religious belief, still prevail,
which in its most potent form, charisma, can change the course of history. Charisma is:

An extraordinary quality of person, regardless of whether this quality is actual,
alleged, or presumed. ‘Charismatic authority,’ hence shall refer to a rule over
men, … to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary
quality of the specific person. (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1970, p.295)

This aspect of power is a particularly important critique of Marxist class analysis because
in emphasizing the power of the individual to change history, Weber poses a significant
challenge to the theory of class conflict.

Another analysis of power that develops from these ideas is that of Parsons
(1963a) who defines it as follows:

Power is here conceived as a circulating medium analogous to money, within
what is called the political system, but notably over its boundaries into all three of
the other neighbouring functional subsystems of a society. (Parsons, 1963a,
p.236)

Thus, power is a driving force as part of his generalized model of human experience
structured according to Weberian rationalist principles. It operates as a series of linear
processes within a hierarchy of interdependent functions to connect sociological institutions such as families with more general systems that coordinate these institutions,
as well as influencing the nature of human experience and knowledge.

Parsons, following Weber, believed the liberal economic system to be the most
advanced theoretical and conceptual analysis yet to exist because it empowered people
and provided ‘freedom’ to those who live within it. This belief in the liberating capacity of
a rational economic system oriented his understanding of power to a model similar to
that of the circulation of money. Legitimate power is the currency of the political system
and circulates from there, and if necessary, coerces those who disagree. What is
interesting is that those who are not part of the political system have no power.

Parsons’s unrealistic statement that some people have no power is a good
example of the damage done by the unacknowledged philosophical underpinning that
so many sociologists work with. It is certainly evident in Marx whose attachment to
dialectical materialism meant that he skated over individual power in favour of class. It is
also there in both Weber and Parsons and their belief in the power of rationality to deny
or promote individual freedom. Elias has drawn attention to these three very influential
examples that limit reality congruence and the development of a scientific sociology.

In What is Sociology? Elias rejects all three models, stating:

Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it is a
structural characteristic of human relationships – of all human relationships.
(Elias, 1978, p.74)

He goes on to say:

Power denotes a relationship between two or more people, or perhaps between
people and natural objects, … power is an attribute of relationships, and that the
word is best used in conjunction with a reminder about more or less fluctuating
changes in power. (Elias, 1978. p.116)

Michel Foucault is another influential writer on power. Discipline and Punish
(1991) was a change in tack after his work on the histories of madness, medicine,
science and knowledge, all of which, in attempting to eradicate the continual rewriting of
history, were heavily influenced by a structuralist perspective (Foucault, 1972). However,
the rather dehumanized history that resulted led him to adopt a Nietzschean,
genealogical approach (Foucault in Bouchard, 1977, pp. 139-64) which focusses on the
human body marked by history through war, whether it be literal violence or the use of
words (Nietzsche, 1979). From this viewpoint, history is a process of emergences
(Entstehungs) that speak of subjugation and resistance to the human will to power.

However, Foucault (1991) writes about the exercise of the will to power and how
it changes its modus operandi from the public display of violent punishment on the bodies of those who transgress, to a more pervasive subtle form of control, underpinned by a technology of discourse which drives the exploration of the minutiae of human behaviour to exploit the machine-like power of disciplined, docile human bodies. Knowledge is power, power is knowledge: power-knowledge.

In bringing the ideas of another philosopher, Nietzsche, to bear on the
dehumanizing force of structuralist historical approaches, Foucault (1991) cannot detach
himself sufficiently from philosophical dogma that limits engagement with historical facts
and is resigned to accepting the relativism that structuralist approaches rail against.
Thus, the subject of history prevails – there can only be histories, not a history, which is
an open acknowledgement of the subject-object perspective outlined by Elias (1987)
earlier in this chapter. Accordingly, even though Foucault focuses on the practices
involved in the exercise of a technology of discursive power on human bodies, the actual
people who made the history he describes remain impervious to Foucault’s prodigious
philosophical legerdemain: those who manage the apparatus of power are ominously
absent from his work, indefinable ghosts speaking panoptical power as they stalk the
shadows of his disciplinary system. For a more evidence-based appreciation of power
we turn to Elias.

By identifying power as a universal feature of human relationships Eliasian
sociology dispenses with the problems that haunted Foucault. Using game models, he
argues that power is a matter of comparative strength within and between human
figurations involving people with differing “power chances” (Elias, 1978, p.74). Power
chances relate to a state of dependency, an employee has fewer power chances than a
chief executive. However, this relationship ebbs and flows in time as the “relative
strength” (Elias, 1978, p.75) of participants or whole figurations changes, leading Elias
to speak in terms of ‘power balances’.

At a seminar at the University of Leeds, Elias (1980) presented a model of power
with four dimensions: violent, economic, religious and state. From this perspective a
threat from a mafioso, an employer, a priest or a tax inspector are all acts of power, which can be accommodated by Elias’s model, whether given formal sanction by a legitimate authority or not. The inclusion of violence is obvious and yet is rarely addressed in sociology. This is an indication of the increased reality congruence opened up by his model in which power is omnipresent within or between figurations.

However, in accepting the power of violence, Elias is identifying a source of
individual power and related levels of bodily strength. This draws attention to a crossover
between natural and social scientific models of power which Foucault (1991) accidentally alludes to when speaking of discursive technology. The natural scientific explanation which equates power with time and work done, can be found in any basic physics textbook, and is critical to an understanding of the plethora of physical processes that engineers deal with. An example is a car engine which is fitted to power a vehicle by liberating energy stored in fuel, which when compressed and ignited in a cylinder, forces
a piston to move up and down which in turn is connected to a crank, which, via a gearbox
and differential drives its wheels. A car with a large engine burns more fuel and is more
powerful, enabling the driver to accelerate more quickly; that is, it will do more work per
unit of time. This can be represented mathematically, and the power of an engine
calculated in watts. The same is true of an electrical motor. Power in this natural scientific
sense is a linear concept that can be tracked through a series of cause and effect chains.

Such a model of power can also be useful in calculating the work done by life
forms such as people. Oleksandr Usyk is a physically very powerful man who with
dedicated training became a world champion heavyweight boxer. As with the car engine,
Usyk’s power can be traced back in linear, systematic, causal fashion to his genetics,
heart and other anatomical functions and can be calculated as power output in watts.
This power can be used to explain his success as a boxer because it gives him the bodily
strength to inflict devastating damage on an opponent with just one punch. In this sense
the capacity to inflict violence is a function of bodily power which when used violently
translates into figurational power through interdependency in the form of danger, fear
and anxiety. Should both of these processes, one biological the other sociological, be
referred to as power?

Power defined by the linear systematic analysis is effective as a means of explaining how the human body works which is why Foucault’s (1991) depiction of the body as machine is appropriately described as power. However, power is much less satisfactory when explaining discursive or figurational processes such as what happens during the confrontation that occurs before the fight when Usyk confronts an opponent
at the weigh-in. This situation was famously exploited by Muhammad Ali, who before
winning his world championship fight with Sonny Liston, bombarded his menacing and
more powerful opponent with a constant series of insults. Is this attempt at intimidation
best understood in terms of power? It is reasonable to argue that power plays a part, but
can we interpret and understand Ali’s victory in logical, linear, causal, systematic terms?

Parsons may well have argued ‘yes and no’. Yes, any social process such as
intimidation can be explained in a logical systematic fashion, but this would not be power, it would be ‘influence’ (Parsons, 1963). Any attempts to get another person to comply without being formally politically sanctioned by legitimate authority was for Parsons a matter of ‘persuasion’, because they could not be coerced. However, unlike power which is only available to those in the political system, influence is something that all people can access. For influence to be effective, trust must be established. Trust is easier to obtain in kin relationships because of familiarity, but where strangers are concerned trust must be won using hard facts. Where trust does not develop, mutual obligation can help persuade. However, there is one situation that Parsons does not address that falls into the category of persuasion, the threat of violence. In a famous scene from The Godfather, a Hollywood film producer who has resisted earlier attempts at intimidation is made ‘an offer he can’t refuse’ and is persuaded to change his mind about casting a member of the New York mafia. Threatening violence in this situation is in Parsons’ terms an act of influence rather than power. How viable is this approach?

Social psychologists apparently have little problem with using influence rather
than power to explain compliance, conformity and obedience. Asch carried out some
famous experiments to assess the effects of group pressure or influence on the ability to
judge the length of a line on a piece of paper (Asch in Pennington, 1986). Even more
famously, Milgram explored the capacity of a high-status professional to persuade
participants to give people electric shocks (Milgram in Pennington, 1986). Whilst these
experiments have been criticized for their lack of ecological validity it is interesting that
social psychologists refrain from using power, and instead prefer the term influence.

However, even though Parsons and social psychologists speak of influence in
this technical sense, Elias refers only to power. Whilst it is not appropriate to fully explore
this problem here, it is arguable that power is better understood as a linear, systematic
concept more suited to engineers than sociologists. Can Elias’s figurational model of
power, with all its multidimensional complexities and related processes of human
interdependencies be more adequately explained as influence? Are not human
interdependencies as processes more akin to non-linear chaotic processes (Gleick,
1988) such as weather or water flowing in a stream, for which the linear concept of power
is not appropriate? Would ‘influence’ be a more reality congruent tool for facilitating better engagement with complex sociological processes, which are about the subtleties of human experience rather than physical realities? If so, power could be used to explain work done at a material level such as planting crops, and influence to investigate the much less tangible networks of human interdependency and figurational processes such as retiring.

It is arguable that Elias and Parsons would agree that influence is available to all
people and is from an Eliasian perspective a figurational universal. However, influence
that is not channelled in some direction such as towards survival needs has little value.
In other words, influence implies control. What is known about control and how does it
help us to understand retiring?

References

Bouchard, D. F. (ed) (1977) Language, Counter-memory, Practice: selected essays and
interviews by Michel Foucault. New York: Cornel University Press.

Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson & Co.

Elias, N. (1980) Seminar, the University of Leeds.

Elias, N. (1987) Involvement and Detachment. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.

Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C. (eds) (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Giddens, A., and Held, D. (eds) (1982) Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and
Contemporary Debates. London: Macmillan.

Gleick, J. (1988) Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Cardinal by Sphere Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo. London: Penguin.

Parsons, T. (1963) On the Concept of Influence. The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 27,
No. 1, pp.37-62. Oxford University Press on Behalf of the American Association
for Public Opinion Research.

Parsons, T. (1963a) On the Concept of Political Power. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun. 19, 1963), pp.232-262. American
Philosophical Society

Pennington, D. C. (1986) Essential Social Psychology. London: Edward Arnold.