Power (social)

This article analyzes the techniques by which the kings of the early Sasanian dynasty engaged the past and shaped the experience of future generations. I concentrate on the innovations and legacy of the first two kings of kings of the dynasty, Ardashir I (r. 224–239/40 C.E.) and his son Shapur I (239/40–270/2 C.E.). These sovereigns fashioned a new and politically useful vision of the past to establish their dynasty's primacy in Persia and the wider Iranian world, eclipsing their Seleucid, Fratarakid, and Arsacid predecessors. I identify and examine the artistic, architectural, and ritual means by which the early Sasanians conformed the built and natural environment of their homeland to their grand new vision of the past. I argue that the Achaemenid patrimony of the province of Pars played an important role in these efforts, serving as inspirations and anchors for the Sasanians' new creations.

"The so-called cyber-threat commands the attention of multinational corporations, governments and the strategic community, keen as they are to harness the power of digital communications yet anxious to protect their interests. Attacks such as those which disrupted on-line banking in Estonia and defaced government websites in Georgia, as well as the infamous Stuxnet worm that temporarily shut down Iran’s nuclear programme, are vivid examples of what may be possible within this new strategic domain. But are our networked societies really vulnerable, as some have suggested, to a knock-out blow, perpetrated by state-sponsored hackers or terrorists? And what can be done to defend the state from this and from the encroachment of external networks that transcend its borders and breach its laws?

This Adelphi tackles the range of issues raised by our dependence on digital networks. It considers how instantaneous, global communications are challenging national and social orders and what shape those challenges may take as the net is cast ever wider. Comparing the transformations of the Information Age with those of previous generations, when new technologies and emerging transnational threats spread panic in political and strategic circles, the authors examine the real implications for states and statehood."

""This introduction to the special issue on the history of power forwards the anthropological concept of “purification” as a means of drawing together disparate histories of psychology that invoke notions of power. Drawing on the work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, and Donna Haraway, I argue for a history
of psychology that links the carving up of people up into their properly natural and enculturated parts with keeping people in their place, the purification of interpretation by scientific representation, the maintenance of the body politic of the discipline, and the role of psychology in making up power in modern nation states.""

Building on Erving Goffman and Emile Durkheim, Randall Collins has demonstrated that situations have rules, processes, and constraints that are largely independent of more macro-social dynamics—this realm of action is referred to as the interaction order (Collins 2004; Goffrnan 1983). Collins's and Goffman's work on the interaction order illustrates how situations emerge and then shape and constrain action. We suggest this process of emergence and constraint can be further understood by explaining how action manifests as various types of involvement in situations. Specifically, we suggest that the different types of involvement manifest depending on how we focus our attention within situations. To understand how, why, and when we focus our attention, we must consider how cognition and emotion shape perception. Thus, we build on theories of cognition, emotion, and attention to explain how and when various sorts of social involvement emerge.

Comment on Hodder, I. and Lucas, G. (2017) "The symmetries and asymmetries of human–thing relations. A dialogue"                                             

In this dialogue, Hodder and Lucas skilfully manoeuvre the winding trails of archaeological theory during the last decades and critically juxtapose the discussion of symmetry and asymmetry of relations between entities with that of entanglement. Their provocative dialogue compellingly leads to the conclusion that most entanglements are in fact asymmetrical. Whereas I mostly concur with the conclusions of the dialogue, addressing the authors’ closing statements I would like to highlight the need to equally (in some ways, symmetrically) consider disentanglement as the process opposite to entanglement, along with the consequences of such disentanglement. If we are to understand better the contexts and politics of entanglements – concerns that this dialogue brings to the fore – I furthermore suggest that we more closely scrutinize the density (quantity) and joining (quality) of entanglements, as well as pay closer attention to memory, emotion and affect in entanglements.

Qualitative research provides opportunities to study bullying and peer harassment as social processes, interactions and meaning-making in the everyday context of particular settings. It offers the possibility of developing a deep understanding of the culture and group processes of bullying and the participants’ perspectives on peer harassment as well. It gives participants opportunities to discuss their own understanding and experiences of bullying in their own words. This article reviews qualitative studies on bullying or peer harassment in school (including some studies in which qualitative and quantitative methods — so-called mixed methods — have been used).

In contemporary society, sexual objectification is usually thought of as something that men do to women. However, this
notion risks conflating the gender of the perpetrator with the fact that men often hold more social power than women. In the
current study, we investigated whether power itself was associated with changes in processing of sexualized human targets, independent of the gender of the power holder. In Experiment 1, we primed separate groups of female participants to high-, low-, or neutral-power. We then engaged them in a recognition task involving upright or inverted sexualized images of men and women. Previous research using stimulus inversion manipulations has found that inversion of faces/bodies, but not of objects, disrupts recognition performance, suggesting a reliance on more configural processing in face/body perception compared to object perception. We found that women primed to high-power did not show an inversion effect for sexualized men but did show an inversion effect for sexualized women. In contrast, women primed to low-power showed an inversion effect for sexualized men and women. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding and found a similar effect of power for male participants perceiving sexualized images of women. We discuss our results with reference to the literatures on objectification
and the cognitive processes involved in the perception of sexualized men and women. Our study provides seminal evidence that power, rather than gender per se, may play a central role in sexual objectification.

"Sometimes dictators are benevolent. Sometimes masters are kind and gentle to their slaves. John Adams was a pretty good "husband" to Abigail Adams. But it seems like there’s something very wrong with being a dictator or a master or a spouse with the power that John Adams had over Abigail Adams in late 18th Century America. A theory of domination tries to pinpoint what’s distinctive about dictatorship and mastery and traditional husbanding, and what is distinctively wrong with such—even the benevolent, kind, gentle, and pretty good varieties.

There has been a lot of thinking about domination over the last twenty-five or so years. This is due largely to the efforts of republican political philosophers, who have used domination and its absence — nondomination — as the primary moving part in their conceptions of freedom. Even so, perhaps because domination has often appeared in a supporting role for the analysis of other concepts, conceptualizing domination itself is still a fairly nascent endeavor.

Accounts of domination need at least two movements. First, domination is a subset of a social phenomenon with—at least more or less—unobjectionable varieties. Maybe this social phenomenon is power; maybe it’s the capacity to interfere with choice; maybe something else. Whatever it is, it’s plausible to think it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s perfectly alright to have power over someone else; sometimes there’s nothing wrong with the capacity to interfere with someone’s choices. (For example, if what you’d rather do is go after your neighbor with a meat-axe, it’s a good thing if someone is in a position to interfere with you, or if your choice situation can be worsened, so that charging next door, axe in hand, without having to worry about a lengthy prison sentence is not among your options.) The first task of a theory of domination is to specify exactly what this broader social phenomenon is.

Next we need to figure out what gives domination its negative moral valence, and thus sets it apart from that broader social phenomenon. Republicans usually say that what makes domination
morally problematic is its arbitrariness. Frank Lovett claims that domination is instantiated in a social relationship between A and B only if A is permitted to exercise power over B arbitrarily (2010, 120). Philip Pettit, until recently, claimed that domination is a capacity for arbitrary interference. Marilyn Friedman calls it “arbitrary interference in someone’s choices…”(2008, 265). If that’s right, and arbitrariness is the difference maker between forms of social power that aren’t domination and those that are, we need a story about what arbitrariness is.

Such are the two essential tasks of conceptualizing domination. I offer here what I think are important course-corrections for recent attempts to complete them. In §1 I set out some desiderata for a useful conception of domination before sketching the elements of earlier attempts I think we can’t do without. §2 addresses the problem of “cheap domination”. This is the problem of identifying ordinary, innocuous human interactions with anything we call domination. I don’t think we should do this, but some of the most influential accounts of domination on offer nowadays — in particular, Lovett’s and Pettit’s — have this result. Instead, I contend that only certain forms of social power can underwrite domination, and try to provide a principled way of identifying what these forms are like. Finally, in §3, I address the nature of arbitrariness."

This paper examines the complex relationship between hospitality and organisations. It is argued that a variety of organisational practices can be understood by considering how hospitality is mobilised and experienced by multiple stakeholders. The paper begins by synthesising existing conceptions of hospitality and outlining its different dimensions. It then goes on to examine how hospitality themes and related issues emerge in, and are thus relevant to, the study of organisations and management. The paper firstly considers how hospitality is extended to or oriented towards external stakeholders and thus mobilised as tactical or strategic enchantment. It is argued that hospitality can be used purposefully to establish power relations and invoke obligations both to conform to organisational norms and to reciprocate. Secondly, the paper considers how hospitality emerges within organisational practices and may be deployed by various stakeholders as an instrument of entrenchment to perpetuate existing norms and hierarchies. However, it is also suggested that practices of hospitality can create alternative organisational spaces and networks, and hospitable acts may thus help to reconfigure power relationships and become focal points of resistance. The paper concludes by reflecting upon emerging questions, challenges and potential avenues for further research and intervention.

We present evidence that although inequality is increasing in some circumstances, the entire human power hierarchy has shifted upwards, such that even many subordinated groups are sufficiently empowered, in absolute terms, to advocate for a converging ideal of empowering participatory governance in ways they previously could not. We then assess how well governments meet this heightened popular standard. We conclude that the combination of the empowerment of the lower rungs of many states’ social hierarchies and the normalization of the ideals of empowerment by government, and overall failure of governments to meet this demand, produces a measure of distrust in authority, particularly among the disadvantaged. Disadvantaged people and groups, given their current and past experiences, may have very good reasons to distrust authority. It would be a mistake to pathologize distrust without taking such considerations into account. What the effects of this distrust are on democracy and social progress overall is a more difficult question than one might expect.

Purpose – This research aims to explore the notion of fit between subordinates’ need for cognitive closure and supervisors’ power tactics on organizational conflict management. Design/methodology/approach – Two-hundred and ninety employees drawn from six different Italian organizations were recruited for the purpose of this study. Findings – Results indicated that high-need-for-closure subordinates utilized more constructive (solution-oriented) conflict management strategies when their supervisors relied on harsh power tactics, whereas low-need-for-closure subordinates were more inclined to use solution-oriented conflict management strategies when their supervisors relied on soft power tactics. Additionally, results indicated that, overall, supervisors’ use of harsh power tactics increased subordinates reliance on maladapted (control-oriented) conflict management strategies, but even more so for subordinates with low need for cognitive closure. Originality/value – This study highlig...

This paper uses power relationship frameworks and regionalism concepts to understand two political aspects of Bhutan’s low-volume, high-yield tourism policy. The number of tourists to Bhutan has been controlled not by an annual visa quota, but by a daily minimum tariff, a required guided tour, certain spatial restrictions, and the general perception of inconvenience associated with the process of getting a visa. The controlled tourism policy, however, is limited only to western tourists, who represent only a quarter of arrivals. Although Bhutan has been able to minimize the environmental and cultural impacts of western tourists through its low-volume, high-yield tourism policy, this is more related to power and regional politics than simply a quest for sustainable tourism.

Abstract
Title: A Concise Model of Local-Level Politics in South Africa
Professor Robert Thornton, Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand
Standard models of political power and behaviour derived from Liberal, Democratic or other classical models of political behaviour do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South Africa.  Here a model is suggested that is based on a different set of political concepts and processes.  I argue, first of all, that there is a set of four inter-linked ‘principles’ or concepts that structure political action and sentiment.  These are the principles of (1) the equivalence of persons, (2) respect, (3) jealousy, and (4) suffering.  The principle of ‘equivalence of persons’ posits that all members of the political community (especially adult males) are morally and ontologically equivalent—not ‘equal’—since institutions of and the moral justification for hierarchy are largely absent, and because underlying systems of kinship continue to specify the equivalence of siblings (Fortes).  Morally justified distinctions between persons, and qualities of leadership, are specified and rationalised in terms of ‘respect’ (hlonipa).  Jealousy enforces the principle of equivalence, and acts to regulate and suppress most other kinds of distinction in local level political communities.  Suffering—expressed as the quality of having suffered, and demonstrable fortitude in the face of suffering—is the primary pathway to achievement of respect that cannot be undermined by jealousy.  These principles form a resilient and powerful structure that govern political action, and are significantly different from the bureaucratic/democratic concepts of (political & jural) equality, (hierarchical) distinction, organisational discipline, and personal achievement that ideally structure action in the ‘modern’ bureaucratic/democratic organisations of national government and global corporate business.  In addition, the principles of ‘exit’ and ‘exile’ are advanced as ways to understand the relationship between the local-level politics and national or global-level political process.  ‘Exit’ specifies the escape from the moral sanctions (jealousy, equivalence) of the local-level political community that is taken by those who achieve distinction through achievement, especially through education or employment in government or business.  Exile is the route taken by criminals, witches and other social offenders.  These concepts help us to understand problems such as the apparent ‘tolerance’ for crime and corruption.  These principles also help us to define the nature and flexibility of the boundaries of the political community at the local level, and to understand the operation of social sanctions on political mis-behaviour.

Analysing two quite rarely considered Max Weber’s essays on social inquiry and on the problems of social psychology the Author places them within the coordinates of weberian historical research
about ethics and the spirit of capitalism. These two essays of 1908-09 anticipate many of the principal themes emerging in the successive methodological and political writings of Max Weber.
At first Weber discusses the bias between qualitative and quantitative sociological research in order to determinate the role of subjective motivations inside the objective conditions of capitalist domination. The analysis of the relationship between entrepreneur and workers becomes consequently an important pointer to understand in which way Weber concretely intends the social relationship and the sources of power and authority. The weberian reconstruction of social life in the factory meets in fact the possibility of the interruption of the association based on a disciplined obedience. As registered by Weber in the two categories of Macht and Herrschaft in this situation changes the perception to be submitted to an anonymous power and emerges the presence of a personal domination.

Lorsque rap et hip-hop apparaissent en France au tournant des années 1980, nombreux sont ceux qui n'y voient qu'un phénomène éphémère. Trente ans plus tard, ce genre musical est non seulement bien vivant, mais il fait durablement partie des industries musicales, et la scène rap française est même l'une des plus visibles au niveau international. Comment le rap est-il né en France et comment s'est-il développé ? Qui a tiré profit de la commercialisation de ses chansons ? Pourquoi ce genre musical est-il si étroitement associé aux banlieues ? Qui sont les artistes qui l'ont promu, et en s'appuyant sur quelles ressources ? Pourquoi continue-t-il régulièrement à déchaîner les passions ? Emaillé de nombreux entretiens réalisés auprès de rappeurs, de DJ, d'animateurs, de professionnels de l'industrie du disque... ce livre décrit comment l'émergence et l'inscription durable du rap en France ont été possibles. En s'intéressant aux artistes, mais aussi aux amateurs, en circulant des MJC des quartiers populaires aux bancs de l'Assemblée nationale, en observant les plateaux de télévision et les radios locales, Karim Hammou montre comment s'est imposée en France une nouvelle spécialité artistique, fondée sur une forme d'interprétation originale, ni parlée ni chantée : rappée.

Power is often taken to be a central concept in social and political thought that can contribute to the explanation of many different social phenomena. This article argues that in order to play this role, a general theory of power is required to identify a stable causal capacity, one that does not depend on idiosyncratic social conditions and can thus exert its characteristic influence in a wide range of cases. It considers three promising strategies for such a theory, which ground power in (1) the ability to use force, (2) access to resources, or (3) collective acceptance. It shows that these strategies fail to identify a stable causal capacity. The lack of an adequate general theory of power suggests that the concept lacks the necessary unity to play the broad explanatory role it is often accorded.

CHAPTER EIGHT

RETROSPECT AND SOME REFLECTIONS

Since this book is already to a considerable extent a summary, it could not be summarized without some loss of essential qualifications and nuances. But history books ought to sum up their conclusions, and so this chapter aims to bring out the main themes of the previous seven chapters and to develop them a little further.
It should be plain, first of all, that we can gain a great deal from comparing the Romans of widely diverse periods. Strange to say, the Romans who constructed an empire and the Romans who lost one have very seldom met each other in the pages of a scholarly history. The contrast between these two populations is extremely illuminating. While it is in any case reasonably obvious that the Romans of the third and second centuries BC were warlike and very often aggressive, no one who compares their behaviour with the behaviour of the markedly different Romans of late antiquity could possibly doubt it. Conversely, no one who has studied the mid-republican Romans could possibly write very favourably about the military capacities of the Roman state in either of the two late-antique periods described in Chapters 6 and 7.
More contestably, if we contemplate the cohesive and disciplined Roman state of the Middle Republic, the fragmented and distracted world of the Roman state in the age of Theodosius I and his sons becomes even more obviously dysfunctional. And this applies still more to the empire of Phocas and Heraclius and to the fragments of it that passed to their successors. 
Throughout this book I have attempted to correlate the workings of external power and the workings of internal power. Thus we have been concerned with military, political, social and economic power all at the same time, but also with gender power and the power of ideas, and with all the channels, especially ideological ones, through which power was exercised. And it has constantly been necessary to ask how much these historical processes disclose the dominance of a single social class.
I asked at the outset why Roman power spread so widely and lasted so long. Many factors worked together in the Middle Republic to produce an extraordinary though not uninterrupted train of military victories: these factors included geographical location and demographic success, which was greatly assisted by the enslavement of defeated enemies and by the incorporation of manumitted slaves. And the Romans’ exceptional devotion to war becomes visible from virtually the beginning of their well-recorded history.
  By the last decade of the fourth century BC, if not earlier, Rome’s resources overshadowed those of most of its chosen enemies.  With exceptional skill, Rome managed to exploit the manpower resources of other communities, at first the Latins, then, by the 270s at the latest, other Italians.  Another feature that emerges clearly by the time of the first war with Carthage is Rome’s capacity for absorbing military technology from other nations.
Social discipline, however, was crucial, including the discipline that sustained aristocratic competition while never letting it get out of hand. There is no sign at all in this period that ordinary Romans were reluctant to serve in the army, but an aristocracy, very powerful though not all-powerful, guided the state’s external policy and did so in a consistent fashion. Much in all this remains uncertain of course – there are hardly any contemporary texts, and we do not know for instance whether the pathological and intimidating violence that Polybius and his informants saw in Roman soldiers already differentiated them from other Italian peoples around, say, 300 BC.   
We are better informed about the ‘organizational techniques’ (to repeat Michael Mann’s phrase) that enabled Rome to hold on to what it had won in peninsular Italy, and they have been studied extensively: colonization, land-confiscations, road-building, the spread of Roman citizenship and Italian identity, together with a limited degree of cultural and religious interference. Rome always tended to favour the local men of wealth and power if they were willing to cooperate, as many of them were.
It only just worked: Hannibal came fairly close to destroying  Rome’s control over peninsular Italy, and the anger of the Italians themselves boiled over in the widespread revolt of 91-90 BC. But on both occasions there were so many Italian ‘allies’ who were either favourable to Rome or at any rate disinclined to take up arms in rebellion that Rome prevailed.
Explaining Rome’s military success in its conflicts with the other great Mediterranean powers, down to the destruction of Carthage in 146, is another challenging task. Carthage and Macedon disappeared as independent states, and the empire of the Seleucids, much reduced, had to recognize it subordinate role after the Battle of Pydna in 168. Naval power was crucial: between 260 (the Battle of Mylae) and 190 (the Battle of Myonnesos) Rome appropriated the Mediterranean, aided once again by several advantages – in particular, the economic resources necessary for the construction and renewal of large fleets, and the more or less voluntary cooperation of Greek cities possessed of naval expertise. But the majority of Rome’s fighting over this 120-year period was on land, against many different opponents. It was often an unequal contest, but that was not at first the case with the great Mediterranean powers, and indeed it was not a foregone conclusion either that Rome would conquer a large part of Iberia. Roman armies always prevailed in the end, for reasons that are to a considerable degree unfathomable. Discipline, both social and military, had much to do with it once again, and discipline was at the centre of Polybius’ explanation. He also told how the ferocity of Roman soldiers intimidated their Macedonian counterparts, who at the time were probably as tough as any others in the Mediterranean world.
As in Italy, so in the territories that Rome came to control down to 146, the victors devised organizational techniques that were fully sufficient to sustain long-term control: provinces and new magistracies, diplomacy of a much more ambitious kind, accompanied by appropriate slogans, together with, once again, support for cooperative local men of property; on the other hand, brutal displacement when it was considered necessary, culminating in the destruction of the historic cities of Carthage and Corinth and the distribution of their land to Roman and Italian settlers.
Rome suffered some spectacular military defeats during the remaining 130 years of unrelenting imperial expansion – in particular at Arausio (105), Carrhae (53), and the Teutoburg Forest (9 AD) – the inevitable consequences, we may say, of a highly aggressive, sometimes over-confident, manner of dealing with the outside world. But the overall record was still triumphant, for Rome’s resources and commitment were enough to deal with any remaining enemy anywhere in the Mediterranean area or in northern Europe – with one exception, the empire of the Parthians. In the north, however, Roman determination flagged at a crucial time (from 9 AD onwards) -- for good rational reasons – and so the lands to the east of the Rhine and north of the Danube remained free.
Through all this era of republican and Augustan expansion, we can relate Rome’s external and internal power relations. The broad outlines are clear: competition between aristocrats in a warrior society, a society furthermore in which citizen power did not produce detectable democratic aspirations of a serious kind until the age of the Gracchi, demanded constant warfare. Military prestige remained indispensable to anyone who claimed to rule, at least down to the time of Tiberius. In the end imperial expansion became less attractive in large part because it did not suit the monarchical ruler to entrust large army commands to potential rivals, or to raise added revenue for this purpose.
CONTINUES.

Power is present in each individual and in every relationship.  It is defined as the ability of a group to get another group to take some form of desired action, usually by consensual power and sometimes by force (Holmes, Hughes & Julian, 2007).

In society governments, organisations and an elite class of people make decisions that affect the lives of a large mass of other people.  A significant amount of research shows these decisions are often made to serve their own economic interests and values of which includes the means of production and property ownership (Holmes et al, 2007; Walters & Crook, 1995; Haralambos & Holborn, 1990; McGregor, 2000).

These decisions cause inequality in society and resentment from people who are excluded from the decision making process.  The unequalness of this decision-making and power allocation enables the fortunate to enforce their will on the less fortunate (Graetz, 2001, Walters & Crook, 1995).

This essay discusses power from two sociological views; the Conflict perspective, predominately from Karl Marx and the Elite theory perspective.  These theories show that power is distributed unequally in society where governments, a ruling class, media and business elites hold the majority of power over others.

La notion de corruption désigne la captation illicite de moyens publics
à des fins privées. Cet ouvrage propose une approche originale de
la corruption en engageant une analyse philosophique qui s’inscrit
dans le fil de la pensée machiavélienne d’inspiration républicaine. La
corruption apparaît comme un mal parce qu’elle rompt la condition
d’égalité entre les citoyens. Le fait qu’elle perdure dans les démocraties
contemporaines sous des formes variées suggère une certaine faillite
de la thèse de Max Weber, à propos de la transformation des sociétés
modernes progressivement régies par « l’autorité légale-rationnelle ».
Cela souligne également la réalité d’un pouvoir social structurant, un
pouvoir oblique, dont l’ouvrage s’attache à comprendre la logique par
l’observation de cas d’espèce. Le problème posé par la corruption
ne peut se régler par une approche purement juridique. On ne peut
pas non plus, pour les démocraties pluralistes d’aujourd’hui, espérer
ranimer la vertu civique des Anciens. Dans nos sociétés « d’après la
vertu civique », traversées par certaines formes irréductibles du pouvoir
oblique, quelle éthique publique est donc aujourd’hui possible ?

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

New technologies in communications and networking have shaped the way political power can be generated in important ways. Recent popular uprisings have shown dramatically how a people can communicate its cause effectively beyond borders
through social networking channels and mobile phone technologies. Hannah Arendt, as one of the most eminent scholars of power and politics in the modern era, would surely have a word or two to say about the implications and uses of social networks and modern means of communication and their impact on politics as praxis. This paper creates an account of how Hannah Arendt might have conceived of virtual social networks and modern means of communications technology in the context of creating spaces and possibilities for political action. It explores whether Arendt might have considered these virtual means of “shared appearances” to either facilitate or frustrate efforts in the formation of political power and the creation of new beginnings. Based on a contemporary reading of her writings, the paper considers the pros and cons of modern means of communications and their impact on both popular power and state power, and consequently offers an analysis of the use
and instrumentality of such means for effective political action.

In this paper, I develop a functionalist theory of social domination to compete with current theories of this kind of social power that have arisen with and from the work of Philip Pettit. On the latter view, the basic structure of domination is seen as the capacity for “arbitrary interference” of one agent in the life choices of another agent.  According to this account, domination is performed by agents, acting arbitrarily, within structured social relationships, but are not seen as being caused by those social structures or systems themselves. On my alternative account, modern forms of domination need to be seen as outside of the interests of agents themselves and instead as part of the functions of the social systems and institutions within which agents are socialized, live, work, and to which they become adapted. On this view, domination becomes not a property of agency but a central property of the social facts that make up the process of socialization itself.  Domination is social and systemic, in this sense, and it persists because of the particular social forms that are held as legitimate by broad segments of any population.

Frågan om kunskap och makt följs tätt åt i de projekt som Michel Foucault har genomfört inom genealogierna över Vansinnets och Sexualitetens historia. Foucault berör i dessa verk också hur de individualiserade praktikerna för självkontroll kan hänga ihop med större moraliska system eller regelmässiga maktutövningar.