Political Sociology

Power: A Sociological Analysis

Semester – III
 Aphorism
The measure of a man is what s/he does
with power.
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power
corrupts absolutely.
Sociologist’s Eye

Power is the ability to exercise one’s

will over others.
- Max Weber
 Understanding Power
• In simple terms power refers to the ability of a
person to influence the behavior of another
person or a group of persons in accordance with
his/her own wish.
• In simplest possible term the word power means
the ability to affect or control the decisions,
policies, values or fortunes of others.
• Power is an essentially contested concept.
Different Sites of Power in Society

• Parliament
Executive
• Judiciary
• Executive
• People at large
People Power Legislature
• Capitalist
• Real Estate
Investors
Judiciary
• Bureaucrats
 What is Power?
• Ability to exert pressure/ a medium to produce
outcome/ strength
• In social and political theory the word power is
used to suggest the control to produce or alter or
reach at the certain result with or without
consent within social-territorial boundary.
• need to understand power in a broadest possible
sense.
 Different Conceptions of Power
• One can think of power in different ways. For example,
power can be productive, exploitative, or power can be
ubiquitous or power can take the form of hegemony.
• Two Views on Power
• Consolidated/Classical/Elite/Managerial
• Dispersed/Contemporary/Liberal

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 Marxist Understanding of Power
• This definition or understanding has been
challenged by those who locate power at the
collective level and attribute it to structures.
• Marxist theory is one such theory that view
power as distributed (unequally) society (class-
differentiated and divided), where one class (i.e.,
ruling class) own the means of production and
exercise power over others (i.e., working class).

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 Feminist Understanding of Power

• Feminist theory is another perspective that

understand power as located within structures of
patriarchy, which ensures that there is a
systematic domination over women by men.
• Power, in this sense, is seen as located within
structures. And, individuals derive their power
from their location within a structure.
 Power is not simply Domination.

• Those who see power as more dispersed quality they make

sense power as “power to” and not as “power over”.
• Power, in this sense is used as an enhanced capacity
emerging from collective action.
• This view is associated with Hannah Arendt. According to
this view, power is enabling and power is generated
when people communicate and act together in a shared
ways.
• In this sense, having power is the basis on which people
can or able to act together as a morally responsible human
being.
 Conception of Power
• The word power in our day to day life used in many
sense. For example, it is used to refer as an ability,
strength, capacity etc.
• However, in social and political theory, however,
power refers to the ability to do things and the
capacity to produce effects within social interaction.
• In this sense, power is a type of behavior and
specifically derives from the existence of social
relationships and social interactions.
 The Conceptualization of Power

• Political sociologists have traditionally organized the

study of the relationships between society, politics, and
power into three frameworks:
– the pluralist,
– the elite-managerial, and
– the social-class perspectives.
• These frameworks represent very different views of
– how power is distributed in society
– how politics is socially organized, and
– how significant individuals, groups, organizations, and the state
are.
 Power
• Political sociologists have consistently studied forms of
power and patterns of social–political interactions,
beginning especially with the work of Max Weber.
• Power is about the distribution of resources among
individuals, groups, and social structures.
• Some believe that power is more complex than the mere
distribution of resources (e.g., wealth, knowledge or
skills, and property).
• The notion of power is based on the idea that power is
meaningful in social connections, or
“interdependencies.”
 Power
• Political sociology casts its analytical net broadly to capture the
nature of the many power-based relationships between social
structures, culture, and individuals.
• Political sociologists have revealed the forms and nuances of the
abstract notion of power by creating typologies of power.
• These various typologies highlight the nature of power in
situations or the characteristics of power as they play important
roles in the construction and distribution of power in society.
• These various typologies and conceptualizations of power share
the notion that society shapes and is shaped by individuals,
groups, organizations, governments, and other societies in a
broadly interactive process.
 Pluralist
• Pluralism finds that power is fragmented. They view power as
balanced as a result of the multitude of groups bargaining for roles
in the political processes.
• The pluralist approach to the study of politics and society is based
on the assertion that power is distributed throughout society
among a “plurality” of power centers.
• Various centres within society compete for power. These power
centers include political parties, interest groups, voters,
associations, and a variety of other social actors.
• Pluralists view the state is characterized by checks and balances
and as a structure that retains legitimate power (authority) to
guard the rules of the political process.
 Elite/Managerial
• This is in stark contrast to the pluralist perspective.
• The focus here is on the concentration of power in society in
the hands of few.
• The elite perspective explains the concentration of power in
society by focusing on social groups, organizations,
bureaucracies, and elite circles of interaction.
• It is the elite power that controls the distribution of resources
in society through its various structures and complex
organizations.
• Social elite controls these complex organizations and
ultimately uses bureaucracies to exercise power are a principal
focus of traditional elite approaches in political sociology.
 The Game of Power: Three Possibilities

• Power may work to ensure that a specific set of

interest prevail over others.
• Certain issues or interest never come up for
discussion at all. This happen in the case of
maintenance of hegemony; issues never come up in
the public domain.
• The third view is: Power seems to be assumed to be
operating even if their seems to be no
apparent/hidden/structural conflict of interest.
People’s real interests are hidden from them.
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 Continue…
• Second and third view of power is often a contested
phenomena because it hinges on many factors, like
interest of participants, knowledge, awareness,
morality and ethics.
• Since some people believe that society should be
based on equitable and ethical principle and people
also contest the point about the organising principles
of society or how society should function or even
what is just or equitable, it seems that there is bound
to have some disagreement over the mutually and
rationally agreed formulation of what power is.

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 Attributes of Power
• Power is a multidimensional phenomena.
• Power entails a social relationship between at least
two people or group of people. To say that individual
has power is meaningless unless it is stated that over
whom this power is exercised.
• The use of sanction in imposing one’s will is an
important constituent of power.
• Power often gives rise to asymmetry in relationship.
• Power yields formation of relationship based on
subordination and super-ordination or domination
and submission.
 Attributes of Power
• Power has the ability to determine behavior of others.
• Power in society is often conditioned by different social
factors and processes and investigate and analyze
sources, limitations, and potentials of power in the
society.
• Those who have greater access to limited resources, e.g.,
control over finances, ownership or control over means of
production and or means of distribution are more
powerful than those who do not have the means or the
opportunity to control such resources.
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 Attributes of Power
• Politics is the art of shaping and sharing power.
• It is inseparable from social power and social life.
• Political sociology is concerned with the
consequences of play of power in social
relationships embedded in the system that power
relationship pervades in a society.

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 Power and Legality
• When rules are complied with or obeyed, it
suggests that it has the consent of the citizens;
that they affirm a belief in legality.
• Such a system is assumed to be legitimate, and
power that is complied with because it has
legitimacy is termed authority.
• Max Weber distinguished three kinds of
authority—rational-legal, traditional, and
charismatic.

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Authority & Legitimate Power
• Authority is a form of power that emerges from the
acquiescence of individuals and groups based on a sense
of legitimacy and obedience or duty.
• Individuals and groups within society create order by
recognizing the power of law, tradition, or custom.
• They behave based on the belief that the power of the
state protects members of society while preserving
community interests.
 Types of Authority and
Legitimacy
• Authority is a type of power that articulates, order or
control the actions of others.
• Authority is a formal looking term. This looks legitimate,
right, and also sometimes righteous.
• Weber has provided a sociological explanation of
people’s compliance to authority-
– Traditional Authority
– Charismatic Authority
– Rational-legal Authority
 Rational-Legal authority
• Rational-legal authority is characteristic of the
modern industrial bureaucratic state. Here, those
who occupy positions of power, exercise their power
and are obeyed on the basis of impersonal rules
that can be justified on rational grounds.
• Rational-legal authority is grounded in rules by
which people are governed.
• Legitimacy stems from an appeal to law, commands,
and decision making that is regarded as valid for all
in the population.
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 Traditional Authority
• Traditional authority exists because of historical
and cultural reasons.
• Traditional authority rests on customs, rituals, and
orality.
• It commands obedience of the people on the basis of
unwritten. They are internally binding.
• Traditional authority gains its legitimacy through
custom and tradition.
• There is a certain sacred dimension to these
traditions or appeals to customs that results in
acquiescence to authority.
 Charismatic Authority
• Charismatic authority exists because of some
personal quality possessed by an individual who
may not have either modern official status or
traditional authority. Gandhi, Martin Luther King
etc.
 Power
• Michel Foucault conceptualised power as not repressive—that is, in the
modern era, power does not operate by preventing us from doing what
we want. Rather, Foucault suggests that power is productive.
• Power is not a thing or substance, it is not embodied in an institution or
a group of people—power is exercised as a technique.
• The only way it can be identified is when it is exercised by some people
over others. This is why, for Foucault, an important indication of the
existence of power is a display of resistance to it.
• Power produces identity and subjectivity.
• Further, power does not emanate from a single source, whether the
state or the ruling classes. Power in this sense is just like capillary,
flowing throughout the system like blood in the capillaries of our body.

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 Robert Dahl
A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to
do something which B would not otherwise do.
This definition assumes two things about power:
– (a) power is an attribute of individuals which is
exercised over other individuals, and
– (b) power is domination over others, that is, power is
used to make others do what one wants, against their
own will.
 Talcott Parsons
• Talcott Parsons developed an account of political power,
which treated it as the analogue of money in economic
systems.
• That is to say, he thought of power as something that
circulates in society the way money does.
• Parsons equated power with the money and said, money
circulates in an economic system the way power circulates in a
society.
• This is called facilitative dimension of power.
• This suggests that just as the possession of money enables the
capacity to secure economic goods and services, so the
possession of power enables the capacity to secure the
performance of political obligations.
DIMENSIONS OF POWER
 Political Power
• Political power belongs to the body polity which is
manifested and represented through the agencies
like, executive, legislature, judiciary, and
sometimes through organs like Bureaucracy and
Police.
 Economic Power
• Economic power depends upon the political
power. It manifests in the ownership and control
of wealth and assets.
• Liberal view suggests that one can gain or achieve
economic power on the basis of their work and
yearning. On the other hand Marxists suggest
only capitalist has economic power.
 Social Power
• When power is distributed and dispersed on the
basis of social location in the society.
• Max Weber refers to understanding of Power

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 Ideological Power
• Marx says that the ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling class, i.e., the class which
is the ruling material force of society is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force.
 Different viewpoints
• Liberal viewpoint: Political power is dispersed
and diffused throughout the society. It varies
from hand to hands.
• Marxist understanding of power suggests that
power is concentrated in the hands of dominant
class. It is common view that capitalist class
benefits at the cost of others.
 A Sociological Account of Power

• Power is ubiquitous, productive and is also relational.

• There is tangible consequences of intangible power.
• We can as a human being can apply our critical capacity to
question the validity of habitualised realities.
• As a discursive force power permeates both our symbolic
and material practices.
• Power is corporeal. Power is always already part of who
we are, not only as what we accomplish.
• Although power is polycentric, some sources of power are
more influential than others.

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 Governmentality
• Governmentality is process through which the subject formation
tales place through the mechanisms of governmentality. This is a
process of subjection in which the production of governable
identities happen. This operate through a variety of discourses
and through a huge bureaucratic machinery. Every individual is
made to conform to the dominant norms.
• This is obvious when we think of our identities in terms of race,
caste, religion and so on. This subject is created and subjected to
classification and surveillance through things, like, identity cards,
passports and so on. through which we can be tracked, and in
which we have to state who we are for example, Indian/Pakistani,
Hindu/Muslim, educated/illiterate, etc.
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