MGMT 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Flattening, Manufacturing Consent, Politicking With Larry King
POWER AND POLITICS
• Power is the chance of an actor (individual or collective entity) to realise their own will
in a social event, even against the resistance of others. It can mean forcing others to
do things against their will, or be more positive when it shapes and frames what
others do
• Organisational politics refers to the network of social relations between people in and
around an organisation, whether willingly or not, in practices of power
• French and Raven
• Expert power – knowledge and expertise
• Referent power – identification and admiration
• Legitimate power – authority
• Reward power – positive incentives for targets to comply
• Coercive power – threats
• Legitimacy attaches to something, whether a particular action or social structure,
when there is widespread belief that is it just and valid. It is achieved through the
‘management of meaning’ – a double action as it seeks to create legitimacy for one’s
actions while simultaneously seeking to de-legitimise those it opposes
• Structural (critical) theories of power
• Marx: ideology represents a particular interest of a dominant few
• Gramsci: hegemony or manufactured consent
• Foucault: power knowledge (control is exercised through the management of
freedom or self-regulation; surveillance is a form of power)
• There are two ways of exercising power: winning acquiescence or concent, or
through the coercion of others
• There are four faces of power within organisations
• Coercion involves one individual forcing another to follow their orders
• A had power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something B
would otherwise not do
• It exists within the relationship between social actors rather than
residing within the actors themselves
• Manipulation of agendas through behind-the-scenes politicking
• Domination over the preferences and opinions of others
• How power can manipulate others to do something they may not
actually want to do by changing what it is they want (i.e. they
‘voluntarily’ act against their own interests)
• Subjectification whereby actors are constituted subjects with certain
understandings of themselves and their world
• Power is omnipresent, co-extensive and everywhere, diffused and
embodied in discourse and knowledge
• Power and knowledge directly imply one another (i.e. what counts as
knowledge is ultimately an effect of power)
• Power and governmentality – the knowledge produced allows for the control of
governance on how individuals will behave in certain contexts from inside the
subject, from the subject itself (e.g. Bentham’s panopticon)
• Uncertainty is the inability to know how to continue some action, a lack of rule or
undecidability about which rule to apply
• Theories of power in management
• Strategic contingencies theory assumes management’s definitions prevail.
Sometimes they do, in which case management has exercised power, but
when they do not, management is outmaneuvered
• Resource dependence theory focuses on how managers in organisations
secure the flow of resources essential for survival. Organisations strive to
influence organisations upon which they are dependent for scarce and critical
resources
• Post-bureaucratic organising and disciplinary power
Document Summary
Power and politics: power is the chance of an actor (individual or collective entity) to realise their own will in a social event, even against the resistance of others. Sometimes they do, in which case management has exercised power, but when they do not, management is outmaneuvered: resource dependence theory focuses on how managers in organisations secure the flow of resources essential for survival. Managers will also be caught on tape therefore giving the appearance that there is power equality: politics are a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in other group interactions including corporate, academic and religious institutions. Identify principle agents of political influence: determining the channels of informal communication, analyse possibilities for mobilising internal and external players, anticipate counter-strategies that others are likely to employ, networking and building coalitions.
