Power

How it is used

Many courses start from Weber, who defined power as the chance to carry out one's will even against resistance and separated it from authority, which is power seen as legitimate. Later thinkers such as Lukes, Gramsci and Foucault widened the idea to include agenda-setting, ideas and everyday practices.

Example sentences

1. For Weber, power becomes authority when people accept it as legitimate.

2. Foucault was interested in how power works through everyday institutions such as schools and prisons.

Common collocations

• power relations
• exercise power
• balance of power
• power and authority
• structures of power

Related terms

• hegemonyLeadership or domination by one group that rests mainly on consent, achieved when its values and ideas come to be accepted by others as common sense.
• ideologyA set of ideas and beliefs that explains how society works and how it should work, and that often supports the interests of a particular group.
• bureaucracyA large organisation run through a hierarchy of offices, written rules, specialised tasks and impersonal procedures, as described by Max Weber.
• conflict theoryA group of theories that see society as shaped by struggles between groups with unequal power and resources, such as classes, genders or ethnic groups.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• power · Electrical & Electronics Engineering
• power · Physics

More terms: Social Structure and Institutions

• social structure
• social institution
• status
• social role
• ascribed status
• achieved status
• division of labour
• capitalism
• social network