Technical and Business Writing

Assignment

Submitted to:
Sir Humayun Adil
Submitted by:
Name: Roll Number:
Javeria Ijaz BSEF16M011
M. Sajawal Khan BSEF16M017
M. Uzair BSEF16M037
Salman Riaz BSEF16M031
M. Bilal Majeed BSEF16M024
POWER DYNAMICS
 Introduction
What is power?

In social science and politics, power is the capacity of an individual to influence the conduct
(behavior) of others. The term "authority" is often used for power that is perceived as
legitimate by the social structure.
Power can be seen as evil or unjust, this sort of primitive exercise of power is historically
endemic to humans, however as social beings the same concept is seen as good and as
something inherited or given for exercising humanistic objectives that will help, enable and
move people.

In general, it is derived by the factors of interdependence between two entities and the
environment. In business, the ethical instrumentality of power is achievement, and as such it
is a zero-sum game. In simple terms it can be expressed as being "upward" or "downward".
With downward power, a company's superior influences subordinates for attaining
organizational goals. When a company exerts upward power, it is the subordinates who
influence the decisions of their leader or leaders.

Five bases of Power

Social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven, in a now-classic study (1959),
developed a schema of sources of power by which to analyze how power plays work (or fail
to work) in a specific relationship.
According to French and Raven, power must be distinguished from influence in the following
way: power is that state of affairs which holds in a given relationship, A-B, such that a given
influence attempt by A over B makes A's desired change in B more likely. Conceived this way,
power is fundamentally relative – it depends on the specific understandings A and B each
apply to their relationship, and requires B's recognition of a quality in A which would motivate
B to change in the way A intends. A must draw on the 'base' or combination of bases of power
appropriate to the relationship, to effect the desired outcome. Drawing on the wrong power
base can have unintended effects, including a reduction in A's own power.

 Legitimate power:

Also called "positional power," it is the power of an individual because of the relative
position and duties of the holder of the position within an organization. Legitimate
power is formal authority delegated to the holder of the position. It is usually
accompanied by various attributes of power such as a uniform, a title, or an imposing
physical office.

 Referent power:

Referent power is the power or ability of individuals to attract others and build loyalty.
It is based on the charisma and interpersonal skills of the power holder. A person may
be admired because of specific personal trait, and this admiration creates the
opportunity for interpersonal influence. Here the person under power desires to
identify with these personal qualities, and gains satisfaction from being an accepted
follower. Nationalism and patriotism count towards an intangible sort of referent
power. For example, soldiers fight in wars to defend the honor of the country.

 Expert power:

Expert power is an individual's power deriving from the skills or expertise of the
person and the organization's needs for those skills and expertise. Unlike the others,
this type of power is usually highly specific and limited to the particular area in which
the expert is trained and qualified. When they have knowledge and skills that enable
them to understand a situation, suggest solutions, use solid judgment, and generally
outperform others, then people tend to listen to them.

 Reward power:
 Reward power depends on the ability of the power wielder to confer valued material
rewards, it refers to the degree to which the individual can give others a reward of
some kind such as benefits, time off, desired gifts, promotions or increases in pay or
responsibility. This power is obvious but also ineffective if abused. People who abuse
reward power can become pushy or be reprimanded for being too forthcoming or
'moving things too quickly'. If others expect to be rewarded for doing what someone
wants, there's a high probability that they'll do it.

 Coercive power:

Coercive power is the application of negative influences. It includes the ability to

demote or to withhold other rewards. The desire for valued rewards or the fear of
having them withheld that ensures the obedience of those under power. Coercive
power tends to be the most obvious but least effective form of power as it builds
resentment and resistance from the people who experience it. Threats and
punishment are common tools of coercion.

Power Dynamics

What is Power Dynamics?

The forces which stimulate development or change within a system

or process. In general, "power dynamics" refers to the way power
works in a setting. I expect a discussion of power dynamics to refer
to specific interactions or ways in which power is exercised.

Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping
understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an
instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors
operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse,
knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’.
 Michel Foucault (1926–84) and his
research in the field of
Power Dynamics

Biography:

Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault,
was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.

Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship

between power and knowledge, and how they are used as
a form of social control through societal institutions.
Though often cited as a post-structuralist and
postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring
to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His
thought has influenced academics, especially those
working in communication studies, sociology, cultural
studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory.
Activist groups have also found his theories compelling.

Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family,

Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he
developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite
and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in
philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to
France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining
work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth
of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications which displayed his
increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first
three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called
"archaeology".

From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France,
where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of
Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970,
Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death.
He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism
and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish
(1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and
genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society.

Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first
public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES
charity in his memory.

Foucault: Power is Everywhere

Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping
understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an
instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors
operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse,
knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’. Power for Foucault is what makes us what we are,
operating on a quite different level from other theories:

‘His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be
easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied
and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes
agents rather than being deployed by them.

Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’
or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive.
‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor
a structure (Foucault 1998: 63). Instead it is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ that
pervades society, and which is in constant flux and negotiation. Foucault uses the term
‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of
knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’:

‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general
politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true;
the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the
means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the
acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’
(Foucault, in Rabinow 1991).

These ‘general politics’ and ‘regimes of truth’ are the result of scientific discourse and
institutions, and are reinforced (and redefined) constantly through the education system, the
media, and the flux of political and economic ideologies. In this sense, the ‘battle for truth’ is
not for some absolute truth that can be discovered and accepted, but is a battle about ‘the
rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power are
attached to the true’… a battle about ‘the status of truth and the economic and political role
it plays’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). This is the inspiration for Hayward’s focus on power as
boundaries that enable and constrain possibilities for action, and on people’s relative
capacities to know and shape these boundaries (Hayward 1998).

Foucault is one of the few writers on power who recognize that power is not just a negative,
coercive or repressive thing that forces us to do things against our wishes, but can also be a
necessary, productive and positive force in society (Gaventa 2003: 2):

‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it
‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power
produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The
individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’

The Phenomenon of Discourse

Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to:

“Ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices,

forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such
knowledge and relations between them. Discourses are more than
ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the 'nature'
of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of
the subjects they seek to govern (Weedon, 1987, p. 108).

... a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to
strategies of domination as well as those of resistance (Diamond and
Quinby, 1988, p. 185).”
Foucault's work is imbued with an attention to history, not in the traditional sense of the word
but in attending to what he has variously termed the 'archaeology' or 'genealogy' of
knowledge production. That is, he looks at the continuities and discontinuities between
'epistemes' (taken by Foucault to mean the knowledge systems which primarily informed the
thinking during certain periods of history: a different one being said to dominate each
epistemological age), and the social context in which certain knowledge and practices
emerged as permissible and desirable or changed. In his view knowledge is inextricably
connected to power, such that they are often written as power/knowledge.

Foucault's conceptual analysis of a major shift in (western) cultural practices, from 'sovereign
power' to 'disciplinary power', in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), is a
good example of his method of genealogy. He charts the transition from a top-down form of
social control in the form of physical coercion meted out by the sovereign to a more diffuse
and insidious form of social surveillance and process of 'normalization'. The latter, says
Foucault, is encapsulated by Bentham's Panopticon; a nineteenth century prison system in
which prison cells were arranged around a central watchtower from which the supervisor
could watch inmates, yet the inmates could never be certain when they were being watched,
therefore, over time, they began to police their own behavior. The Panopticon has become
the metaphor for the processes whereby disciplinary 'technologies', together with the
emergence of a normative social science, 'police' both the mind and body of the modern
individual (see Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 143-67).

Power, in Weedon's (1987) interpretation of Foucault is:

“…a dynamic of control and lack of control between discourses and

the subjects, constituted by discourses, who are their agents. Power
is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and
govern individual subjects (p. 113).”

Foucault's focus is upon questions of how some discourses have shaped and created meaning
systems that have gained the status and currency of 'truth', and dominate how we define and
organize both ourselves and our social world, whilst other alternative discourses are
marginalized and subjugated, yet potentially 'offer' sites where hegemonic practices can be
contested, challenged and 'resisted'. He has looked specifically at the social construction of
madness, punishment and sexuality. In Foucault's view, there is no fixed and definitive
structuring of either social (or personal) identity or practices, as there is in a socially
determined view in which the subject is completely socialized. Rather, both the formation of
identities and practices are related to, or are a function of, historically specific discourses. An
understanding of how these and other discursive constructions are formed may open the way
for change and contestation.
Foucault developed the concept of the 'discursive field' as part of his attempt to understand
the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power. Discursive
fields, such as the law or the family, contain a number of competing and contradictory
discourses with varying degrees of power to give meaning to and organize social institutions
and processes. They also 'offer' a range of modes of subjectivity (Weedon, 1987, p. 35). It
follows then that,

“…if relations of power are dispersed and fragmented throughout the

social field, so must resistance to power be (Diamond & Quinby, 1988,
p. 185).”

Foucault argues though, in The Order of Discourse, that the 'will to truth' is the major system
of exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure and something
like a power of constraint on other discourses', and goes on further to ask the question 'what
is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this 'true' discourse, if not desire and power?'.

Thus, there are both discourses that constrain the production of knowledge, dissent and
difference and some that enable 'new' knowledge and difference(s). The questions that arise
within this framework, are to do with how some discourses maintain their authority, how
some 'voices' get heard whilst others are silenced, who benefits and how - that is, questions
addressing issues of power/ empowerment/ disempowerment.

How Foucault Matters Today

As noted above, Foucault has served as theoretical inspiration across a multitude of

disciplines, so much so that the term “Foucauldian” is often applied to analyses that utilize
his theoretical approach. Outside of academia, Foucault’s work is of interest to anyone
looking to better understand and appreciate the subtle ways that power works in social life,
particularly with regard to how seemingly mundane practices and ideas structure our
personal experiences and senses of self. After reading Foucault, it’s hard to think about your
society or yourself in quite the same way.
Despite these early obstacles, Foucault eventually became one of France’s most notable
intellectuals. His thesis on the history of the concept of “madness” (eventually accepted in
France in 1961) was immediately well received, and Foucault continued to write influential
books on some of the West’s most powerful social institutions, such as medicine, prisons, and
religion, as well as groundbreaking works on more abstract theoretical issues of power,
knowledge, sexuality, and selfhood. While the objects of Foucault’s studies seem to range
widely, they all tend to focus on how knowledge of human beings is inextricably connected
to power over them. For Foucault, the many modern concepts and practices that attempt to
uncover “the truth” about human beings (either psychologically, sexually, or spiritually)
actually create the very types of people they purport to discover.
Foucault was also well known in France for his political activism. Foucault took a number of
leftist (and sometimes unpopular) political stands, like supporting prisoners’ rights in France
and protesting the Vietnam and Algerian wars.
Foucault died in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness. Today he remains one of the most
influential and widely read social theorists in recent history. Foucault’s work has been
groundbreaking not only for sociology, but also for anthropology, cultural studies, psychology,
gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, philosophy, and literary criticism.
Bibliography

https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/powerknowledge

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/theory/foucault.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault