Reflections on power… Based on M. Haugaard, Reflections on seven ways of creating power

Reflections on power…

Based on M. Haugaard, Reflections on seven ways of creating power.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands www.kit.nl

Why talk about power?

Advancing women’s rights and promoting gender equality requires a transformation of gendered power relations

A rights-based approach to development calls for a re-balancing of power relations:

• between aid agencies and recipients• between duty-bearers and rights-holders• empowering marginalised groups


Why talk about power?Un-packing how power is created may suggest how existing power relations can be changed

To make visible our existing theories of power so we can critique them, expand them, apply them

Development agencies and development workers are implicated in power relations – gender mainstreaming and RBA call for critical self-reflection and redistribution of power within development


Different views on powerCoercive power:• ability to compel people to do things through punishment (or threat of punishment) or reward

Power as created through social order:• social order enables individuals to do things they could not do if they were not part of society• it also imposes constraints• establishes relations of power and powerlessness

Power created and reproduced through social order backed up by the threat of coercion.


How is social power created?

1. Power created by social order – a system of shared meanings which give predictability to social life.

• predictability gives ‘power to’ act – we know what to do in order to achieve a particular result

• culturally specific• a process of social relations – action/reaction• unless an action is acknowledged and

supported by others it may not be effective


How is social power created?2. Social order is maintained by imposing

constraints – actions outside ‘the rules of the game’ are not supported

• Constraints maintain existing power relations:• keep new issues off the agenda

• dis-empower groups associated with that issue

• Change = build a new consensus• create arenas where new practices are recognised

• strategic alliances

• challenge acceptance of old practices


Creating social power

3. Social order, and the resulting distribution of power, makes sense within the dominant paradigm or world view

When an issue / action does not fit with the current world view, people may see no way to address it

Change = paradigm shift



4. Most of our knowledge of social life is ‘practical knowledge’, not conscious. Hence

• people participate in maintaining power relations that disadvantage them.

• when people become conscious of how unequal power relations are reproduced, they can choose not to support those practices.

• when unquestioned practices become visible they may also show them as incongruent with consciously held beliefs

Change = consciousness raising



5. Social conventions are ‘reified’ by the belief that they are more than social constructs:

• they are ‘natural’

• they are determined by God

• they are scientifically true

People may see that they are disadvantaged by a practice, but believe the practice cannot be changed.


How is social power created?

6. Power created through socialisation

• ‘learning to be normal’

• internalising social conventions

• creates the ‘practical knowledge’ that maintains the social order

• education system as a major actor in socialisation – gives legitimacy to routines / conventions


Violence as a tool of power

• violence is the failure of social power (Arendt)

• necessary only when social power fails and people do not behave as expected

• but… violence / threat used more consistently to maintain gender relations – why?

• violence combined with social power = coercion

• people with less power prevented from challenging structures by the threat of violence

Documents

Reflections on power… Based on M. Haugaard, Reflections on seven ways of creating power