Towards a Practice-based View on Power

As illustrated above, most ‘conventional’ accounts of power take rationalistic and individualistic point of views, supposing power to be in the hands of certain individuals – heads of state, CEOs, managers, or kings, as Foucault (1980) would say. In other words, power is concentrated in the sphere of certain individuals who ‘possess’ power. Performative views, meanwhile (e.g. Latour, 1986; Clegg, 1989; Law, 1992; Fox, 2000; Clegg et al., 2006; Levina and Orlikowski, 2009; Heizmann, 2011; Contu, 2014), profoundly disagree with such a conception of power. “We need to cut off the King’s head”, said Foucault (1980: 121) famously in order to decentre the individual and its alleged possession of power. Instead, these scholars argue power to be the property of society rather than the individual capacity to achieve desired outcomes (see also Giddens, 1984; Hardy and Clegg, 2006).

As a property of society, power is a circulating phenomenon, something that is never “here or there” (Foucault, 1980: 98), and thus neither in a specific individual’s hands nor an appropriated commodity. Power is “everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere”, Foucault (1978: 94) writes. Individuals, in that regard, are by definition seen as always simultaneously exercising and undergoing power (Foucault, 1980); they are its target and its articulation. In other

find their way into the capillaries of social life – they are involved in everything we do (Schatzki, 2002; Huzzard, 2004), and thus also rendering its analysis in the work of leadership a potentially fruitful endeavour.

Simultaneously to being an inherent property of society, this also means that power is first and foremost a practical rather than a static phenomenon. Similar to conventional perspectives, power is always exercised (Giddens, 1984), meaning that it is practiced and therefore an activity. Clegg and colleagues (2006) label this a ‘constitutive’ view of power, denoting that supposedly power does not exist apart from its constitution, and that it is inseparable from and only visible in its effects. Unlike conventional, this view shifts the analysis from exploring whohas power towards how it is exercised (McGabe, 2009). Conceiving of power as an activity, however, need not imply episodic acts ‘located’ in the actor as discussed in section 2.3.1 (see Lawrence et al., 2012; Foucault, 1980). Instead, since power is in effect practiced and considering individuals as being the ‘carriers of practices’ (Nicolini, 2011; Shove et al., 2011), they are also seen as the ‘vehicles of power’ (Foucault, 1980). Given that power is seen as an activity, it also follows that it emerges from and is embedded in practices (Schatzki, 2002; Contu and Willmott, 2003; Nicolini, 2007; Gordon et al., 2009; Contu, 2014). Indeed, while Foucault suggests power to be a property of society, practice theorists (e.g Schatzki, 2002, 2005) would contend that society, in turn, is ‘made up’ of practices. As with all social phenomena, practices become the fundamental unit of analysis when studying power (see Chapter 2.1).

While the link to practice theory has not yet been made by the power literature, for power theorists, social practices are indeed a form of power by themselves, a further sibling of dispositional and episodic power; namely, ‘systemic power’ (Lawrence et al., 2008, 2012; Nicolini, 2013). In order to understand how power is exercised, therefore, one has to appreciate that all actors operate within an existing ‘structure of dominancy’; that is, practices as prevailing webs of power relations (Hardy and Clegg, 2006). These relations are the effect of divisions, inequalities, or disequilibriums (Nicolini, 2011), regarding to who can do and say what, and whose views get privileged. In other words, practices exhibit unequally empowered social positions actors may occupy, which, according to Nicolini (2007), are based on different status claims.

Instead of exclusively focusing on status claims in relation to differently empowered social positions, however, I propose to also draw on the resource- dependency view on power (Giddens, 1984; Clegg et al., 2006; Simon and Oakes, 2006) in general, in order to understand how practices produce said positions and thus power relations. Traditionally, the power literature suggests that actors may exert power over others as they have access to or control over resources. For Giddens, (1984), for example, resources are the media through which power is exercised, and through resource asymmetries structures of domination occur (see also Brocklehurst, 2001). What is critical about this ‘conventional’ view on resources, however, is the underlying assumption that the more resources ‘held in store’ the greater an individual’s autonomy and the less its dependence (Clegg et al., 2006). Whilst in this thesis I adopt the view that the exercise of power draws on a set of resources, the static and possessive portrayal by the conventional literature does not work well with the assumptions of a practice philosophy.

Feldman’s (2004) work on the matter, therefore, provides useful assistance. Her research on ‘resourcing’ asks “whether we can call something a resource before it has been used in some way” (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011: 1246). Feldman is thus criticising that resources have too often been understood as being static, a thing ‘out there’ possibly acquired and deployed by individuals; or as I have pointed out, a commodity (a salami in McGabe’s terms). From a practice-based point of view, indeed, a resource does not become such until it is used. Shifting emphasis to the process of enactment, Feldman argues resources to be “created and recreated through action, neither can they be defined independent of context nor are they static” (2004: 307). Similar to Orlikowski’s (2000) ‘technologies as practice’, theorising resources through a practice lens suggests that it is the thing and its use that make it an actual resource (Latour, 1986; Clegg et al., 2006; Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011).

It is hence my argument that practices provide for unequally empowered social positions, based on a variety of resources accessed, enacted and reproduced through practices. These resources may include information and knowledge, money, norms, tenure, expertise and skill, access and relationships to organisational members higher up the hierarchy, or hierarchy and authority itself (French and Raven, 1959; Parsons, 1967;

Schatzki, 2002; Lukes, 2005; Clegg et al., 2006; Nicolini, 2011, 2013; Contu, 2014). This list of possible resources to power, meanwhile, is not all exhaustive. Firstly because, as argued previously (e.g. Chapter 2.2), practices are utterly contextually dependent meaning that certain settings exhibit different resources of power than other settings; and secondly, because “anything (…) can serve as a source of power in social interactions” (Sewell, 1992: 9).

In this sense, through providing differently empowered social positions through a variety of resources (systemic power), practices serve certain interests at the expense of others. In other words, practices confer “differentials of dispositional power on agents, thus structuring the possibilities for actions” (Haugaard, 2010: 425, my italics; see also 2003, 2012). Practices, therefore, are the source of power in that they disposition actors to ‘make things happen’ as outlined in Table 2 and 3 (cf. Giddens, 1984; Lawrence et al., 2012). This disposition, or ability, ultimately translates into acts of episodic power (Table 3), which in turn keeps dispositional power in place through recurrent enactments (Nicolini, 2013).

Importantly, as mentioned in this section (2.3.1), the conventional literature argues that an actor may have dispositional power regardless of whether this power is exercised; it exists ‘outside’ of action (e.g. Haugaard, 2010). Advocates of episodic power, at the same time, maintain power to only occur when its exercise can be

witnessed (e.g. Dahl, 1957). As stated previously, the different ‘versions’ of power (systemic, dispositional, and episodic) have mostly been treated in a separate fashion, since different studies attend to just one of the three (e.g. Lawrence et al., 2012). This approach, however, does not work well in a practice-based philosophy.

Firstly, as I have argued in Chapter 2.1, a practice approach conceives of the world in a productive and reproductive sense. This means that the social world and its phenomena, such as meaning, organisations, or indeed power, only exist as long as the practices of which they are part and through which they transpire keep being performed (Wenger, 1998; Schatzki, 2006; Nicolini, 2013). Power, in other words, needs to be exercised in order to exist (cf. Giddens, 1984). This is what I discussed earlier in terms of a ‘constitutive view’ of power (e.g. Foucault, 1982; Clegg et al., 2006), and that power resources always need to be enacted to become such (Feldman, 2004). Secondly, however, a practice philosophy also tells us that practices are more than what people

‘actually do’, and that treating the notion of practice in terms of an actor-centred micro analysis of daily activity misses the ‘promise’ of the practice lens (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini, 2011; Gherardi and Perrota, 2014). To take practice up on that promise, I adopted a philosophical view (see Chapter 2.1) that, amongst other things, suggests actors to be entwined with the world as a relational totality. Objects, actors and activities, or in this case power relations, cannot be understood in isolation from the context in which they take place and through which they acquire meaning (Schatzki, 2001a, 2002; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Gherardi 2011; Nicolini, 2013). Vis-à-vis power dynamics, this means that episodic acts need to be analysed not only in their enactment, but also in terms of how these enactments are made possible in the first place; i.e. systemic and dispositional power. In that sense, attending to one version of power is insufficient. Based on a philosophical practice approach, I argue that systemic, episodic and dispositional power build a ‘relational totality’, which requires to be analysed as such when attending to power dynamics in a particular context. A practice approach, therefore, connects all three versions of power – in other words, all three versions form a triangular relationship and are mutually dependent.

So far I have established a practice approach for anchoring my conceptual understanding of power. What is finally needed in order to study power empirically, however, is a ‘working definition’ in order to identify the phenomenon in a local setting. To do so, I adopt the definition of power, based on Foucault (1982), that one actor (or a group of actors) structures the possible actions of another actor (or a group of actors) (see also Schatzki, 2005). Akin to my approach to defining what constitutes leadership (Chapter 2.2), this definition is particularly helpful again as it also reflects an ‘infra-language’ (Latour, 2005; Nicolini, 2009a, 2013). This is also where perceiving power as a family resemblance is a fruitful exercise, because it allows for appreciating that power is neither inherently repressive nor coercive, nor need it be inherently productive or positive. Just like leadership (see 2.2), power is nothing per se and at the same time might indeed be anything – all depending on the local setting under study, given that any practice-based phenomena is situated. This is why the above definition I chose is neutral; i.e. it allows for various facets of the power family.

framework that is used as a heuristic to study power dynamics empirically. To recap, the framework begins with the premise that practices, based on a variety of resources (e.g. tenure, expertise, capital, social position, relations, rules, information, authority), provide for certain power relations in the form of distinctly empowered social positions – ‘regimes of empowerment’ in Nicolini’s (2011) terms (i.e. ‘systemic power’). Systemic power then translates into certain dispositions (dispositional power) in the sense that actors are enabled and constrained to do certain things. Dispositions, ultimately, need to be enacted to be meaningful and to be kept in place, thus suggesting an inherent connection to episodic power, which, as an enactment of practice, in turn

reproduces existing dispositions and hence systemic power.

I should note here that the framework developed in this section, displayed below in Figure 1, is not supposed to denote a uni-directional perspective of power that dichotomously distinguishes between rulers and ruled, but that any actor is dispositioned in some way to make things happen – which Foucault (1978) would describe as the possibility of resistance, intrinsic to relations of power. Resistance, in that sense, I perceive to be in itself an act of power. As the data is going to illustrate in Chapter 4, and picked up in Chapter 5, this is situationally-dependent. That is, in some cases authority may prevail whereas in others expertise might be a ‘more powerful’ resource to structure somebody else’s possible actions. As such, my framework accounts for fundamental asymmetries of power in organisations.

Figure 1 – Theoretical Framework; practice-based understanding of power.

In order to develop this framework, I first illustrated the knotted and twisted tree of the power family, and discussed briefly the core ideas from ‘conventional’ theories of power, including power as a static and possessed thing, concentrated in the hands of certain ‘powerful’ individuals that mostly wield their power repressively. I also pointed out the positive connotations of power some scholars emphasise, explained systemic, dispositional, and episodic power as three versions, which have largely been treated separately by the literature. These ideas, in turn, provide fertile ground for performative views to develop alternative conceptions. A performative conception, in contrast, assumes power to be found everywhere, i.e. in the capillaries of social life. Power is thus a societal and ‘systemic’ property, which in turn means that it is practiced (i.e. an activity) rather than possessed. This reflects a practice-based view, since it argues power to reside in practices, and allows for appreciating power as mundane, instead of grandiose and majestic. Based on key assumptions of a practice philosophy as outlined

an understanding of the phenomenon that not only centres on either its exercise or its systemic properties, but one that also attends to power as it transpires through practices in their relational totality. This idea builds the core of my theoretical framework illustrated above, which I use in Chapter 5 to explore the ways in which power dynamics are brought to bear on the work of leadership.

After concluding the theoretical chapter, in the next chapter of the thesis I outline my methodology to investigate my research questions empirically.