Power and Power Relations within Organizations: Theoretical Approaches from the Perspectives of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber

Abstract

This paper discusses the theoretical approaches to the concept of power and power relations within organizations by philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bordieu and Max Weber. Michel Foucault, modern critic of institutions, theorized about domination and control relations as power strategies with a common objective: the silence and obedience of those dominated. A ‘dominated’ individual is, first and foremost, an acting subject, as Foucault believes that power cannot be executed without freedom; Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective as a contemporary critic of social structures and author of concepts such as habitus, campus, capital, symbolic capital, economic capital, among other concepts anchored in social spaces where power is a battle of forces that aims to achieve positioning and control systems, and Weber’s perspective, which supports power relations —or authority strategies, in his words— in a legitimate, social system. These strategies are executed and have an effect of obedience, depending on the type of organization and the way that it can be structured on an administrative level