Power, Discretion and Strategy

This essay starts with a brief review of some of the main approaches to power, and identifies four: ‘power to’, ‘power over’, ‘power/storage’ and ‘power discretion’. It argues that these are all viable, but that they should be linked to a fifth — that of ‘power/effects' — with its stress on the continued performance of social relations. But how are such relations stabilised? It is argued, in answer to this question, that social relations are never purely social in character: rather they are heterogeneous, being embodied in a series of corporeal, textual, natural and technical materials. Finally, certain strategies for ordering these relations and their power effects are examined for the case of a formal organisation, and it is argued that such strategies are always, and necessarily, discursively impure.