Conflict, cooperation and trust in three power systems

The central variables of power, conflict, cooperation and trust have traditionally been employed in a context-irrelevant fashion as general theoretical explanations for many social phenomena at the levels of organisms or persons, groups, organizations, societies and even supranational systems. This paper questions the assumed high cross-system applicability of these concepts by outlining three different prototypical power systems which seem to find frequent expression in everyday life: the unilateral power system, in which a strong source imposes influence on a weak target; the mixed power system, in which partially equivalent interactants bargain to agreement or deadlock; and the bilateral power system, in which interactants are in unit relation and formulate joint policy programs. Power, conflict, cooperation and trust are all found to require substantially different definition and treatment when considered in one as opposed to another of these prototypical systems. A context sensitive approach to conflict research is recommended, in which concepts are articulated with specific regard for the interactional system in which they will be applied. A preliminary effort is made to outline the nature of the variables in each system, allowing the treatment of existing as well as new, e.g., love and hate, topics as valid influence foci while maintaining a good consonance of theoretical expression with social experience. More generally, the dual issues of a bias toward context-irrelevant theory coupled with unrepresentative empirical forays are suggested as potentially debilitating problems for every subdiscipline concerned with social inquiry.