Organizational Power

According to Mann, “in its most general sense, power is the ability to pursue and attain goals through mastery of one’s environment” (Mann 6). However, when it comes to social power, it is more specifically defined as having mastery over other people and is the probability that someone will be in a position to carry out his or her will despite social norms and resistance. I personally think that a better definition social power is the ability to persuade and influence others, and this can either be subliminally or by brute force. I found it interesting that power could be described as something of the “zero-sum game” in which if someone gains power, another has to lose power. In a way, it makes sense: in order for someone to have “social power”, one person must be the more dominant and influential one- this also means that the ones subjected to the power have to be subdued.

On the other hand, Mann appears to agree with Parsons with the fact that there is collective power in the sense that one cannot work by his or herself to gain power. It is in the interest of a collective group of people to cooperate in order to gain more power. In effect, this whole “social power” process is a lot like currency. Some people will try and gain money while others will undoubtedly lose money. However, when one needs to do something big, like become an “institutionalized government”, for example, people need to work together to pool in their money (power, in this case) to be able to create a sense of massive social power that is able to pull off such a stunt. Indeed, that is what collective power essentially is.

However, the main point of this response paper/ post is to discuss how the interconnectivity between collective power and distributive power leads to something institutional. As I recall from Liverani’s Uruk: The First City, it used to be that in the more primitive states of government and society that even though there was a “leader” or chief (Liverani 20), he or she would be working like the rest of the people subjected by power. Later on, though, there was the administrative elite, in which all others would contribute directly to it, and this has to do with collective power. “But in implementing collective goals, social organization and a division of labor are set up. Organization and division of functions carry an inherent tendency to distributive power, deriving from supervision and coordination…Although it involves specialization of function at all levels, the top overlooks and directs the whole" (Mann 7).

So as we can clearly see, it was the idea of collective power and the reorganization of the distributive aspect of power that enabled for there to be different groups of people who were able to specialize in certain functions. This disguised the inherent greed for power of the smarter individuals who worked together to fuel the power that was brought upon the rest of the people who followed. Inherently, this brought us closer to “civility” because suddenly, people had to work together, and there was now a “center” that brought everyone together. It seems, though, that this hierarchy of power was not intentionally made to create a more focused, central civilization but as a process of organizations, intuit, creativity, and the need to gain more power for a set group of individuals. Anyone who did not want to participate could, as it was not forced, but any other option would be severely lacking in comparison with the new system and centralization of power (because even though there was the powerful elite who were the leaders of the group, everyone was able to gain because of the surpluses obtained due to more specialization and "thinking of the bigger picture").