4 Power and collective actors

4 Power and collective actors

Power as a concept describes and explains relations between actors whether they are individual or collective. Reformulating the two aspects of power to take account of collective actors (as formulated by the sociologist Michael Mann, 1986: 6):

collective power refers to how persons in cooperation enhance their joint capacity to influence third parties or nature

distributive power refers to how one actor in a social relationship is in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance: this is a zero-sum concept in which there is a fixed amount of power, and one actor enhances their power at the expense of the other

Both of these kinds of power are aspects of power relationship involving collective actors, and there are dialectical relationships between them, i.e. the two are intertwined in practice.

But different views of power emphasise one aspect or the other:

1 Conservative accounts ( functionalism in sociology, Realism in IR) seem primarily concerned with the collective power of whole societies or states.

But they are also concerned with distributive relations. Realists are interested with how states project collective power vis-à-vis each other, so they are concerned with the distributive aspect of power between them - e.g. unequal capacities between states play a major part in Kenneth Waltz's explanation of

2 Radical accounts of power (Marxism, feminism, etc.), emphasise inequality, domination and control - appear to be concerned mainly with zero-sum or distributive power.

But they also involve collective or cooperative power: they are about how ruling groups maintain their cohesion, how they incorporate subordinate groups within their power networks - and on the other hand, they are often concerned with how subordinate groups can form their own independent collective power.