Ch 6: Critical Approaches to Organizations and Communication

The Centrality of Power
Pg.168-169

The centrality of power serves to clarify the historical development of the perception of power from something that a person possessed and could exercise. The critical approach to power looks more in-depth The text provides a good breakdown of five types of social power. It is safe to assume that each and everyone of us can recognize these various types of power. Furthermore, the deficiencies on the five categorizations of social power are evident when we use life experience to asses their validity. For example, I have gad the opportunity to work with a person who exerted “Expert Power”, my colleague was not shy about letting each and every other member of the team of their expert knowledge. This individual as the book states employed his/her position of expert to assert power and authority over other areas of our office of which s/he had not purview. The previous example is clearly in line with the what ther text explains as the limitation of French & Raven’s view of power. Had I only used their model of power I would have been limited to the overt authority of the “Expert Knowledge” which my colleague possessed. The main source of the problems would not event have been identified as a factor , since according to the text because, “By focusing on the more overt or superficial exercise of power by individuals, we learn little about the more covert or deep structures of power…”