The Lie of Power: Empowerment as Impotence
Human Relations · 1999 · Volume 52 · Issue 2
DOI: 10.1177/001872679905200203
Abstract
The arguments in this paper are based upon an ethnographic description of the circumstances surrounding the investigation of a complaint against the Governors of a small rural Primary School. This is an empirical study of a local struggle in which the role of the researcher as a prisoner in a web of power is highlighted. The case is first analyzed using structural and functional understandings of power as described by Hardy and Clegg. However, the voluntary nature of the individual engagement of the actors in the case highlights the role of the individual's interpretative frameworks-both in operation and as explanatory mechanisms. Structural and functional analyses of power do not appear to fully account for aspects of this situation, and therefore Hopfl's distinction between the poetic and the rhetoric is considered as part of the explanatory mechanism. This paper suggests that "power" can be seen as an individually interpreted quality, and that feelings of "empowerment" are evoked by consonance between the poetic and the rhetoric, but that such consonance also signals impotence.
Keywords
power, school governance, participant research, ethnomethodology, voluntary workers, trade unions
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