Varieties of Political Capital and Power in Organizations: A Review and Integrative Framework
William Ocasio, Jo-Ellen Pozner, Daniel Milner, Ray Tsai Fang, Felice B. Klein, Chi Nguyen, Jeff Lingwall, Alexander Lewis, Ilir Haxhi, Miguel Rivera-Santos, Carlos Rufín, Willem Grolman, Nuno Oliveira, Leon Oerlemans, Paul C. Van Fenema, Jeffery S. McMullen, Theodore L. Waldron, G. Tyge Payne, Oleg Petrenko, James C. Wetherbe, Koen van den Oever, Christine Shropshire, Maximilian Göbel, Alexander Seymer, Dominik van Aaken, Tsedal Neeley, B. Sebastian Reiche, Marco Berti, Walter Jarvis, Natalia Nikolova, Alexandra Pitsis, Jieqiong Ma, Jie Yang, Jingzhou Pan, Yin Bai, Youchao Tan, Cheng Zeng, Alison Dean, Martin Kretschmer, Kira Kristal Reed, Narasimhan Srinivasan, Maxim Voronov
Academy of Management Annals · 2020 · Volume 14 · Issue 1
Abstract
We review the organizational literature on power in light of Bourdieu’s concept of capital to further a political capital perspective on power in organizations. In reviewing the literature, we find that Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital provide a useful beginning, yet are imprecise and insufficient for organizational research. We therefore modify and extend Bourdieu’s typology to include knowledge, reputational, organizational, and institutional capital as distinct varieties of political capital in organizations. We provide an integrative framework and further review the concept of political capital as determinant of power within organizations, focusing on its activation and mobilization, its convertibility, and the contingency of its value in organizations. We also bring to the fore various mechanisms latent in the extant literature that explain how political capital generates power—not only resource dependence but also status, identification, and legitimacy. Our proposed political capital framework provides a foundation for further research on power in organizations.
Keywords
power and politics, institutional theory, sociology
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