Power and Signification in Neostructuralism

Abstract

Power is a theme approached in sociology from several different theoretical frameworks. More often than not these different theoretical currents understand other frameworks of interpretation as their enemies. Sometimes this is well grounded, but it is not unusual for social scientists to jump conclusions and interpret contradictory such conceptions which could actually be put in a complementary relationship. The thesis of this chapter is that in the study of power, there are at least two such combat zones which could—and should—be transformed to fields of cooperation and peaceful division of labour. One of these combat zones is the division between the distributive and the collective approach to power which was present already in the exchange between C. Wright Mills and Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. Another demarcation line is the more recent yet heated debate between the followers of the Foucauldian analytic of power and the representatives of the more traditional power conceptions. I will here make the claim that even though the representatives of these different approaches to power often are politically enemies in analytical terms, there is nothing in these approaches which would prevent making them complementary parts of one unified theoretical conception. I also develop a fourth form of power analysis to complement these three and interpret all four conceptions as a scale which provides four different levels of analysis from which researchers can select the one to be made use of depending on the requirements set by the research task at hand. To make the analytical scheme more concrete, I finally give some examples of the nature of analysis at different levels of the scale of power analysis. This is how the chapter also comments the issues of interpreting meaning in face-to-face encounters according to ethnomethodology, Schutz’s phenomenological sociology and semiotics and the problem of Big Case Comparison in historical sociology.