Power

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

This entry addresses issues of power as they may surface in case study research. Because case studies provide the opportunity to delve into the “whys” and “hows” of particular people, organizations, and communities work, issues of power often are evident in the relationships between people and groups. Many thinkers have tried to understand power as a human process, and this entry focuses on the approach taken by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. As a more recent thinker, Bourdieu addressed the issues brought up by former theorists while also adding his own perspective and expanding greatly the way that researchers understand and conceptualize power in their work.

Bourdieu appreciated Michel Foucault's focus on the individual's relationship to power. Foucault saw power as the recognition of knowledge that allowed an individual to be set apart and recognized for the knowledge he or she possesses. Bourdieu expanded on this notion by adding the concept that groups share power in their assertion of capital, a valued accumulation of wealth. Capital can be economic, social, cultural, or symbolic. A hierarchy exists within a field of society in which those who belong to the field value capital and try to accumulate it. Habitus is the individual's awareness of his or her own capital or worth within the field. Fields can be large, as in the field of education, home, or law, or they can be very specific. Nevertheless, each field has persons who have established their wealth of knowledge or other forms of capital, and everyone in the field accepts their dominance. Habitus involves knowledge of self in relation to others. It can involve the body, as in the way that one carries oneself, walks, talks, and dresses. It also leads to a sense of self-worth.

The significance of power in this respect is that power involves a relational division between two or more parties. Bourdieu asserted that it is not necessary for the dominant group or individual to maintain power over the less powerful with physical force. In fact, to maintain this relationship of power it is necessary for the less powerful to accept and assert the status quo as natural and not even question its legitimacy. Bourdieu stated that change is difficult in such relationships of power, yet it can happen in moments of crisis, when the rules of the field are no longer acceptable to its members. This [Page 714]perspective accepts that fields share capital with other fields, and that capital is constantly being traded, and thus the relationships of power are fluid. Some may have power over others in different ways. For example, one person may have more money than another in the field of culture, or one person may have access to a great deal of cultural capital while not having access to money. However, in many cases capital grows across fields, and one form of capital often leads to another. For example, one who has money often has more access to culture, education, the symbolic capital of symbols of wealth, and so on. The power associated with capital allows those who have it to assert their agendas and gain more capital than others who are not born into capital and have to build capital on their own over the course of their lives. Marxists such as Peter McLaren point to the potential for change in society and the dissolution of power structures, by empowering laborers at the bottom of the economy pyramid to assert their ability to withdraw their service. In a capitalist society the economy relies on the working class to provide labor to the system. However, as Bourdieu asserted, the unwillingness or lack of awareness of the working class to assert their potential power within a capitalist system results in maintenance of the status quo.

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