1 Defining power
Power is a word that can provoke worry. This is because people think of power as something that oppresses and abuses – often using the authority of official institutions and the law to do so. Such views of power are of course legitimate and important to understand, as they speak to the everyday experiences of many Black people in the UK. However, it is also important to understand that power can be deployed more positively to enact change that enhances equity.
Because power is such an important resource for influencing and shaping the world, it is no surprise that it has played a major role in Black activism over the years. Most obviously, the Black Power movement, originating in the US in the 1960s, was itself a reaction to a previous era of civil rights activism that valued peaceful non-violence, advocated love and made great efforts to build a broad-based movement that appealed to white people as well as Black people. Black Power emphasised the need to defend oneself when attacked violently. But it also supported notions of self-sufficiency and autonomy, through building independent networks, services and institutions. Love and power can be closely related – you can spread love through power and change the nature of power through practising love. Love can indeed be powerful (hooks, 2016).
Power is not an abstract or distant phenomenon for people who practise leadership, but a force you can apply through doing real work. It is a collective resource that you can discover and create by working together to develop one another’s capacity for leadership. Sometimes this power is built and deployed on, against or through established institutions – such as branches of government, public services, major charities or businesses. Power can challenge these institutions from outside with a view to disrupting and changing them. At other times power can be exerted from within, working inside structures and systems of existing power to change them. However, power can also be built independently of existing formal institutions, with groups deciding to create their own institutions, resources and networks of support.
Bearing the above discussion in mind:
Power can be defined as the capacity to shape or influence the world around you.
As you will notice from this definition, power is closely related to leadership, which is a practice of making meaning and establishing direction through affecting people’s heads and hearts. Power and relations of power therefore run right the way through leadership.
However, you need to bear in mind that power to do things is always limited by structures – the web of institutions we navigate on a daily basis, as well as the informal traditions and ways of life that shape everyday behaviours and values. When you exercise power, there is always a pushing back from these institutions. This pushing back can be more or less obvious: from racist laws and people in positions of authority abusing their power, to more casualised social assumptions that are nevertheless racist.
Contemporary life
In contemporary life it is often hard to pinpoint exactly where dominant power sits. Notionally, political leaders are ‘powerful’, but we know that they are also reliant on support from a wider base of political supporters – in private business or society. In a world with more globalised trade and production chains, power is ever more distributed, with the super-rich and powerful having more freedom than the rest when it comes to influence over government and indeed other social responsibilities, such as paying tax. Nevertheless, it is also true that, more often than not, people are unaware of how much power they could wield were they to engage in effective forms of leadership – they tend not to push as hard against structures as they could. As you proceed through this course you will explore a number of frameworks and approaches that will help you in placing power at the heart of leadership practice. Before you get there, you will spend the remainder of this week exploring how and why power is so important – through considering its effects on bodies and minds.