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Own Power (own + power)
Selected AbstractsRelative power and influence strategy: the effects of agent/target organizational power on superiors' choices of influence strategiesJOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 2 2002Anit Somech The present study examined superiors' tendency to utilize different top,down influence strategies according to their evaluation of their own power relative to that of their subordinates. Four hundred and fifty-five subordinates (schoolteachers) from different schools described the extent to which their superiors used each item of the influence strategy questionnaire to influence them, while their immediate superiors evaluated superior's power and subordinate's power. Overall, superiors tended to use soft and rational strategy more often than hard strategy. However, regarding the parameter of relative power, the results indicated that the agent's power, as well as the target's power, affected the superior's choice of particular influence strategy. The results suggest that power should be discussed in relative rather than absolute terms. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Singing and Silences: Transformations of Power through Javanese Seduction ScenariosAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2000Nancy I. Cooper Glamorous women singers (waranggana) in rural central Java appear ordinary in their everyday lives, but become exemplars of extraordinary femininity in performances where flirtatious interactions may occur between them and male musicians. Although the obvious interpretation suggests sexual promiscuity, my research shows that these "seduction scenarios" are ways in which women, through their attractive power, help men transform their exuberant power into constructive spiritual potency. More superficially, men use these seduction scenarios to position themselves in a masculine prestige hierarchy. Although women can and do activate their own power through daily activities or, in the case of waranggana, through singing, they more often suppress the signs of their embodied power in favor of men's spiritual and social potency, in keeping with a highly valued ideology of social harmony shared by both. Hence, through singing and silences, waranggana preserve men's prestige and together with them participate in a social construction that usually keeps the peace at local levels, [gender, power, prestige, performance, gamelan, Javanese, Indonesia] [source] The place of politics: powerful speech and women speakers in everyday Pa'ikwené (Palikur) lifeTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2004Alan Passes This article focuses on the practice of female scolding in a community of Pa'ikwené (or Palikur), a native Amazonian people (French Guyana and Brazil), in order to explore ideas about power and speech and the phenomenon of political speaking. The article takes issue with claims that politics are to be equated specifically with the formal public arena, and that political discourse is the exclusive province and prerogative both of leaders and of men, whether institutionally ,authorized' or not. It is argued, on the contrary, that the everyday speech of common villagers, in this case women, is among other things integrally political, and no more powerless in effect than the so-called ,empty' speech of Amerindian chiefs postulated by Clastres. It is further proposed that Pa'ikwené women's scolding not only embodies their own power but also regenerates symmetrical gender relations, and thus the polity itself. [source] 3.,The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday LifeAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Article first published online: 18 FEB 200, John Sanbonmatsu The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society in which we are plunged every day. ,Ionesco1 Abstract It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities,in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with "realist" intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to "face" overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or "singular" against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable. [source] King Canute and the ,Problem' of Structure and Agency: On Times, Tides and HerestheticsPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2009Colin Hay The story of King Canute (Cnut) is well known. Indeed, in perhaps its most familiar form it exists as an oral historical tradition passed from generation to generation. In this almost legendary account, King Canute is depicted as an arrogant ruler, so confident as to his own omnipotence that he takes on the forces of nature, pitting his own powers against those of the rising tide , his wet robes paying testament to his powerlessness in the face of potent material forces and to the triumph of (natural) structures over (human) agency. Or so it might seem. In this article I suggest that even in this, the simplest depiction of the story of Canute, the relationship between structure and agency is more complex and involved than it appears. This complexity is only accentuated if we turn from the legend to the historical evidence. Moreover, by reflecting on Canute's practical negotiation of the ,problem' of structure and agency we can not only gain an interesting political analytical purchase on a seemingly familiar tale, but we can also generate a series of valuable and more general insights into our understanding of the structure,agency relationship. In particular, the (various) stories of King Canute and the waves alert us to the need: (1) to maintain a clear distinction between the empirical and the ontological; (2) to resist the temptation to attempt an empirical adjudication of ontological issues (or, indeed, an ontological adjudication of empirical issues); (3) to differentiate clearly between the capacities of agents with respect to material/physical structures on the one hand, and social/political structures on the other; (4) to acknowledge the significance of unintended consequences; (5) to attend to the ,performative' dimensions of agency; and (6) to recognise the dangers inherent in an overly instrumental view of actors' motivations and intentions. [source] | ||||||||||