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The argument that there is a social dimension to power is not new. Working from a social exchange perspective, Bacharach and Lawler (1980) thus start out from the premise that:We hold to the sociological adage that is maintained by Marx, Weber and Durkheim: that individuals become political in groups and that groups are capa- ble of affecting and often do affect structure. In turn, if we are to understand organizations as political systems we must come to grips with how, when, and why groups mobilize power. (p. 77)
Having reviewed the field, they dismiss individual- istic perspectives that accentuate ‘the chaotic nature of action in organizations’ and ‘depoliticize cognition’, and settle as a final alternative on:
An organizational model that is based on the group as the unit of analysis. … This perspective affords an empirical middle ground between concentrations on aggregate and on individual data. (Bacharach &
Lawler, 1980, p. 212)
They add, though, that:
To date, the potential of the group model has not been fully realized. … Realization of the full potential of the group perspective requires that the dynamics of group interrelationships become a focal point for future research. (Bacharach & Lawler, 1980, p. 212) As we have seen in previous chapters, a key feature of the social identity approach is that it takes this conclusion very much as a starting point for its analysis – recognizing that people’s actions in organizations are shaped by the social and struc- tural realities that impinge on them and, among other things, lead to them defining themselves either as individuals or members of social groups.
In both cases it suggests that they will be motivated to engage in self-enhancing behaviour and, where appropriate, use power to that end. However, it follows from arguments presented in previous chapters that the forms of power available to people and the uses to which they seek to put them will vary as a function of (a) the self-categorization of the power user and (b) his or her self-categorical relationship with those on whom power is used. In order to expound the social identity approach to power, we can therefore start by examining the basis and implications of this statement.
One of the statement’s most important features is that it suggests that power is not an invariant property of a particular individual or group, but, rather, that its form and extent are an outcome of the self-categorization process. This is most appar- ent in the case of referent power – the ability of a person to exert influence because they are admired and respected by others. As we argued in Chapters 2 and 3, this form of influence is heavily structured by the categorical relations between parties. Thus, those who are representative of the same social self-category as a perceiver (that is, prototypical ingroup members) will have considerably more ref- erent power than non-representative members or members of a non-self-category (outgroup mem- bers; Hogg, 1996; Turner, 1991; Tyler, 1998). This point emerges clearly from findings discussed in Chapter 3 that show leadership is conferred on, and attributed to, those who represent a group and its interests in context (see, for example, Burton, 1993; Hogg et al., 1998; see also Lippitt, Polansky, Redl & Rosen, 1956) and that only leaders who act this way are capable of commanding followership (Haslam & Platow, 2001a, 2001b; Platow et al., 1997).
The same argument also applies to expert power.
Traditionally, expertise is regarded as an absolute characteristic that any individual either possesses or lacks and something that can be assessed simply by physical reality testing. If a person is an expert carpenter, this should be obvious from the quality of the cabinets they make, and if a person is an
expert economist they should make insightful economic forecasts – or so the argument goes.
However, on closer inspection, this power – and the attributions that lie at its heart – are found to be heavily dependent on social categorization processes (Hewstone & Jaspars, 1982, 1984;
Kramer et al., 1995). Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attributions of expertise made by sport- ing fans (Mann, 1974; Mullen & Riordan, 1988).
Here, the failures of one’s own team are typically forgiven as products of unfortunate circumstance, while the successes of the opposition are explained away as freak events or lucky breaks. Only an ingroup’s victory over the outgroup is lauded as a true reflection of skill and talent. Thus, in Turner’s (1991) words:
The influence of experts is not due to the fact that they possess demonstrably correct information. Their infor- mation is perceived as valid because they are socially designated as ‘experts’, the legitimate representatives of normative cultural institutions and values. (p. 151) In short, experts have power because we assign them that role in recognition of their capacity to reflect the things that we hold dear – our values, beliefs, norms and ideals. An expert who starts undermining these things (one who is perceived to be ‘batting for the other team’) will soon find their expert status revoked and their power rapidly dwindling.
The same arguments are also pertinent to mat- ters of legitimate power and informational power.
As we have seen, following French and Raven (1959), it is traditionally argued that the power to influence can reside simply in the fact that a person occupies a particular organizational position or is particularly persuasive. In this vein, standard interpretations of Milgram’s famous obedience studies (in which participants were willing to obey the instructions of a malevolent experimenter even when this seemed to involve the administration of life-threatening electric shocks to an innocent person; Milgram, 1963, 1974), suggest that partici- pants’ behaviour reflected deference to the experi- menter’s inherent authority in the experimental situation. Along similar lines, informational power is seen to reside in the intrinsic and non-negotiable quality of any knowledge or information to which a given person has access. Here a person ‘in the know’ is a person worth knowing, and it is this fact that is seen to make him or her influential.
Again, though, it is possible to see that, in both these cases, the persuasive impact of any given power source will be affected by the identity rela- tions that prevail in a given context. In particular, a person should only be inclined to accept that another person’s authority or knowledge is legiti- mateand relevantto the extent they internalize and act in terms of a social category that gives the authority and knowledge its meaning. Organizations
usually go to a lot of trouble to ensure this is the case – for example, by developing procedures that draw attention to the norms and values that its members share (Tyler, 1990, 1993). Nonetheless, it is clear that people canreject any given authority and canperceive any particular body of knowledge to be invalid and useless, particularly if they iden- tify with an alternative social category. Industrial spies, for example, are unlikely to be influenced by the authority or knowledge that is vested in the officers of the organizations against whom their espionage is perpetrated. As we saw in Chapter 5, it is also the case that information is much more likely to be withheld from another person – and therefore be perceived as an instrument of power – when he or she is an outgroup member (Agama, 1997; Dovidio et al., 1997; Suzuki, 1998).
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The above discussion summarizes ideas from the large body of research that suggests social influence is a self-categorization process (see Turner, 1987a, 1991). However, bearing in mind that self- categorization theorists draw a clear distinction between influence and power, the next obvious question is whether forms of power that are not influence-based also vary as a function of the user’s self-categorical status. The answer is that they do, and in quite interesting ways.
From an objective standpoint, ‘power proper’ – that which is based on recognition of a person’s capacity to control one’s behaviour by means of domination, forced compliance and submission (that is, coercive power) – can be held by both ingroup and outgroup members. However, a num- ber of attributional and judgemental processes combine to ensure that, while ingroups are recog- nized to have some coercive power at their dis- posal, this form of power is typically seen to be concentrated in the hands of outgroups (Taylor &
McGarty, 1999). In the first instance, this is because this representation of the world is consis- tent with stereotypic views about the differences between ingroups and outgroups that serve to cre- ate or maintain positive intergroup distinctiveness (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Even when little is known about the groups in question, the groups to which we belong are typically seen as fair, just, honest and decent in comparison to outgroups that are unfair, unjust, dishonest and treacherous (Doise et al., 1972). That being the case, it is clearly more fitting for repressive power to be seen as an instrument of control that is resorted to by outgroups rather than ingroups.
As well as this, people generally find it less threatening to their self-image and sense of personal
control to explain their own adherence to group norms as a product of free will rather than as a response to threat or pressure (Perloff & Fetzer, 1986). On the other hand, they are less charitable in explaining the behaviour of others. In this vein, studies into the ‘third-person effect’ show that, in situations where susceptibility to influence might be characterized negatively (for example, because it connotes gullibility or weakness), people gener- ally perceive themselves to be relatively unaf- fected by influence attempts (such as media campaigns and advertising) while believing that unspecified third parties will be easily swayed (Davison, 1983).
Importantly, though, an extensive programme of research by Duck and her colleagues has also revealed an intergroup dimension to this effect (Duck, Hogg & Terry, 1995, 1997; Duck & Mullin, 1997; Duck, Terry & Hogg, 1999). More specifi- cally, the effect is found to vary as a function of the third person’s social self-categorical status and is largely confined to judgements of outgroup members. As an example, Duck et al.’s (1995) study of an Australian election campaign revealed that, when supporters of a particular party were asked to explain the behaviour of a third person who was a member of the same political party, that other person was believed to have been persuaded by the validity of the ingroup’s arguments rather than to have succumbed to propaganda. However, the opposite pattern was observed in accounting for the behaviour of members of other parties.
These attributions were also enhanced to the extent that respondents identified strongly with their political ingroup.
The general view that emerges from this and related research is that people tend to account for behaviour in a way that suggests ingroup members behave the way they do ‘because it’s right’, but outgroup members act for much more instrumen- tal reasons – because they were forced, because they were paid to or are naive (Taylor & McGarty, 1999). Accordingly, whatever the actual power structure that prevails within a particular organiza- tion (that is, the ability of individuals or groups to administer rewards and punishment), one would expect that there will be a range of situations in which its members are inclined to downplayboth (a) their self-power (at either a personal or a social level) and (b) the extent to which their dealings with other members of a salient ingroup are affected by power. On the other hand, they will often be expected to emphasizeboth (a) the power of non-self others (that is, outgroups or, when per- sonal identity is salient, other ingroup members) and (b) the extent to which dealings involving those others are affected by power. Support for these predictions is provided by the research of Rothbart and Hallmark (1988) that we discussed in the previous chapter.
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The discussion in the previous sections deals with the way in which individuals’ perceptionsof power vary as a function of the self-categorization process, but it is reasonable to ask whether or not these per- ceptions bear any relationship to people’s actual power use. Group members may believe that they are more likely to be the victims of an outgroup’s power than an ingroup’s, but is there any evidence to support this view? As with most of the early research into intergroup discrimination that we discussed in Chapter 2, a key problem with all of the naturalistic evidence that would support this view is that it is contaminated by a range of con- founding variables. When a group has power, its members might use this against members of another group for any number of reasons specific to the intergroup relationship in question – to redress past injustices, because the other group has a history of using power itself or because that treat- ment has been formally sanctioned. However, fol- lowing the rationale of Tajfel et al.’s (1971) original minimal group studies, these confounds can be bypassed by assigning participants to groups that have no prior meaning and seeing if and how the treatment of ingroup and outgroup is affected by the infusion of power. This was the goal of research conducted by Sachdev and Bourhis (1985; see also Bourhis, 1994b; Sachdev & Bourhis, 1987, 1991).
In Sachdev and Bourhis’ (1985) study, students were randomly assigned to minimal groups (Group W or Group Z) and asked to allocate points to members of their own group and the other using matrices like those in Figure 2.1. The experi- menters explained that the group which ultimately received the most points would gain course credit that would excuse its members from having to write an additional course essay. However, as a vari- ant on Tajfel et al.’s (1971) study, participants were told that a specified amount of weight would be given to the allocations made by members of each group in deciding how many points the groups received. Across five conditions, the weighting given to the participants’ allocations and those of other members of their ingroup was 100, 70, 50, 30 or 0 per cent.
The question, then, was whether or not variation in the ingroup’s power to dictate the outcome of the study would affect the pattern of intergroup discrimination revealed in the standard minimal group studies. It did. As the results in Figure 8.2 indicate, the more power that the students’
ingroup had, the more likely they were to use that as a means of ensuring that outgroup members did not receive the additional course credit. In other words, to the extent that it was available, power was used differentially to disadvantage the outgroup.
As a corollary to this point, the results also demon- strate that intergroup discrimination is confined to situations where power relations between groups allow discrimination to occur. So, in the case of the minimal group studies, groups can only discrim- inate when they have a relatively big say in the dis- tribution of resources (Bourhis, 1994b, p. 200; De Dreu, 1995; Ng, 1982, p. 189). Consistent with this point, the only departure from the strong linear correlation between power and discrimination occurred when groups that were given total (100 per cent) power chose to discriminate slightly less than those given 50 or 70 per cent. Where there was no need to fear the outgroup (because it had no reciprocal power at all), participants tempered their use of power, magnanimous in the knowledge that even a small amount of ingroup favouritism would secure them the extra course credit.
This study confirms the point that, as with sus- ceptibility to influence and perceptions of power, when a person or group has access to power its use will vary as a function of the self-categorical rela- tions between the parties involved – a point that is represented schematically in Figure 8.3. However, as this figure indicates, influence increasesto the extent that the parties are perceived to be members of the same self-category, while the use (and perceived use) of coercive power is expected to decrease.
However, as the findings from Sachdev and Bourhis’ (1985) study suggest, it is also true that perceptions and the actual use of power will depend
on the power-related social reality that confronts the perceiver. Moreover, while the coercive power of ingroups will usually be underplayed (because of its negative connotations for the self ), there should be some situations in which it will be accentuated or ‘talked up’. This is particularly likely to occur at times of intergroup conflict where power (or power-related threat) is used strategically both to ensure the compliance of ingroup members and to win concessions from the outgroup (McGarty, Taylor & Douglas, 2000). A general’s message that
‘We are very powerful’ could be used to intimidate both the opposition and those members of his or her own side who may have been thinking of deserting. However, precisely because it contra- venes the norms alluded to above (and constitutes what Kramer et al., 1995, refer to as ingroup viola- tion), such a strategy is most likely to be used (and is only likely to prove effective) when those towards whom it is directed are unlikely to respond to identity-based influence attempts. If you are a general, your friends will be upset if you threaten them with a gun and they are unlikely to remain your friends for long.
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Having dealt with the question of how self- categorization determines both the likelihood of0 30 50 70 100
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Ingroup power (as a percentage of total power)
Intergroup discrimination*
Figure 8.2 Intergroup discrimination on a minimal group task as a function of the power of the ingroup (from Sachdev & Bourhis, 1985)
Note: *This measure of discrimination is based on responses to MD v. MIP/MJP matrices such as those in Figure 2.1 (where max.=12, min.= −12)
power being used and influence being achieved, a final question concerns how this analysis relates to the existing literature on power use in organizations.
This is a particularly significant issue because, on the face of it, the foregoing arguments bear little resemblance to the literature that we reviewed in the previous sections. We have suggested that group membership and social categorization processes play an important role in power-related organizational behaviour, yet, as Bacharach and Lawler (1980) note, such considerations are con- spicuously absent from mainstream organizational theorizing. What accounts for this discrepancy and how can it be resolved?
One of the primary differences between the social identity approach to power and that which informs most other work in the area is that, where research has previously tended only to uncover the darker side of power use, the above analysis sees it as a basic feature of intergroup and interpersonal relations. It is clear, though, that many of the darker features of traditional analyses can still be discov- ered in the arguments we have provided. In partic- ular, if we confine our analysis to interaction that occurs either (a) between groups whose members are acting in terms of distinct social identities or (b) between individuals who are acting in terms of distinct personal identities (that is, as represented towards the left-hand end of Figure 8.3), then the processes we have discussed account for many of
the patterns observed in motivational, cognitive and personality research.
A major reason for this is that, in both of these situations, the individuals or groups concerned should be striving to enhance the positive distinc- tiveness of their salient self-category relative to the salient non-self-category. However, because, by definition, they do not share identity with non- self-category members, their dealings with them will necessarily involve (and be perceived to involve) the use of power rather than the exercise of influence. The patterns observed in power dis- tance research (for example, by Mulder, 1977) can thus be seen to reflect the behaviour of individuals attempting to get ahead of other individuals, just as the patterns observed in Kipnis’ (1972) study reflect attempts by ingroup members to get ahead of outgroups. In both cases, the participants’ lack of concern for other low-status participants can thus be seen to derive from the fact that they were per- ceived to be members of a non-self-category.
Is it the case, then, that this action reflects men- tal deficiency or, more specifically, a lack of cogni- tive resources on the part of the participants (as argued by Fiske, 1993)? In line with arguments presented in previous chapters, we think not (Nolan et al., 1999; Oakes & Reynolds, 1997;
Oakes & Turner, 1990; Spears et al., 1999; Spears &
Haslam, 1997; Turner & Oakes, 1997). Instead, the behaviour of Kipnis’ participants can be seen to Nature of self-categorical relationship between
high- (H) and low-power (L) parties
Shared self-categorization Non-shared
self-categorization
A: Likelihood of relationship involving influence c o n t i n u u m
Social self-category (us) Social self-categories
(us–them) or personal self-categories (me–you)
B: Likelihood of relationship involving (and being perceived to involve) coercive power
High Low
High Low H
L
H L . . . .
. . . .
Figure 8.3 Schematic representation of the manner in which power and influence are affected by the social categorical relationship between high- and low-power parties