Dear Doc,
may be I need to read Mary Parker Follett's work to better understand her
relations of power, aurthority and control.
>"Power might be defined as simply the ability to
> make things happen, to be a causal agent, to initiate change."
Although it is bad dialogue manner, I will state my understanding of power
as a contrast to Follett's definition:
Power might be defined as the ability to resolve conflicts of interest.
With this definition I feel in line with Gareth Morgan and Aristoteles.
There are several sources of power, i.e. authority, knowledge, relations,
various kinds of control, personal mastery. Thus "power is derived from
authority" makes sense to me and I have difficulties to sort in "If they
only knew that all authority is derived, instead, from power."
There are also different styles of applicating power. I like the
distinction of power-over and power-with, which fits well in dealing with
conflicts.
Power-over is the style to support ones interests by supressing the
interests of others. It occurs when a conflict is interpreted in a
win-lose-model (compare my answer to Richard and Roxanne). Thus I do not
want to follow your
>the nature of competition concerns power-over.
In my eyes, competition is not restricted to conflicts (for example about
common resources), but also includes forces to create new emergences. But
this is a question of definition again - what content/meaning to what
expression.
Regarding empowerment, I like the article by Eliyahu Goldratt "Empowerment
- Misalignment between responsibility and authority" under
http://www.goldratt.com/empower.htm
Best regards,
Winfried
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>