Doc and Dale's conversation about Mary Parker Follet's 70-year old
discussion of power is very timely and interesting to me. I have been
reading a review of Gregory Bateson's work. By Peter Harries-Jones, the
book is _A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory
Bateson_. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a long-standing fan of
Bateson, a brilliant, but difficult thinker about anthropology,
cybernetics and, finally, ecology.
As long as I have been studying Bateson, Harries-Jones is revealing
aspects of his work of which I was only vaguely familiar. One of them is
his view of the notion of power. Bateson makes the argument that the
metaphor of power is unhelpful in creating a systems understanding because
it has a linear, mechanistic, internal/external foundation. This is a new
and challenging notion to me, as I'm sure it is to many of us on this list
who have worked comfortably with the notion of power as a real, visible
dynamic operating within organizations and larger systems.
One paragraph that Dale pulled from Follet's writings really stood out for
me:
"These expressions [dividing power, transferring power, conferring power,
sharing power], while containing indeed a partial truth, nevertheless at
the same time *hide* an important truth, namely, that power is
self-developing capacity. (...) The division of power is not the thing to
be considered, but that method of organization which will generate power."
[p 113]
If I look at the expressions in brackets from Bateson's point of view,
they do, indeed, seem to be rather mechanistic, as if "power" is a
separate entity that can be manipulated. The notion of power as a
self-developing capacity, on the other hand, looks and feels much more
like a systemic conception.
I've not read Follet. I'd be interested in hearing from Doc and Dale (or
anyone else!) about their reading of Follet -- does her view of power seem
to represent a systemic perspective? Also, I'd be very interested in
hearing from anyone who has been exposed to Bateson's thinking about the
value of power as a metaphor.
Marilyn Darling
Signet Consulting Group
(617) 242-7214
mdarling@warren.med.harvard.edu
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