Power

Abstract

‘The natural place to look for an understanding of power in organizations is that extensive body of work known as “organization theory”’ (Cockburn, 1990: 76). However, in contrast to control, most traditional organisational behaviour textbooks simply do not have chapters on power, or if they do, admit that it has been largely ignored or subsumed within other issues such as leadership (Luthans, 1981: 387). Cockburn’s explanation is that such theory has been devised from the viewpoint of the owners and managers who control organisations. This may be less a case of reflecting the viewpoint of managers, than the conventional ways of viewing their activities which we examined in the previous section. Willmott (1984: 350) sums this up succinctly: ‘the common sense, technical, images developed by managers to account for their activities get returned to them in the form of apolitical descriptions of the reality of their work’.