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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
What Do We Believe About Power?
Votaw, Dow
8
/
4
(
Summer
1966
):
71
-
88
Ideas and beliefs about power do make a great deal of difference. Whether ideas and beliefs correspond to reality is of equal importance. Because power is one of the primary forces of human society and because it is particularly visible as an issue today, it seems appropriate to examine some of the ideas and beliefs about it. Power has become an issue on local, national, and international levels with the emergence of new styles of pressure groups, with increasing awareness of the role of the great corporations, and with the corning of deep social, political, and economic changes all over the world. Of the three types of circles that compose the power elite today, it is the military that has benefited the most in its enhanced power, although the corporate circles have also become more explicitly entrenched in the more public decision-making circles. It is the professional politician that has lost the most, so much that in examining the events and decisions, one is tempted to speak of a political vacuum in which the corporate rich and the high war lord, in their coinciding interests, rule. This article presents a discussion of traditional and modern concepts of power and an analysis of the sources and control of power. The article concludes that the problems of power can only be solved by rational beliefs about power.
