Positive and Negative Power: Thoughts on the Dialectics of Power

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Positive power (induction), as an ability to initiate activity, and negative power (resis tance), as an ability to stop some activity, are treated in this paper as two closely related poles of the same power cycle. The paper further demonstrates how existing theoretical treatments of power phenomena have been reduced to an analysis of positive power and have consequently been unable to treat the contradictory interdependency of positive and negative power. Leadership as a power-implementing practice cannot avoid resistance. However, suc cessful leadership can provoke greater induction than resistance. Attempts to avoid resistance completely would provoke secondary effects which would lead towards the deterioration of powerless as well as powerful entities. Authority is treated in this paper as a specific state of equilibrium between conditionally tolerated positive power and conditionally tolerated negative power. Authority can, therefore, be treated as a unity of contradictions.

This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit: