Parsons’s conceptualization of power ties it to authority, consensus and the pursuit of collective goals, and dissociates it from conflicts of interest and, in particular, from coercion and force. Thus power depends on ‘the institutionalization of authority’ and is ‘conceived as a generalized medium of mobilizing commitments or obligation for effective collective action’. By contrast, ‘the threat of coercive measures, or of compulsion, without legitimation or justification, should not properly be called the use of power at all. . . .’. Thus Parsons criticized Wright Mills for interpreting power ‘exclusively as a facility for getting what one group, the holders of power, wants by preventing another group, the ‘‘outs’’, from getting what it wants’, rather than seeing it as ‘a facility for the performance of function in and on behalf of the society as a system’.
Sayfa 31 - 2005, Palgrave Macmillan