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International audience ; While Lukes' view of power as an 'essentially contested concept' is a move in the right direction, it does not go far enough because it falls short of arguing for a plural view of power. Power constitutes a 'family resemblance concept', with family members forming complex relationships within overlapping language games. Members include, among others: and . This argument does not entail relativism or that 'anything goes', as all usages have to be justified as 'conceptual tools', whereby pragmatic criteria of usefulness, rather than essence, define better or worse usage. When moving language games, the relationship between signifier and referent changes, which leads to confusion, unless the family resemblance nature of power is understood. In the literature, the most significant confusion has taken place between sociological analytic and normative political theory language games.

In this article it is argued that social power can be created based upon either the reproduction of social order or coercively but that in complex societies the former is the more important. Building upon the ideas of a number of authors - including Arendt, Parsons, Barnes, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg - a typology of seven forms of power creation is developed in a manner which allows for diverse phenomena from previously divergent perspectives to be woven together into a theoretical whole which renders them commensurable. At the foundational level, social order presupposes the recreation of shared meanings which enable actors to act in collaboration in a way which they could not otherwise do. This observation is used as the basic premise from which to re-examine the reproduction of social order and the relationship between power, structure and knowledge. Among other things, this allows the author to render Lukes' `false consciousness' argument commensurable with Foucault's power/knowledge hypothesis.

A response to Jane Mansbridges's 1994 article on the nature of power conflict in the democratic process (see abstract 9503177). Two basic theories of political power, the conflictual & the consensual, are outlined along with their respective shortcomings. It is illustrated how Mansbridge's notion relies only on the conflictual theory, where power is perceived as being equivalent to coercion in binary opposition to consensus. However, it is argued that most democracies are not based on this opposition, but instead rely on a three-way interplay between consensus, noncoercive power conflict, & coercion. The two-part opposition fails to account for the existence of a commitment to accepting defeat according to a set of institutional procedures. The basis of noncoercive conflictual power is a tacit prior agreement to these rules. This agreement is produced by a shared interest in the maintenance of the democracy. D. Bajo