Power & Influence

In class on Wednesday, we talked about the article "The Power Elite" and sources of power.  When Dr. Goates asked what we felt gave someone power we named some things like job/title, intelligence, reputation, wealth, social connections, and personality.  Then someone stated the word influence.  This is what Dr. Goates said to be most important.  Without influence you can't have power.  Power is only the capacity to influence, and influence is about action - power in motion in an attempt to alter someone's attitudes or behavior.  We also talked about how it is not people who have power, but institutions.  Family, school, and church USED to be the most important when it came to influences, but now it has changed to government, military, and businesses.  This shows how much our world has changed over the years.  Sadly now everything that matters revolves around business, money, and politics rather than family, religion, or politics.  We also talked about French and Raven's 5 sources of power, referent, expert, coercive, reward, and legitimate, and then the 4 contingencies of power, substitutability, centrality, discretion, and visibility which I also found to be really interesting when focusing on these issues.  I never thought about how much someone's influence capacity told about the power they had though, and it definitely made me realize power is more than just wealth or title even though many would like to believe that nowadays.