Instruments Of Domination Theory
Anke Malinski
And the metaphors we use to describe our organizations themselves, speak volumes about our roles as leaders, as followers, and our ability to make change. In his book, Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan lays out eight metaphors for an organization: machines, organisms, brains, cultural systems, political systems, psychic prisons, instruments of domination, and flux and transformation.
People who see organizations as an instrument of domination are often terrible people to work with and for. They see employees as objects to be subjugated. They also tend to see the natural resources available to the company as theirs to exploit.
in it, i saw again a better imaginary world, a world that was fair and just and where good things happened to good, deserving people. that was the world i wished to inhabit! looking back, i recognize in this 3-minute clip the hope i wanted to see as a child, but now i also see domination.
Xerxes and his army operate more like an army of pirates, where he is the captain. He and his army do not seem to come from a place that has and laws or equality amongst the people, unlike Leonidus and his army who come from Sparta, a region with order. Given the background of Leonidus, he and his army have also been exposed to the rational-legal domination.
It should be crystal clear: charisma is the type of domination that is transitory; basically it is between one of the forms of traditional authority and another form of traditional authority. Hence it is hard or impossible to pass charisma on from one leader to the next. Arguably one exception is the Roman Catholic Church, but transmission of charisma is rather difficult even in the Church. When one charismatic leader lost his or her charisma or the leader passed away, it is likely that a certain kind of traditional authority will replace that leader. On rare occasions charismatic authority may be turned into legal-rational authority.
Historically speaking Sultanism was the form of domination characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. The best approximation of prebendalism in the modern Western world is the Russian service nobility (or Pomeshchiki). The ideal type of patrimonialism is West European feudalism. In Russia, boyars owned property and office in a patrimonial way and they were turned into a service nobility after centuries of struggle by Czars from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great. In the following sections, I demonstrate the applicability of the concepts of patrimonialism and prebendalism to post-communist capitalisms.
The question how to translate Herrschaft into English has been debated for some time. Mommsen (1974, p. 74) among others pointed out the difficulties of translation, but in the end he also concluded domination is the most appropriate term.
Theories of domination are primarily attempts to understand the valueof justice, freedom, and equality by examining cases where they areabsent. Such theories seek to clarify and systematize our judgmentsabout what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength, i.e., aboutwhat it is to be vulnerable, degraded, and defenseless againstunrestrained power.
Much contemporary disagreement about domination involves competinganswers to three questions: (1) Who, or what, can dominate? (2) Is itpossible to dominate merely by having power with a certainstructure, or is domination an exercise or an abuseof power? (3) Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power isdomination? The remainder of this entry will address each of thesequestions in turn, then conclude with a survey of how the idea ofdomination has been used in recent applied ethical theory. It willbecome clear as we examine competing answers to these three questionsthat different theorists have very different ideas of why, exactly, weneed a theory of domination. There may be wide agreement that we needthe idea of domination to make sense of unjust power relations, butunjust power relations are wildly varied, and theorists of dominationdisagree not only about which varieties most need to be understood,but about how theorizing domination helps us to understand them.
Another word of qualification before proceeding: what follows is asurvey of work almost entirely from Anglophone political philosophersand political theorists, broadly within the Analytic tradition. Fortheories of domination from the Continental tradition, see the entry, feminist perspectives on power.
A minority position in the literature sees domination fundamentally asa relation between groups, where any domination between individuals isparasitic on group membership. If this is true, the domination of oneindividual by another counts as such only because one belongs to adominant group and the other belongs to a subordinate group(Wartenberg 1990).
The central question is whether we can understand possible examples ofdomination by systems or ideologies as instances of dominationby agents through systems or ideologies. Anaffirmative answer is more often assumed than argued for in theliterature, but Frank Lovett tries to motivate it with thisexample:
Lovett thinks we will agree that domination occurs only during theperiod after slaves are imported and before their manumission: thelegal system that allowed property in slaves enableddomination but did not dominate.
In general, the disagreement about whether agents alone dominatetracks the division between theories directly influenced byneorepublicans and those descended from other traditions. Theneorepublican preoccupation with the master/slave relation makes itnatural to focus on domination by agents: to be dominated by a masteris, obviously, to be dominated by an agent. Working from this centralexample, the republican tradition tends to see institutions, systems,and ideologies as sources of power that make mastery possible ratherthan as standalone sources of domination without agents. If, instead,our attention is focused on the ways power can shape the consciousnessof those under its sway, domination by, e.g., patriarchy itselfbecomes more plausible, even without the looming presence ofparticular patriarchs.
There are two primary lines of objection to the claim that only achange in how power relations are structured can check domination,rather than changes to the outcome of the relation or to the characterof the empowered. The first is that it fails to capture realities ofwhat the dominated really object to; the second is that it leads tosignificant over-generalization.
Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power is domination? Ifdomination is about how social relationships are structured, what isA in a position to do if A dominates B? Ifdomination requires the exercise of power, how does A use theirpower when they dominate B?
Theories identifying domination with even unexercised power tend awayfrom moralization and norm-dependence. If A has a great deal ofpower over B, A will be well positioned to wrongB, or to force B at least to act like A hasauthority. Non-moralized/norm-independent theories maintain that thisis not essential to domination. What is essential? Roughly, thatA has an unchecked or uncontrolled power to impose their willon B, to shape the framework of choices available to Bso that B is highly likely to cooperate with A. Thedisagreements among non-moralized/norm-independent theorists are aboutthe kind of checks or control that might prevent domination, and abouthow imposition works.
This general emphasis on choice is what provokes theover-generalization worries already introduced (Shapiro 2012; Friedman2008; Blunt 2015; McCammon 2015). Some choices clearly have moreweight than others. Nobody thinks having no choice about where to sitin a café matters compared to having no choice about where tolive. Connecting the former as well as the latter to dominatingvarieties of choice-interference, because both might represent, e.g.,the removal or replacement of an option, seems to exaggerate the ideaof domination. If, however, we want to keep domination and thereduction of freedom conceptually connected, there is reason to seedomination in all power to interfere, at least when that power isoutside the control of the interferee.
A capacity for choice-interference, or social relatedness howeverrendered, is necessary but not sufficient for domination on anon-moralized/norm-independent theory. To get domination, somethingmore is required than mere choice-interference or power within asocial relationship.
Frank Lovett argues that avoiding domination does not requiredemocracy, but instead subjecting the powerful to reliably enforcedand widely known rules. Perhaps democracy does, in fact, mosteffectively reduce domination, but this should follow from substantiveargument, not from the mere analysis of concepts (Lovett 2010). Also,there is reason to think that subordinate groups are less dominatedwhenever their overlords must abide by reliably enforced and widelyknown rules, even when those rules do not express the will of thesubordinated in any way. Lovett uses the following case to make hispoint:
Again, if we understand the power required for domination as a kind ofauthority, it makes sense to diagnose the presence or absence ofdomination in terms of illicit authority. When illicitnormative authority counts as such because it is claimed by a powerfulfew, we are pushed firmly in the direction of a reckoning with thenormative authority of all. Of course, once this reckoning has begun,it is natural to diagnose domination in broadly Kantian terms as theabsence of institutions securing respect for our autonomy. (See Bohman2004 for a similar approach applied to international relations.)
Because power asymmetries persist in other contexts outside thetraditionally political, the idea of domination has been marshaledbeyond political philosophy in applied ethics. Anti-dominationapproaches have an ecumenical appeal. Few deny that the paradigms areexamples of injustice; thus, to show that some power structure or useof power resembles these paradigms goes a long way toward motivating averdict against them. Awareness of domination also draws our attentionto the ways moral wrong can be manifest outside the limits ofindividual actions. Aside from questions about which individualactions are wrong, other questions become important. Who is empoweredto act in what ways? How are potential victims empowered to resist?Who is vulnerable even if not actually victimized? However benevolent,who makes the rules? Who obeys or refuses to obey, and what does theircompliance (or refusal) cost them? How do the actions of those withmore power construct the space where the less powerful or thepowerless must act?
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