Social and Critical Psychology

Power Lens Laboratory

Five things are known about the air in a fictional college's workshop block. You will read the same five items three times, using three different analyses of power, and end up with three different lists of things to go and change.

Fictional case - Brackwell College, its committee papers and its staff exist only here

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to apply three analyses of power to one case, and say what each explains well, leaves in shadow, and implies as a remedy.

About 15 minutes. Nothing is timed, and nothing you select is saved or sent anywhere.

This is not a matching exercise

You will not be asked which theorist said what. Each lens arrives as a question rather than a name, and the task is always what happens to this evidence when you ask it. None of the three is the correct answer.

How to use this

Read the case file and commit to an answer to the question below.
For each lens in turn, select the evidence it brings into focus.
Read what the lens actually makes visible, what it leaves less visible, and the remedy that follows from it.
Compare all three side by side at the synthesis stage.
Then apply what you have to a different case.

This part needs JavaScript

The case file, the three analyses and the comparison are built in your browser, so they cannot run with JavaScript switched off. The debrief and the limitations below are readable without it.

Before you start: what best describes what happened at Brackwell? Nobody exercised power - it is an ordinary institutional failure Somebody decided against the technicians, and the decision was wrong Nobody had to decide anything, because the question never became a question The people reporting were not believed, and that is the whole of it

Key terms

Decisions, agendas, preferences: Lukes's three dimensions: who prevails in an open contest, what reaches the agenda at all, and what people come to want.
Normalisation: A standard becoming the unremarkable measure cases are assessed against, without anybody having decided that it should be.
Testimonial injustice: A speaker being given less credibility than their account merits, because of who they are.
Interpretive resources: The shared concepts available for making sense of an experience. Where they are missing, something can happen that nobody can name.

This lens

The three lenses on one case

For each lens: the feature of the Brackwell case it brings into focus, the feature it leaves in shadow, and the remedy that follows from it
Lens	Brings into focus	Leaves in shadow	Remedy it implies

Decisions, agendas and shaped preferences

Commits you to the idea that there are real interests being thwarted - that the technicians would want something different if the situation were different. That is a strong claim about people's real interests, made by an analyst who is not them, and it has been the standing objection to this account since it was first put.

Strongest where somebody could have acted and did not. Weakest where nobody is in charge of the thing doing the damage.

Knowledge, classification and normalisation

Commits you to treating power as productive and dispersed rather than held. That is what lets it see a definition or a classification as an exercise of power. It is also why it struggles to say who should be held responsible, or whose interests were served, without importing a vocabulary it has set aside.

Strongest on the machinery that keeps running by itself. Weakest where somebody needs to be answerable.

Credibility and interpretive resources

Commits you to locating the wrong in an epistemic relation: who is believed, and what vocabulary is available to say things with. That makes a specific and often invisible harm nameable. It can also make an institutional problem look like a problem of individual virtue, and a budget line or a performance measure will keep working whatever anybody believes.

Strongest on what happens to a speaker. Weakest on machinery that does not need a speaker at all.

Challenge - a different case

Ferrand Borough Council, also fictional. A three-year backlog of repairs on one estate has been reported to councillors as a resourcing problem. A review establishes four things. The repairs contractor is paid against a single measure, jobs closed per week. A job that is reopened within twenty-eight days is counted as a new job. Residents' calls are logged by the first keyword an operator selects from a fixed list of twelve. The tenants' association has asked in each of the last four years for "damp" to be added to that list, and no decision on the request has ever been recorded.

Three accounts of power pick out three different things in the same case: a decision nobody had to make, a definition that produces the outcome a decision would have had to produce, and a speaker who is not believed. Each brings some of the evidence into focus and leaves the rest in shadow, and the remedy each implies leaves the others running. Which lens you reach for decides what counts as the problem.

The case file

The laboratory

Three passes over the same five items