Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter One: Introduction

The central question that informs this book is the extent to which dimensional theories of power can usefully be applied in contexts of marketing and consumption. Each theory presents a different face of power such that earlier explanations can be thought of as fitting into subsequent ones in the manner of matryoshka dolls. They owe their provenance to the political theorist Robert Dahl (1957), whose explanation was subsequently critiqued as too narrow by Bachrach and Baratz (1962) who pointed to a hidden face of power that Dahl had overlooked, succeeded by Steven Lukes’ (1974) argument for the existence of a third, invisible face of power.

The account here takes a broadly dimensional approach to power as the first two sections of the book meander through questions of theory and context. Although overly long, to take a dimensional view necessarily means that some important theorists of power excluded and now that the project is almost finished, I am aware of some glaring omissions. Foucault’s explanation is included, partly because some have argued that this presents a fourth face of power. Below I briefly describe power-over and power-with and dimensional theories of power, and then relations between power, freedom, and sovereignty, before describing this in the context of capitalism, consumption and marketing before concluding with a brief outline of chapters.

Power-Over and Power-With

We mostly think of power as power-over something or someone, in the sense of having someone in your power. Yet, as argued by Steven Lukes, power also refers more broadly to our capacity to effect an outcome or to receive it passively. From Spinoza Lukes distinguishes potentia, the general ‘power of things in nature’ such as for persons to exist and to act’, from potestas, or being in the power of another.¹ Thus Potestas or ‘power-over’ as the ability to have others in your power is a sub-species that derives from potentia which is the capacity to act.²

Potentia can be linked to potential and the power to get things done. The importance of the collective achievement of joint goals is highlighted by the prominent psychologist Michael Tomasello (2008) who argues that human language itself arose from the system of visual signs used by individuals to summon help from others to achieve common goals. This idea of power as a disposition or as a capacity to get things done is shared by Hannah Arendt for whom power is, ‘the human ability not just to act but to act in concert’,³

There are affinities between potentia, power-with, capability and enablement, such that “Power-with” others provides the capability that enables one to succeed in a task that one could not otherwise have achieved. In addition to helping directly, for example in the situation where others crowd round to push the back of one’s car that has broken down, others may help by providing infrastructure, organization, materials, know-how, or some combination of these.  For example, all were present in the joint initiative Project Shakti (Strength) launched by the Indian Government and Hindustan Unilever (HUL) in the year 2000, with the ambitious goal to encourage 100,000 women in Andhra Pradesh to become Shakti Amma (Empowerment Mothers) covering 500,000 villages and touching the lives of 600 million people. The idea was to empower women by raising their status through economic engagement in this traditional society where most lived below the poverty line⁴, whose freedom of movement and action were curtailed. However, as the vice-president of Unilever stated, this was not a CSR programme but rather a “business initiative with social benefits’.⁵ HUL would benefit from the establishment of a dense distribution network modelled along the lines of the Avon Lady. The women would invest R10,000 to buy stock from which they ought to make a return of 9% or 10%. Six years after the launch of the programme in 2006, 3,077 over 22 districts were reportedly in business, a figure that could either be interpreted as a slow but positive start, or as a disappointment in relation to the project’s overall aim.

 On the plus side, in Thekkudan’s (2010) account, the ability to make their own money raised women’s self-confidence with many reporting that they were now better respected in their village communities, for instance when others used their first name and not their last name which is caste-related.  Amma were “beauty agents” associated with health and hygiene but also with a “modern” notion of beauty evidenced by the brisk sale of “Fair and Lovely” skin-lightening cream.  On the downside she concluded that, “freedom of choice and action to shape one’s life along with control over resources and decisions is not an evident result of the project.⁶  One reason was because the business might be run in the name of the woman but was actually run by the men in her family her took orders and made deliveries because of women’s lack of freedom to  move about.  The work was laborious, requiring a collective effort taking up from two to eight hours a day and Ammas experienced problems created by unsold stock.  Additionally it had the reverse effect of that intended, by reinforcing to a certain extent the distinction between male space (public) and female (private).  The initiative had also been objected to by private shopkeepers and offered no community benefit or involvement.   Thekkuden argues that a major setback happened later when the state drew back from its support of the project.  She concludes that overall, while HUL was able to build its brand in a previously untapped market, for the “power mothers’, “rather, the result was making vulnerable salesgirls’ unable to empower themselves in the absence of state mediation and support from civil society.⁷ In relation to the overall success of the project she comments that while the power of the corporation was questionable in this case, the power of the state was undiminished. As will be discussed later, this conclusion lends support to arguments that such initiatives are more likely to succeed when they are supported by the government and political establishment and downplays those that suggest that the corporation can step in to form a governmental role.

There are obvious similarities between the above and the empowerment literature in marketing⁸ and in social marketing. it fits well with one of the two descriptions of critical social marketing espoused by Gordon (2019, 86), as ‘the impact of commercial marketing and business on society.⁹ While there are obvious parallels, the bulk of this book is concerned with dimensional theories of power-over, based on Dahl’s (1957) A/b conception of power and not with social-psychological explanations of empowerment.¹⁰. That said as some of the examples in this book make clear, it by no means simple to disentangle ‘power-with’ from ‘power-over’. In an explanation that takes a distinctively Hobbesian complexion, the power of the sovereign can be thought of as deriving from that portion of sovereignty leant to them by each of their subjects. Market liberals contend in a broadly similar manner that the corporation derives it power from the “votes” cast in its favour each time a customer pays for its services, although this is a very strange form of ‘power-with’ as each individual is presumed to act entirely in their self-interest. The argument at the heart of the marketing concept is thus that in the long run the survival of even the largest corporation lies in the hands, or rather pockets of its customers.

To think of power as power over someone, or something, seems commonsensical given early experiences at the hands of, or in the shoes of, the school bully. This accords with definitions such as Max Weber, for whom power is, ‘the probability that an actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’,¹¹ or Denis Wrong (1980) who conceives of power as an asymmetric, intentional social relation involving, ‘the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effects on others’. Wrong identifies factors other than sheer force, such as manipulation, persuasion and authority as the principal means by which power obtains its effects, spending most of his time discussing authority relations involving the resources or status of the powerful.

Dimensions of Power

The idea that power has different faces or dimensions derives from the critique of the political theorist Robert Dahl’s work by Bachrach and Baratz (1962). In the early 1960s Dahl became was concerned by a claim that is also widespread today, which is that US politics was run in the interests of a hidden ruling elite. As an empiricist Dahl was concerned by the lack of evidence to substantiate this claim which he then set out to study in the local city of New Haven. Dahl’s team measured the preferences of different groups in the local political system and quantified the extent to which the preferences of one group prevailed over those of others. From this research programme which proved to be highly influential, Dahl’s team rejected the hypothesis that politics was governed by a shadowy elite, but was pluralistic, such that different groups dominated others in different contexts.

For Dahl, power is a causal relation between two individuals such that, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to something that B would not otherwise do”.¹² Although no-one could get inside my head to scrutinize my intentions, a reasonable person might have inferred that as a child I ate the parsnips I hated because my granny told me to do so. Dahl’s causal definition follows from Hobbes’ idea of sovereign power, which Stuart Clegg (1989) describes as, “a place of will, a supreme agency towards which others would bend”. Power is conceived of by Dahl in positivist terms as something directly observable and measurable. The roots of this go back to classical mechanics and Dahl, who was keen on collecting facts and assessing probabilities in relation to power used a comment he made to his students prior to the mid-term break as an example; “If you don’t do the requisite reading, you’ll fail the exam”! He described how the power of the teacher could be measured as the difference between the probability that his students would have done the reading before they received this information, against the amount they would do after they have received the news.

Waiting time is a ubiquitous but little-referred to aspect of the consumer experience. Waiting can be frustrating, particularly if one does not know how long for and supplicants, such as those requesting healthcare, welfare support or political asylum often have to endure lengthy and frustrating application procedures and cancelled appointments, as do those of us who are trapped into using inappropriately named ‘consumer support services.¹³ The length of time used by the diminutive tyrant Vladimir Putin to signify his status by keeping visitors waiting is a case in point. That Putin could be on time is testified to by the fact that he turned up promptly to organized press conferences.¹⁴

Putin Power￼

That he kept the Queen of England waiting for fourteen minutes might not seem particularly long but would have been thought impolite, and even a slight, given she worked to a minute-by-minute schedule. It seems that the Queen got off lightly compared to most European leaders and journalists, never mind his long-suffering wife, who reputedly had to wait for up to two and a half hours while they were dating. Putin’s blatant disregard shown to US Secretary of State John Kerry seemed unfathomable, until one learned that this was a deliberate snub at a time of frosty relations with the USA over Syria. His humiliation of the supplicant ex-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovitch who had to wait over four hours, could not have been made plainer.

Stewart Clegg (1989) describes episodic power in in organizational contexts where managers make workers use a system they would not otherwise use. This relational form of “power over” or causal power cannot be identified in the absence of resistance. This calls to mind the lamentation of Bartleby the scrivener, “I would prefer not to’. In the context of consumption there is the palaver attached to air travel where “travel assistants” ensure that we have first checked-in online and downloaded our boarding pass, then direct us to weigh our bags and attach the luggage tag, then to join the queue where we are issued with another boarding pass, and then onwards to place our bags onto the moving belt, all in the interest of “convenience”. As Hobbes (1651) knew very well, language is a slippery thing!¹⁵ Lukes (2021) mentions a positive aspect of power-over in the role played by parents to rid their children from bad habits, which was never easy but is much more challenging today given the long reach of social media into childhood.

Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) subsequently critiqued Dahl for ignoring a “second face” of power which shapes the political agenda by restricting what is discussed to what is innocuous to the powerful by preventing issues from entering the political arena. What they call non-decisionmaking can be achieved through the “mobilization of bias” which can involve silencing potential opponents by co-opting them.

Steven Lukes (1974) argued that Dahl’s ‘one-dimensional’ understanding and the ‘two-dimensional’ account by Bachrach and Baratz’ are similar, in that each conceives of power as deliberate and intentional, although in the latter case it may operate covertly. Lukes warned others to beware of two common fallacies in studying power. The exercise fallacy is when one assumes that power is overt and that it only occurs when it is operationalised, as for instance, when Elon Musk frustrated Ukrainian offensive plans by switching off the Starlink system.¹⁶ Power is better thought of as a disposition or as a potential that may or may not be exercised; Musk could equally cut off access to half the world or indeed all of it if he chose to. The vehicle fallacy describes the situation where power is equated with the amount of resource one has at one’s disposal. The most (in)famous example is perhaps the ‘McNamara Fallacy’, so named because during the1960s Vietnam war, Robert McNamara modelled US strategy as a set of equations, leading to a focus on tracking numbers, so that the US generals came to believe they were winning based largely on the massive tonnage of ordinance dropped. This fallacy has since been observed in relation to quality assurance and widespread use of targets in healthcare.¹⁷

In developing the argument for a third dimension of power Lukes (1974) took from Gramsci the idea that the willing consent of those dominated can be gained by manipulating their beliefs and preferences; ‘(t)he supreme exercise of power consists of getting others to have the desires you want them to have’.¹⁸ From this what people say cannot be trusted as they, ’do not know their own minds…it is precisely the belief that they falsely think that they do which is the locus of the problem of hegemony’.¹⁹ Lukes acknowledged that this presents a formidable challenge to the researcher as conflict is not even covert but is replaced by willing compliance, and how this is obtained may not be intentional. How then to detect if power is at work? For Lukes this necessitates the adoption of an external perspective from which to judge the effects of power against the real interests of the individual.

Lukes’ ideas were further developed by John Gaventa (2006) and colleagues through the Powercube, which describes power in its three-dimensional aspects as visible, hidden and invisible. Thus ‘invisible power’ may involve ‘self-reproducing social processes’ by which the thoughts and actions of both the powerful and of the powerless are conditioned by pervasive norms. If anything, Gaventa’s explanation of invisible power resonates more strongly with the conception of power developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984) than does that of Lukes (2021).²⁰

Power-Over in Marketing

The mainstream literature in marketing embraced a definition of power early on that was broadly similar to that developed by Dahl, (1957) as a base to study dyadic power in marketing channels. Authors discussed the theorisation and measurement of power (Beier & Stern, 1969; El-Ansary & Stern, 1972) and its application to franchising (Hunt & Nevin, 1974), the purchase of advertising agency services (Farrell & Shroder, 1998) and the study of channel conflict (Gaski, 1984). Influence features as an important construct in this literature as the generally agreed definition of power is, ‘the ability of one individual or group to control or influence the behaviour of another’.²¹ Another difference from Dahl’s definition is that authors accept that a firm can have power without using it, thus recognising that power is a potential that need not be exercised.²² Empirically, marketers quickly discovered that the ‘non-coercive” bases of power developed by French and Raven (1959) comprising reward power, legitimate power, expert and referent power, were almost impossible to distinguish in an empirical setting, thus opting for a simple differentiation between coercive and non-coercive power.²³

Over and above this are literatures on topics ranging from advertising influence and ideology,²⁴ to brand power,²⁵ and consumer resistance.²⁶ At a more general level marketing academics have long focused on the importance of intra-firm power relations by arguing that business is better off if it is run by marketers and not engineers, or accountants nor those in sales (Levitt, 1960; Auh & Merlo, 2012). In more modern parlance these can thought of as specific discourses that legitimise a particular structure of power, by specifying roles and responsibilities and authorising some behaviours while ruling others out. For instance, when working on a research project I observed Levitt’s (1960) point first hand, that businesses run by engineers have an interest in demonstrating their technical proficiency by building a better mousetrap.²⁷ When I started the project buyers were instructed by designers to procure expensive state-of-the art components. A year later when a new executive team gained led by accountants was installed it decreed that engineers move from their office to work alongside sales to produce an entry-level product at an extremely competitive price. Several engineers left the business in disgust, whilst those who remained were required to reverse engineer each product, with the result that state-of-the art components were replaced with cheaper but more robust alternatives used by mass electronics manufacturers.

The above might be understood as illustrative of the operation of the circuit of power model devised by Stewart Clegg (1989) where individualistic and episodic power relations are nested within the wider social system where the rules of the game are contested that facilitate requisite actions and specify role requirements. The logic informing marketing discourse is that by identifying and serving customer needs better than the competition the marketing-oriented firm will be more profitable than others. An influential stream of research developed to prove this point by operationalising and measuring “marketing orientation” (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990). Taken to its logical conclusion, the most customer-centric business will be the most profitable, leading ultimately to monopoly and what might be termed the ‘Amazon paradox’, given that near-monopolies can exercise virtually unlimited power over their customers.

Not all discourses are equal as some are tighter and better specified and have more pressing real world implications than do others. In democracies much of the action pertaining to the rules of the game occurs in the arcane context of legal discourse where those found guilty must pay a literal price. Denegri-Knott and Tadajewski, (2017) cite Foucault, who pointed to the ‘ceaseless reciprocity between the legal system, the market system and power’ (Foucault, 2008, 164). While discourses of accounting and engineering employ specific rules and procedures that are inculcated into their subjects through years of education and training on the job, they also promote the specific world views mentioned above. More nebulous are the ‘tribal’ discourses invoked to frame the actions of those who are labelled as voluntary simplifiers or culture jammers (Cherrier, 2009). At a still-wider level there is the discourse embedded in the overall language system. Employed as a lingua franca by many, to write in English has a particular resonance for those once colonised by the British who were at one time punished for speaking their own language. Literary scholars such as Brian Friel and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have illustrated the violence done to indigenous systems of meaning and the alienation that results from having to speak in a foreign tongue.²⁸ On the plus side Ngũgĩ wrote that English provided support to anti-colonial intellectuals who appropriated its vocabulary of liberation and emancipation and brought it back to Africa.²⁹ Varman and Belk (2009) have argued in the context of India that collective memory of colonisation provided a resource to mobilize against global corporations.

Given that the marketing is not suspended in space but is embedded in an economic and social context it is necessary to briefly discuss freedom and sovereignty and indeed capitalism, the meaning of which can be taken for granted.

Power and Freedom

Freedom is important to this discussion because it is intimately related to power and there is more than one idea of freedom. Power is most often discussed in negative terms in the sense of getting rid of the obstacles that encumber the individual. Robert Dahl adhered to a liberal understanding as freedom from, whilst for those in the civic republican tradition such as Quentin Skinner and Phillip Pettit, freedom consists of non-domination by arbitrary power. The difference can be illustrated by the example of a slave who is allowed freedom to do as he pleases by his master. In the liberal understanding he is free as his choices are unconstrained, whereas in the republican view he is still dominated as his master may at some point change his mind. Both these negative forms of freedom (freedom from; non-domination) can in turn be differentiated from positive freedom. Pushed to an extreme in this understanding, the truly autonomous self-determined individual will be free from any constraint, construed as “interference”, imposed by family, community or government.

From the time of Adam Smith, liberal economists such as Milton Friedman (1962) emphasized the value of negative freedom, to think what I want, say what I want, write what I want and do what I want, whether to take drugs, skydive, engage in risky sex or die when I choose, without fear of hindrance from the “nanny state”. For Friedman, the objective, “is to preserve the maximum degree of freedom for each individual separately that is compatible with one man’s freedom not interfering with other men’s freedom”. At the extreme, the demand for negative freedom is thus expressed in a radical form as the demand for freedom from any constraint whatsoever. A particularly virulent form of this view is manifested in the (Dis)-United States of America, through moves by some of the richest men on the planet to unravel the central State institutions that provide security and safety for many, and to destroy democracy itself.³⁰

The radical slant of negative freedom can be argued to provide an ideological bolster for the powerful which traps the powerless in a cage that is just as solid as its iron counterpart. While the vice-President of the “land of the free” lectured Europeans on their lack of “free speech he omitted mention of “freedom” in his own land to brazenly lie, incite violence, use military assault weapons with deadly effect, or the ‘freedom’ granted to children to learn the best way to kill themselves from social media feeds. Timothy Snyder (2024) offers an interesting take on this by arguing that negative freedom operates as an alibi for the powerful, providing them with license that enables them to dominate and coerce others. Expressed in economic terms negative freedom specifies an absence, signalling that as economic actors we should be left equally alone to do as we please. This shrouds a history of exploitation of the powerless. The fiction by which market forces are assumed to spontaneously equilibrate exculpates the individual from having to think of the actual situation of the real people involved and the consequences of their actions.

The Harm Principle

While John Stuart Mill (2001) acknowledged the importance of negative freedom, he cautioned that individual freedom is allowable to the extent that it does not harm others; “(t)he only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it”.³¹ Harming another is to make them worse off than they would otherwise have been.

All governments place some limits on the exercise of negative freedom by individuals when their actions threaten potential harm to others. Given that the harmful effects of passive smoking are now well understood, one might expect that some form of regulation that limits the effects of tobacco smoke on non-smokers. However, regulation has gone well beyond this so that in the UK, advertising for cigarettes has been banned since 2016 and cigarettes must be hidden from view at the point of sale and packaged in standardised plain packaging. In the USA, shopkeepers must check the photo ID of customers aged under 27 and cannot sell cigarettes in packs of less than twenty. In the UK ownership of firearms is monitored and enforced by the local police who apply stringent checks such as confidential character assessments; In the USA the bizarre situation has arisen that any individual can buy a military style AR-15 rifle at the age of 18, while to buy a beer they will have to wait until they are 21. Friedman argued against government regulation of smoking, recommending the market-based solution of developing nicotine pills and cigarette substitutes. He also wrote encouraging reviews for anti-gun control books More guns, less crime (Lott, 1998) and The Bias Against Guns (Lott: 2003).

How then should a liberty-minded person behave? There is no clear answer to this question. Consider that in the face of a highly infectious and deadly epidemic, a vaccine has been discovered, but a close member of your family refuses to be inoculated. Should they be free to do so? Vaccines are only effective if they achieve herd immunity. Millions of parents in industrialized countries refused to have their infants vaccinated with the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine due to the mistaken belief that this leads to autism. According to one historical review effects of contracting measles alone for children aged under five were significant; 0.3% died, 20% had to be hospitalised, 12% suffered from acute diarrhoea and over 8% contracted pneumonia. What should a liberty-minded person do? On the one hand if they side with Milton Friedman, then they would regard this as fundamentally a question for individual judgement. On the other hand the “harm” principle suggests that one should consider the likely harm done to others by refusing to be vaccinated. Given that measles is highly contagious and that one person can infect 9 out of 10 others, to achieve herd immunity, 95% of the population would need to be inoculated. Every individual who decided not to get the vaccine would reduces the chance of achieving herd immunity and so would increase the risk to others.

Positive Liberty

While liberal economists make much of negative freedom, positive freedom, or freedom to developed by Isiah Berlin, is less spoken about. This questions the unitary nature of the individual subject presumed by proponents of negative freedom and problematizes the idea of free choice. Positive freedom conceives of the subject as comprising two selves, one of which is driven by base desires, while the other follows the true interests of the individual. Consider that I decide to drive down a road and then to turn right at one junction and left at the next, before pulling over to stop. Up until now my actions seem perfectly free. But when I tell you that I took this route because I wanted to go to the tobacconist to salve my craving for cigarettes, even though I want to give up smoking. There are two “selves” at work here where the one that dominates is that which drives my craving for cigarettes. In this positive conception of freedom, true freedom of choice would involve self-determined engagement with my rational self-interest in line with survival, to quit smoking. As we shall see later a similar logic informs Kotler’s (1972) argument for the societal marketing concept which distinguishes pleasing products that provide short-term satisfaction and long-term harm, from salutary and desirable products that serve the long-term consumer interest. It also informs a variant of social marketing theory that works in the purported interests of public welfare in producing campaigns against racism and drug abuse. This is also the logic that informs Kahneman’s (2011) appeal that the consumer should be protected against firms that manipulate System 1 processing linked to the immediate satisfaction of desire and to reduce the effectiveness of System 2 processing that acts in preserving their true interests.

Capitalism

It is important to discuss the relation between markets and the Market, or capitalism. Language can be a source of confusion and a bone of contention, evident in liberal theorist Norman’s (2018) reference to “markets”, while critical theorists Fraser and Jaeggi refer only to “capitalism”.³² That many if not all liberals eschew “capitalism” as a descriptor may be understandable given this term was first used by Karl Marx and appears nowhere in Adam Smith.³³ Marx argued that capitalism is a pre-requisite for the establishment of communism by maximising the productive force of the economy.³⁴ Today it is lambasted by critics as the source of all of society’s ills comprising a cold, ruthless, rapacious system of exploitation that thrives on discontinuity, disruption, conflict and violence. From a Marxist perspective critics have focused principally on the effects of capitalism on the worker, describing it as an abstract system that involves processes of separation, or the alienation of resources required to satisfy needs as private property; the imposition of work and the separation of work from leisure; and the profit motive by which the surplus value of production is expropriated from the worker.³⁵

Bernand Braudel, a prominent critic of capitalism argued, contra liberal and Marxist positions, that capitalism is the anti-market. Braudel likened economic organization to the storeys on a house, the first of which consists of “material life” consisting of basic consumption; the second storey, consists of “economic life” and has something in common with Polyani’s conception of a marketplace, as prices are public and profits amount to little more than a wage for the seller. What is notably different is that Braudel’s final storey, scaffolded on top of economic life is ‘capitalism’, which is the zone of the anti-market, an opaque world involving the monopoly concentration of wealth and power. If true, Braudel’s vision of capitalism would be entirely antithetical to Adam Smith’s view of the market

If capitalism is not entirely about markets that are regulated by a price system, then what is it about? It seems that liberals and critics agree that inexorable growth and accumulation spurred by the profit motive are intrinsic elements of capitalism, involving a dynamic process where firms control the transformation of inputs into commodities and the labour process involved in this and invest profit into a new cycle of production. While arguing that capitalism and markets are intertwined, Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) acknowledge that markets for consumer goods existed in non and precapitalist societies and appear in a variety of forms. In their account capitalism is a system where markets play a central role, involves private ownership of the means of production, a class division between owners and producers, a free labour market, “the dynamic of capital accumulation premised on an orientation towards the expansion of capital as opposed to consumption, coupled with an orientation toward making profit instead of satisfying needs”.³⁶ While they offer an expanded description of capitalism, linked to expropriation, imperialism and racism, their assertion, “making profit instead of satisfying needs’ would no doubt be vigorously contested by mainstream marketing theorists which potentially leads down the theoretical rabbit hole that capitalism manufactures false needs.³⁷

Embeddedness

Robert Dahl (1993) and Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) were each influenced by Polyani’s (1944) argument, that capitalism does not go “all the way down” but is embedded in an institutional context. Given the creative destructiveness of the marketplace a pure market-based society could not reproduce itself, so Polyani argued that economic processes should be understood in the context of wider social relations, noting in a pithy turn of phrase that in traditional societies the economy was embedded in social relations, whereas in capitalism, social relations have become embedded in the economic system.

By comparison with the USA, Robert Dahl (1993) commented favourably on the balance struck in Nordic societies between and political and economic power that then prevailed when equality between citizens was regarded as an important value. Fraser has developed a more thoroughgoing notion of embeddedness which focuses on the shifting boundaries between capitalism and the non-economic spheres it depends on, comprising social reproduction, the polity and nature. Compared to Marxist explanations where crises come from within the capitalist economy, in this explanation they arise from the boundaries that divide it from its non-economic conditions. Markets can be fickle and dangerous and capital accumulation, “depends on a precarious and complex balance between commodity relations and other forms of social organization” (Jessop, 2001: 219). Thus, market society developed as a corrective to harness the strengths of the market while striving to contain its destructive potential through regulations that sustain capital accumulation. Fraser argues that in the period of state-managed capitalism what she calls the ‘states of the core’ began to assume some of the costs of reproduction, promoted full-employment, developed partnerships with unions, compensated for market failures, “and generally disciplined capital for its own good”.³⁸

Consumption

Rather than trying to define consumption in some esoteric way, for instance, by viewing it as destruction (which of course it is), it can be useful to reflect briefly on the scope and variety of consumption practices in our daily lives. Consumption takes up much of our time and includes personal grooming, preparing and eating food, doing housework, browsing and shopping for food, durables or phones, travelling for leisure and for work, holidays, sporting equipment, concert tickets, cars, pornography, sex, and (for some) sex and so on, never mind talking about them with others. It can be useful to check our consumption against an average in which case it seems that apart from sleeping and working (which take up around sixteen hours a day), the “average” adult in the UK spends about fifty minutes grooming, an hour travelling, two hours preparing and eating food, two, to two and a half hours watching TV, and fifty minutes on their computer. Time spent shopping is not accounted for separately but is parcelled in with activities such as household work, care, DIY and gardening, which in a sample period in 2024 amounted to three hours forty minutes a day for women, about an hour more than spent by men. This highlights differences based on gender, age and social-class. Those who are economically inactive, ill or who stay at home during the working day report watching more TV. That consumption takes up a huge amount of our time is starkly obvious when respondents report that on average they spent just thirty minutes a day socialising with others.³⁹

While figures such as those mentioned above should be taken with a large pinch of salt, they nevertheless provide a benchmark for us to reflect on our own daily consumption patterns. From the above, we spend much of our time either buying or consuming commodities, leading us to engage with all sorts of sizes and types of organization from the people with whom we have personal dealings, such as the local ‘one-man-band’ we are at the mercy of when our washing machine or heating system breaks down, or when our roof tiles fall off and the local newsagent or greengrocer, (vanishing breeds), to remote engagements with those herded into call-centres, who labour joylessly on behalf of “our” bank, broadband “provider”, holiday company, utility, and so on. Am I alone in beginning to prefer the occasional rudeness and pomposity of the local electrician or plumber who assumes that I am an ignoramus who needs to be informed about what is really going on in the world and forgive their transgressions (even though they drive me mad when they don’t show up when they said they would or when the blasted thing breaks down again), over the platitudinous ‘have a wonderful day’ on repeat from their remote AI enabled counterparts, following a failed attempt to resolve a simple issue?

The Market: An Unusual Case of Power-With

Earlier I briefly mentioned Lukes’ discussion of potentia and potestas which he borrowed from Spinoza. From this I suggested that it might not be going too far to suggest that the potesta or power-over the individual customer enjoyed by the corporation derives from the potentia or power-with of the multitude. There is something of a resemblance between the idea that the power of the corporation rests ultimately on that lent to it by its customers, and Hobbes’ argument that citizens lend a part of their sovereignty to government to form a mandate. If Leviathan arises and assumes its gigantic form from the will of the citizenry, should there not also be a collective term aside from that of the corporation, to describe the constructions assembled by consumers? Where citizens can club together to advance the common weal, the consumer envisaged as homo economicus is supposed to act solely in their self-interest. Self-interest can obviously be involved in instances of power-with, as in the situation I mentioned earlier that when a car broke down and blocked the road, it didn’t take long for a group of motorists to band together to clear it out of the way. But in such situations all of the motorists are working towards a common goal, whereas power in the marketplace is blind, constituted unintentionally by transactions between strangers who are mutually indifferent to each other.

There may be no need to depend on Spinoza, given that Adam Smith pointed out that it should go without saying, that as the end of all production is consumption, so the firm should serve the interests of the consumer. Spinoza after all was writing about the immanence or otherwise of God and his call for a radical democracy based on the ‘multitude’ has been argued by radical commentators as the antithesis of representative democracies that are run by political elites co-opted by big business.⁴⁰ The marketing concept might better be expressed as a common-sense regard by those in business for the interests of those on whom their own interest depends. In a market society it is ultimately the shifting of demand that acts as a spur to keep business from doing what it wants to do in the dog-eat-dog market-place, which is to create a monopoly. Thus while there is clearly an asymmetry between the resources that are at the command of the individual and the corporation, due to the creative destruction of capitalism, the argument is that in the long-run the market will prevail, which does not rule out all kinds of malpractice in the short run however long that will be. As anyone in the role of customer knows who has been at odds over an issue with some corporate monolith, the experience can more often result in a sense of powerlessness and annoyance. At the heart of the marketing concept is the presumption that the “long run” the survival of even the largest corporation lies in the hands, or pockets of its customers. In the “short-run”, all manner of collective enterprises have emerged to work in the interests of consumers, some formally endorsed by the state. Another set of groups has formed based on the perceived responsibility of consumers for the wellbeing of people animals and the environment, on whom their consumption depends.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is another term whose meaning cannot be taken for granted. In seeking to justify the need for a sovereign, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1651) argued that this figure is required because otherwise society would be a war of all against all. To avoid society degenerating it was necessary for each individual to cede some of their power to a sovereign, Leviathan. In The Sovereign Individual (1997)) by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (no, not that one, his father) expressed a much more radical vision of sovereignty. They argued, presciently in some respects, that such is the power of the current wave of information technology that it will sweep away the institutions that are currently taken for granted as underpinning our security, from Leviathan itself, in the form of national governments, to central banks and state-administered healthcare. They foresaw that much of the world’s economy would move into online transactions away from government control. For them the key question is how to maximise one’s individual autonomy from others, from community and government. They envisioned a zero-sum state of natural winners and losers, where the winners are free from regulation or domination by government, which they equate with organised crime. As government receded with the proliferation of mafias, sovereign individuals would soar above the chaos by constructing protective bubbles that would survive the collapse of nation-states.

The Sovereign Individual is a successor to the work of the novelist Ayn Rand who developed a fan club on the right for The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In Rand’s extreme portrayal of negative freedom, independent individuals, predominantly men, reminiscent of the “rugged individuals” beloved of US Americans are pitted against the soulless bureaucracy of a State which they (and she) conceived of as criminal, and against other obstacles to the realisation of their ruthless ambition to realize their self-determined vision of progress. Although Rand was a novelist, and by many accounts not a very good one, Bill McKibben argues that in the present age she ought to be regarded as the greatest philosopher of our time, if only for her influence on ‘threatening to end the human game’. McKibben describes the Thatcher-Reagan years as effectively the “second age of Rand”, when she developed a cultish following that proclaimed her core message, ‘Government is bad, selfishness is good…solidarity is a trap’.⁴¹

Although some might understandably perceive flaws in their logic, a major problem for the rest of us subhumans is that the works by Rand, Davidson and Rees-Mogg have apparently become the ‘go-to’ place for bedtime reading for the ‘tech bros.’ of FAANG, leading them to pour billions of dollars into the construction of enclaves on Earth and the missions to Mars that these texts envisioned, investing also in technologies to slow their aging so as to bring them to the cusp of immortality. McKibben (2019) devotes several chapters to describe this form of madness that have come straight out of Brave New World as these ravings were also inspired by literal readings of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. McKibben describes the dystopian fantasy of the current Tech elite, some of whom he knows personally, they are trying to realise as fact, for whom the world is divided between them (the “naturally gifted” members of the tiny GenRich class), and the subhuman GenNaturals whom they will generously condescend to serve them as drones. The elite envisage that they can leverage AI to their advantage and will be able bio-engineer their germline through CRISPR technology so that within a few generations Genrich and GenNaturals will be so genetically distinct that they will be able to crossbreed. Although for McKibben as for me, this fantasy has been plucked straight out of a sci-fi novel, he disconcertingly references the above scenario to works by prominent academics from reputable universities.⁴²

Although for Timothy Snyder (2024), sovereignty is also the first form of freedom, his argument could not be more different to that of Rand, or from Davidson and Rees-Mogg. For Snyder to conceive of sovereignty as negative freedom is to miss something fundamental to the very construction of human subjectivity. The fallacy lies in the presumption that humans are isolated individuals and that sovereignty has to do with simply clearing away those others who are perceived as obstacles to the realisation of their imaginings. In his alternative account, it is only through the acknowledgement of others, that we come to see ourselves, to paraphrase Robert Burns, as others see us.⁴³

For Snyder, the belief that we are alone and so we are free is a mistake that ensures we are not. He contrasts two senses in which the body is understood, as the leib, or living human body and that of the body as körper, or object. Leib is the essential source of knowledge of our imperfect selves together with that of the world and of freedom, enabling us to see others as subjects and not as objects. Given that Leib, our living body, is the essential source of our knowledge about the world, understood in this way, negative freedom which takes others as either obstacles or means to one’s ends is a form of self-deception, that denies the leib, of our own body.⁴⁴ Freedom should thus be thought of in positive terms, as the correct way to perceive barriers is as impediments, “not because they block us as objects, but because they hinder us from understanding one another and becoming subjects.”⁴⁵ We must see the bodies of others as subjects if we are to perceive ourselves as subjects and if we cannot do this, then we cannot be free. ⁴⁶ The idea of negative freedom itself creates intellectual and moral barriers, by incorporating a flawed conception of the subject as lacking in self-awareness, empathy and self-knowledge and who, by treating others as foreign objects denies their own embodiment as a subject. This perception of the body as körper, or object, ultimately leads to horrific, well-rehearsed outcomes, ultimately opening the door to demeaning the other through abuse, rape, slavery and murder.⁴⁷ For Snyder, a narrow focus on negative freedom which has a version of market-logic as its locus, “leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another’.⁴⁸

Consumer Sovereignty and Creative Destruction

While the notion of negative freedom is inscribed in the notion of consumer sovereignty, your daily experience of relations with corporations may be similar to mine, of powerlessness, being treated like a child by an organisational parent who appears benevolent but is often patronising and sometimes forceful. Liberal theory presents a vision of the Consumer, which, as it represents the aggregate of consumption choices, can flex its power to humble and bring down even the mightiest corporation. Proponents cite examples of dinosaurs that failed to keep up with consumer expectations such as those who in the early twentieth century locked their money into the production of electric vehicles to General Motors. Neoliberals link capitalism to democracy by likening the dollar or euro in your pocket to the vote you use to elect your political representatives. According to this explanation the sovereign consumer can punish firms that fail to serve her needs by exiting, or transferring her patronage to a competitor. A tipping point is reached when a sufficient number of customers make the same decision and the firm is bankrupted. Proponents of this view argue that even the mightiest corporation is subject to the same logic.

A clear thread running through liberal arguments onward from the publication of the Wealth of Nations ties marketplace morality to the rational pursuit of self-interest, linking ‘enlightened’ self-interest to attention to the interests of those others upon whom the attainment of one’s own interests depend. There is a paradox, whereby the wealth and resources of the largest corporation can lead its bosses to believe that they have unassailable “power-over” others, including their customers. What they perhaps fail to recognize is that their “power-over” others depends ultimately on “power with”, comprising the collective effect of a myriad of individual purchasing decisions. Just as the propulsion system of a vessel requires a source of power if it is to operate, so the corporation needs the power conveyed to it by the purchasing decisions of its consumers if it is to survive, such that, no matter what its’ size, the self-interest of the firm rests on keen attention to the interests and needs of the consumer it serves, (which is a point we will revisit later). Otherwise, no matter what its size, even a corporation like General Motors, once the largest company in the USA, will fail. At bottom, this logic is driven by the provision of choice, for just as competition is argued to provide the spur for governments to be responsive to the needs of the electorate, so that between firms has been argued to play a similar role with respect to the corporation and its customers.

The rise and fall of General Motors, is a case in point. Incorporated in 1909 as the Buick Motor Company, General Motors, or GM as it is better known, expanded rapidly, incorporating twenty brands such as Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Chevrolet. By the early 1930s GM was the largest motor manufacturer in the United States and in 1967 it made its hundredth millionth car. While for a time GM seemed impregnable the corporation began to struggle from the 1970s, when it started facing serious competition from Japanese brands. The company became famous for marketing “gas guzzlers’, such as trucks and SUVs, for instance, in 1998 purchasing and aggressively marketing the Hummer brand.

By the turn of the Millennium a new management team was hired which five years later announced its plan to reduce gaps in the quality, productivity and fuel-economy of GM cars. In June 2008 the management announced plans to close four plants making gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs and to shift production to more fuel-efficient cars and crossovers, which were more “family-friendly’ SUVs designed to fit on a car chassis. The workforce was cut from 386,000 to 243,000. GM had first entered the Chinese market in the 1920s with the Chevrolet brand, but it was not until 1998 that the first car manufactured in China was launched, since when sales rose rapidly. However global sales plummeted following the financial crash of 2007/8, provoking a liquidity crisis, leading GM to file for bankruptcy in 2009 with assets of $82 billion and liabilities of $173 billion. The US Government then stepped in to bail out the company out which was split into two entities, comprising "NewCo," a new company with a clean balance sheet, taking on GM's best brands and operations; and what came to be called “Liquidation Motors” comprising the unprofitable rump with most of the liabilities. The new GM that rose from the ashes regained profitability but by 2022, GM was no longer the biggest seller in its home market.

Some argued that although GMs sheer size made it bureaucratic, inefficient and inflexible and so unable to adjust quickly to a changing market, the main problem was a lack of liquidity. Others argued that cash-flow was a secondary problem that stemmed from ta prolonged failure to decide which market opportunities to exploit and which segments to divest from. GM was compared unfavourably with firms that were arguably more market focused such as General Electric, Wal-Mart, Sony, Toyota, Honda, and Microsoft; “All of these companies have track records of driving market focus toward opportunities where they can create both wide buyer choice and high cash flows”.

The case of General Motors is illustrative of some of the complexities involved in trying to turn a behemoth around to make it more responsive to consumer needs at a time of rapid change coupled with external shocks. It also illustrates the increasingly common phrase, “too big to fail”, which basically signals to citizens the impunity of shareholders and capitalists who benefit when wealth is made, who do not suffer the burden of losses which are borne by the public purse and pushed onto the shoulders of the ordinary taxpayer.

Economists, who focus purely on the supposed rationality and efficiency of the market, presume a simple dichotomy whereby the consumer is either loyal or withdraws their “vote” by exiting. Exit is an impersonal process whereby the mass of customers shift loyalty from one firm to another and balance is restored through the operation of the Invisible Hand of the market. For Albert Hirschman (2000) this presumption is naïve because the behaviour of firms in the real world does not conform to the ideal type of optimization presumed by liberal economists. In his view individual operators and the general economy do not perform as well as they might and firms are “permanently and randomly” open to decline (ibid.: 10). Moreover it is not unusual for a firm to lapse and begin to fail before beginning to respond once more to consumer needs. He argued that another factor, “voice” which belongs to the political sphere, plays a crucial role in explaining this process. Voice is the opposite of exit; it is messy “political action par excellence”. Unlike the either-or, loyalty-exit, voice is graduated from faint grumbles to violent protest, “it implies articulation of one’s critical opinions rather than one’s “secret” vote. (Hirschman, 2000:16).

Hirschman uses “voice” to critique arguments from neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and others for the extension of free-market principles into non-market contexts. He cites Friedman (1958), who contended that education provision would be improved if parents were given vouchers to buy educational services, an idea that has since been enthusiastically endorsed by neoliberal politicians. For Hirschman (1970), “exit” is a clumsy once and for all approach that disavows the messy reality of political “voice” in how change actually comes about through dialogue and dissent. Applied to politics “exit’ is often regarded as desertion or treason, when one switches allegiance from one party to another. Hirschman (1980) refers to a paper from 1956⁴⁹ that made a similar point to Friedman’s to argue that municipal services could be delivered through markets as if recipients didn’t like the service, they had the choice to exit or leave for another municipality. Such arguments have since been pushed much further so that services once provided publicly are now delivered through a series of contractual arrangements (healthcare, education, water, refuse-collection and so on) between citizens and corporations. Hirschman (1980) argued that the narrow focus by economists on exit completely rules out the use of political voice. He cites confirmatory evidence for the his hypothesis that those with plentiful resources and status will simply exit if they object to the level of service provision, although they can be prone to ‘exit fatigue” whilst those low in resources and status have little choice but to try to work politically to improve their lot.⁵⁰ Moreover, the effect of this had profound consequences, contributing to the deterioration of the cities in the USA.

The Approach taken in this book

Given my earlier mention of the numerous shortcomings of dimensional approaches to power as episodic, individualist and dyadic, thus missing out on the big picture, as well as being mechanistic and empiricist, the question arises as to why bother? Most obviously this is because these explanations have inspired a great deal of thought and research which as I see it is entirely passed over today especially by critical marketing scholars in favour of post-structuralist explanations. That is a shame, as while I have a good deal of respect for post-structural theories, surely there is something to be learned from these more prosaic approaches, if only to act as ‘straw men’ against which to compare more complex instances and critical explanations?

Additionally, although Steven Lukes’ meticulous reasoning demands some effort, dimensional theories are comprehensible, and the idea of three faces of power provides a ready-made and accessible framework from which to understand this complex subject. It is in my view more productive to start with Dahl’s rather crude definition of A/b power and then work outwards to discuss what it fails to capture than to begin with that of, ‘ a ‘multiplied, accumulated power’ …power relations that stresses the mobility and plurality of relations of force – thus working against Marxist accounts – yet still registers the inequitable distribution of influence’⁵¹, although I do eventually get to discuss this in chapter nine.

Although mechanistic and positivistic, the focus on detail and on gathering facts provided by dimensional accounts offers a counterweight to work that can be over-theorised and backed by little evidence and is consequently not of much use to anyone. And while it is true that theories are underdetermined by facts, the dangers presented by misconstruing facts or just making them up because they support your pet theory are particularly apparent in public life today. While it is true that the facts can be marshalled to support different explanations, it can be forgotten that facts can also act to undermine a particular explanation. I discuss two cases in some detail, comprising the McLibel case and that of Child Labour in Bangladesh. While these are obviously dated, I have used them because they well-known and much has been written about them.

In the preface I mentioned that this sprang from the last three chapters of an undergraduate text. If you choose to read on, you will quickly realise its length and meandering character that can stray far from the precision I argue for which is a seemingly inevitable outcome of the foibles of my character. More than half is devoted to a discussion of context and as I wanted this to be accessible for the general reader, I have tried to make the discussion at least in part two, as straightforward as possible.

Chapter Outline

Part One: Sketching the Theoretical Landscape

Chapter Two: The Consuming Subject

Chapter two was written as a scoping device when I was still intending to write about the consuming subject of power. It is obviously not as relevant to consider relations between corporations, consumers, members of civil society and government as although the business corporation is regarded as a legal individual it is a very different individual to the human subject. The chapter ranges from a brief mention of homo economicus to explore psychological, sociological, psychoanalytic, mimetic and deconstructionist formulations of the subject which I try to illustrate with examples from consumption. More specifically discussion includes psychological theories from behavioural economics to behaviourism, social conformity and terror management; sociological theory which mainly focuses on Marx, to discuss his early argument for ‘species being’ and discussion of alienation and social character turning to consider his later work on ideology, fetishism and questions of value involving financialization and the machine, as a prelude to a brief discussion of social theorists of modernity and postmodernity; moving on to discuss Freud’s conception of the conflicted subject in relation to processes of identification and social character, and then Lacan’s revised theorisation of a subject consisting of real, imaginary and symbolic elements and the gap formed by the vital missing object a, concluding with a consideration of the Four Discourses; next, Girard’s conception of the mimetic subject; and finally, a brief discussion of deconstructionism.

Chapter Three: Marketing and Consumer Research

Chapter three uses Kuhn’s conception of paradigms as a (one-dimensional) device to consider aspects of power relations in the academic study of marketing. Power operates at different levels in the marketing academy and within the academy the study of marketing has been symbolically positioned close to the bottom rung on the ladder of management studies, which is in turn located at an equivalent point in relation to the social sciences. It thus comes as no surprise that like psychology, the academic study of marketing has sought to burnish its credentials by modelling itself on the image of the hard sciences and so on. Conceptual developments do not just serve the purpose of better helping the firm to attune its offering to its customers. Given the traditional lowly status of marketing, critiques of the ‘marketing myopia’ of businesses that are run by engineers, technologists, accountants, or sales managers, and developments such as the marketing concept and Service Dominant Logic not only emphasize the centrality of marketing ideas but lend ideological support to enable marketing managers to leverage their position in the ‘C-suite’. Discussion moves to discuss mainstream marketing and places special emphasis on responses to the trauma of the early 1960s through developments of the societal marketing concept and social marketing and followed by relationship marketing, macromarketing and Service Dominant Logic. This is followed by brief sections on interpretive and critical marketing prior to a narrower discussion on mainstream, interpretive and critical approaches to consumer research.

Part Two: The Neoliberal Landscape of Power

Chapter Four: From Liberalism to Neoliberalism and Beyond

This chapter provides the broadest description of the institutional context in which issues pertaining to power, marketing and consumption are contested in what today is a threatened species, comprising remaining liberal democratic states that continue to follow the ‘rules-based order’ that emerged from the destruction of the Second World War, such that the polity consists of polyarchy, or representative government, and as places where the rights of the individual are guaranteed, and the economy is organised along capitalist lines. Here "liberalism" carries a very specific meaning pertaining to the system of thought that sprang up in the eighteenth century to proclaim the principle of individual self-determination in economic and political life, that eventually came to advocate liberal democracy in the political realm and the market in the economic realm, as the best guarantors of individual freedom and the social good. Key to this was a shift in power, from the despotism of the absolute ruler of the medieval age to the sovereign individual.

There follows a brief history of liberalism and a description of Dahl and Lindblom’s argument for polyarchy, or representative democracy and of the institutional context a sphere populated by a range of actors in addition to homo economicus such as homo politicus, homo juridicus and homo civicus. This is followed by a discussion of economic liberalism, and the re-engagement of discussion of homo economicus. The question is then asked as to whether or not democracy and capitalism have been a marriage made in heaven? Discussion then moves to neoliberalism ordoliberalism and anarcho-capitalism and on to consider the neoliberal state and the policies followed under neoliberalism relating to the market, individual choice, the introduction of quasi-markets, meritocracy, quality assurance and outsourcing. Neolberalism is then discussed in relation to the changing face of the corporation and in relation to the transnational context in relation to changing conceptions of the human citizens and the emergence of the notion of the corporate citizen. The chapter closes with a discussion of neo-libertarianism.

Chapter Five: Some Consequences of Neoliberalism

The aim of this chapter is to consider some important issues arising from the previous chapter. An important question pertains to the extent to which the market has acted as an engine for prosperity, as the veritable goose that lays the golden eggs? Related to this, to what extent has the prosperity enjoyed by Europe and the USA relative to the rest of the world been down to the market? Additionally, what of the argument for ‘trickle-down’ used as the basis to justify the accumulation of vast wealth, on the basis that as the rich become ever richer, a proportion of their wealth will be transferred to the poor? Also, given the neoliberal focus on freedom, what meanings does this term have today and what has since happened to equality? Another question pertains to how the neoliberal conception of rationality has worked out in practice? Finally, it discusses how corporations were able to become so enormous in the neoliberal era as arguments for competition gave way to advocates of efficiency as the sole measure of consumer welfare.

Part III: Dimensional Theories of Power

Chapter Six: One-Dimensional Power

This chapter begins by describing Robert Dahl’s views on freedom, homo economicus and his arguments for worker democracy to counteract the rising power of corporations. Dahl’s theory of power is next outlined and then developed more broadly to consider relations between government, business and consumers, paying attention to the role of sectional and cause-related interest groups within a polyarchal system of governance. The McLibel case is used as a vehicle to illustrate the central importance of the law by means of SLAPP actions (Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation) to stifle dissent. The case also enables discussion of the treatment of the corporation as a legal individual and questions pertaining to its accountability of those who work for it. The case illustrates the difficulty of determining outcomes even in relatively simple situations. Finally, the case illustrates the limitations of the pluralist assumption that conflict will be represented within formal systems of representation. It is then argued that social movement theories, and particularly the variant developed by Doug McAdam provides an alternative that is broadly in keeping with Dahl’s aims.

Discussion shifts to address the tricky problem as to how to conduct research into power relations from this perspective, by outlining potential problems and offering some possible solutions. While arguing that there is scope for quantitative study of general questions, complexity is exemplified through discussion of the cases of Movimento Passo Libre (MPL) and of child labour in Bangladesh. Whilst complex, it is argued that event analysis, fact-checking and counterfactual reasoning can be helpful. A difficulty is that whilst activists and members of NGOs are often willing to cooperate with researchers corporate archives are not so readily available.

The chapter closes with a brief discussion of more diffuse social movements and of actions beyond the law.

Chapter Seven: The Second Dimension of Power

The two-dimensional understanding of power arose from the critique of Robert Dahl by Bachrach and Baratz (1975). Like Dahl they were troubled by the potential threat to democracy posed by the asymmetric influence of the rich on political decision making. While holding to Dahl’s focus on the overt exercise of power as a capacity that enables A to gain power over B, they identified how A can work behind the scenes in various ways to prevent issues being raised in the public square that are antithetical to A’s interest. A may achieve this in a number of ways, for instance, by creating and fostering values that are conducive to A’s cause. For instance, the argument that taxes are good because they contribute toward a society that is more equal and fairer, as the money can be used to secure the health of the nation into its old age, is countered by that which claims that to seek equality is undesirable as humans are naturally different, and everyone should be self-reliant and stand up for themselves. A may use non-decisionmaking as a means to hamper and to blunt B’s efforts to air arguments or opinions that are detrimental to A’s interest. A range of options are available to A ranging at the extreme, from overt threats of intimidation and force to more covert means, employing the mobilization of bias, through the establishment of norms or by ensuring that topics raised for discussion in the public square are innocuous to their them. J.K. Galbraith’s theory of power and his arguments about the revised sequence and the technostructure are discussed in this context.

Discussion then turns to research on non-decisionmaking in the context of marketing and consumption. There is no shortage of examples of corporations or of entire industries that have sought to divert attention from the damage caused to human and other sentient life and the environment by processes of extraction, production, distribution, use and disposal of their product; some keen to maintain a low profile, such as lead, asbestos and chemicals and others more attuned to the media spotlight such as tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and finance.

Over the years several aspects of the ‘playbook’ developed by PR agencies and product liability lawyers have come to light. Central to this is to seek to control the narrative by denying the ‘facticity’ of evidence that their product or service causes harm and by commissioning their own research which they can present as ‘independent’ to counteract this. Also discussed are the tactics used to suppress critics, which range from attempts to co-opt them by providing funds to more overt threats and intimidation. The discussion of the ‘playbook’ then folds into the concluding discussion on ‘post-truth’ and conspiracy theories.

Chapter Eight: Steven Lukes: the Third Dimension of Power

Steven Lukes (1974) applied the metaphor of faces to the explanations of power by Robert Dahl and Bachrach and Baratz, such that the latter revealed a previously hidden and more basic ‘face’ of power than Dahl, the power to ‘decide what is decided’.⁵² In the first edition of his book Lukes (1974) argued that by focusing on the overt exercise of power, one and two-dimensional explanations tell just half the story, and indeed to limit power to its exercise is misleading as this forecloses that power is a potential that need not be invoked for it to be effective, as power is at its most effective when it does not need to be exercised, especially when the willing compliance of others is gained through shaping their opinions and beliefs.

My intention in this chapter is not to rise to quickly to judgement but to summarize Lukes’ arguments as best I can and where possible to apply these in the context of marketing. Lukes addresses objections directly and is meticulous in rejecting some concepts in favour of others in his quest to pin down the elusive third dimension. Lukes clearly had his work cut out for him as the “face” of power he describes is conceptually as sheer and smooth as that of the most challenging rockface. Additionally, (to stretch the metaphor) his argument for a third dimension of power is squeezed between two rocks, considered too radical and nebulous by half by rational empiricists, whilst post-structuralists look askance at arguments for objectivity and mystification. For his third dimension to retain its grip Lukes, (2021) engages in detailed discussion of amongst others, James Scott, John Elster and Michel Foucault. Briefly, the challenge presented by Scott (1990) is that the third dimension does not exist because in reality suborned individuals are always resisting and indeed only intellectuals fall for the claim that they are somehow duped. Elster

Lukes (2021) must also deal with the critique by John Elster (1983) of an earlier version of PRV (Lukes, 1974), where the former argues that the behaviour Lukes identifies with the third dimension of power is better explained as an adaptive preference. In this explanation which is equally applicable to Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of power, adaptive preferences are a means to resolve the cognitive dissonance that arises from one’s inability to gain something generally considered desirable, perhaps through one’s lack of wealth or social standing. Dissonance is overcome by refusing what one is refused, by ‘ trimming of desires to circumstances’. Rather than saying, “I can’t afford it”, (an expensive watch, a sportscar, to eat at an expensive restaurant) one reasons that “I don’t want it because” (it’s pretentious, a waste of money). Elster also questions whether rulers actually have the power to inculcate such beliefs, which he finds implausible. Lukes’ response to Elster is that the third dimension of power does not involve direct manipulation and that beliefs and opinions can be influenced without “intelligent and intentional” action. Moreover, he cites evidence that such passive acceptance can be observed particularly amongst women in male-dominated societies. Although receptive to Bourdieu’s (1984) arguments, Lukes finds this understanding of power rather too nebulous and is critical of the latter’s attacks on Marxist arguments, aligns his argument for the third dimension of power more closely with Buroway’s reading of Gramsci rather than Bourdieu.

Lukes’ (2021) argument is meticulous, fortified by his responses to criticism of previous editions of PRV. Concepts are scaffolded into a structure so as to provide a firm basis for his argument for the third dimension of power as domination involving the willing compliance of those subjected to it. Thus domination will exist in situations where power is innocuous to the interests of the powerful that are extended or unharmed, whilst the interests of those subjected to power are harmed. (Lukes 2021, 91); from Spinoza, those who are dominated are ,“less free to live as their nature and judgment dictate”. How is one to explain the willing compliance of those who are dominated? This can only be brought about as a form of mystification, as a result of which judgement of the existence of the third dimension requires an objective viewpoint and a stable criterion on which to base this. Following discussion of identity and real interests as potential bases, he settles on real interests. There then arises the question of how to assess harm to an individual’s real interests, and here he turns to the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, who argued from Aristotle, and Marx, that certain capabilities make us ‘truly human’, such that for Lukes, domination occurs where the power of some affects the interests of others by restricting their capabilities for “truly human” functioning.

From the above, there is a lot to go through before one gets to discuss some that he has provided including that of ‘surveillance capitalism’ from Zuboff (2019) and in relation to the desire for a “European” nose which he mentions in Lukes, (2005).

Chapter Nine: Foucault on Power

Some suggest that Foucault opened a fourth dimension of power by exploring issues beyond those addressed by Dahl, Galbraith and Lukes.⁵³ Whether or not that is so, his approach differs in that he delighted in challenging and subverting orthodoxy. For instance, in the series of seminars published as Society Must Be Defended, Foucault (2003) reversed Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. By taking war, as opposed to the Philosophy of Right as the lens through which to view politics and power, Foucault argued that truth is not neutral, but is rather used as a weapon to justify an historically partisan victory; put plainly, the supposed “truth” of history is written by the victor (Foucault, 2004: 57). In so doing he wilfully placed himself on the margins, identifying himself with the sophists and against mainstream philosophy. That he did not trouble himself to discuss dimensional theories of power developed by American and British political theorists is to an extent understandable, given that his main point of reference was France. Even though he was elsewhere at the time, Foucault was deeply affected by the political upheaval that occurred in France in May 1968.⁵⁴ His reflections on the events of May largely shaped his ideas on power as signalling a void in Marxist theory, pointing to the emptiness of abstract discussions of class, surplus value, consciousness and ideology, such that to focus narrowly on the sovereign power of the State misses out an entire nexus of power.

It can be somewhat confusing for the reader who like me is not fully conversant in French, that we have had to wait for translations of Foucault’s work. This is not just down to the exigencies of translation, but rather because while some appeared rather expeditiously, others appeared many years after the original was published, notably the lectures bundled as Society Must Be Defended, delivered in 1975-1976, (first published in English in 2003) and The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered in 1978-1979 (published in English in 2008). Discipline and Punish, on the other hand was published in French in 1975, and appeared English translation relatively quickly in 1977, while the first volume of The History of Sexuality was published in French in 1976, appearing in translation in 1978. This may help explain the preponderance of articles on discipline and the repressive hypothesis by anglophone authors in the intervening period.⁵⁵

Foucault (1982) divided his work into three periods. In the early stage he explored how versions of the subject were created by science and economics. He then turned to study the period in the seventeenth century when the emergent field of psychiatry developing dividing practices to sequester the mad from the sane, the sick from the healthy and criminals from “good boys” (Foucault, 1982: 777). His subsequent work on the development of disciplinary power and biopower can be seen as complements to this project as they explain how, in the modern nation-state, these forms of power came to be exercised over juridically free subjects. Then the broader question of how the government of citizens changed in the transition from the ‘raison d’etat” of the police state, to the operation of power contemporary market societies. Foucault’s last project focused on ancient Greece and the early Christian period to illustrate how individuals turned themselves into subjects of sexuality (Foucault, 1982: 778). Hiss status as an historian was controversial, rejected by many conventional historians who took a jaundiced view of his genealogical approach, as an “antihistorical historian” (Poster, 1982), accused of playing fast and loose with historical facts.

I begin by reprising concepts such as genealogy, the subject, governmentality, pastoral power and disciplinary power and biopower and by briefly discussing Foucault’s critique of the philosophy of right. The next section discusses Foucault’s contribution to the understanding of the government of the neoliberal subject and in particular in relation to the development of ordoliberalism and neoliberalism. This forms the prelude to a discussion of how Foucault’s concepts have been deployed in relation to the government of the consumer and more generally in contributions to the field of marketing by providing revised accounts of the history of marketing thought, the ‘responsibilization’ of the consumer, consumer resistance. The chapter concludes by differentiating Foucault’s work from dimensional theories of power.

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¹ Lukes, (2021, 78).

² While I stick with Lukes’ interpretation which is admirably clear, Vardoulakis (2018) offers a more complex explanation. Auctoritas is personal authority, imperium, the limits of juridico-political authority and summa potestas the most powerful authority. Potestas on its own refers to the power of the people and although summa potestas points to the authority that has the greatest power, this ultimately devolves to the multitude, as the most powerful violence does not come from the sovereign but from the people themselves. Ultimately it is the people who hold power, which is why Spinoza argued that democracy is the most primary institution. As Vardoulakis explains it auctoritas, potestas and imperium intersect and interact in a revamped and ontologized notion of power (potentia).

³ Quote is from Arendt, (1970) in Lukes, (2021, 36).

⁴ Thekudden later mentions that many were housewives, teachers or shop-keepers, of which the latter two made me wonder about the extent to which they were living in dire straits.

⁵ Neath, G. & V. Sharma, (2008). The Shakti revolution, Development Outreach. World Band Institute (16 pp.).

⁶ Thekudden, (2010, 86).

⁷ ibid., 9,

⁸ Denegri-Knott, (2019); Kamin et al., (2022).

⁹ The second part of the description that states the aim to ‘critically analyse(s) social marketing theories, concepts, discourses and practice, to generate critique, conflict and change that facilitates social good’, is more indistinct.

¹⁰ See for instance, research inspired by Perkins, D. and Zimmerman, M. (1995),

¹¹ Weber, (1978, 53).

¹² Dahl, (1957).

¹³ As I write this I have just spent 48 minutes on the phone to my local district Council trying to order a recycling bin, starting at number 34 in the queue.

¹⁴ Walker, Shaun, (2015). Why is Vladimir Putin always late. The Guardian, 11th June.

¹⁵ See for example Ch. XI,of Leviathan, (1651) “On the slipperiness of manners’.

¹⁶ Roulette, J.; C. Bryan-Low & T.Balmforth (2025). Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia. Reuters, 27th July.

¹⁷ See O’Mahonly, (2017).

¹⁸ Lukes, (1974: 23).

¹⁹ Lukes, (20221, 3).

²⁰The Powercube. https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/bourdieu-and-habitus/

²¹ Hunt & Nevin, (1974, 186). A slightly modified version is in Frazier, (1983, 158) ‘the ability of one channel member to influence decision variables of another channel member, a potential for influence on another firm's beliefs and behaviour’.

²² Frazier, (1983, 158).

²³ See for instance, Beier and Stern, (1969) and Hunt and Nevin (1974).

²⁴ See for instance the exchange between Pollay (1987) and Holbrook, (1987).

²⁵ See for instance, Aaker, (2014)

²⁶ Peñaloza & Price, (1993).

²⁷ This example is drawn from an electronics company I was involved with for two years as part of a study into the implementation of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP2) systems when at Manchester Business School. Geoff Lockett, Peter Barrar and Ian Tanner were the grantholders and Fiona Wilson and Eileen Polding were also joint researchers (ESRC, ACME).

²⁸ For instance, Friel, B. (1981) Translations, London: Faber and Faber; Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Allen Lane.

²⁹ See Derbyshire, J. (2025) Can language ever be objective? Financial Times, 29th July.

³⁰ See, Slobodian, Q. (2024). Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy, UK: Penguin.

³¹ Mill, (1859, 17).

³² Norman (2018: 290-293) only refers to capitalism when referring to Karl Polyani’s account.

³³ Norman (ibid.) writes that if we think of capitalism as, “the combination of open markets and industrial corporations functioning as independent institutions and controlling autonomous pools of labour”, then this only came into existence eighty years after publication of the Wealth of Nations.

³⁴ Eagleton, (2018: 56). Eagleton offers a gruesome comment from Marx’s work on India, that there is progress in capitalism but this is like a hideous god who drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain. Discussion of capitalism and socialism is on pages 57-59.

³⁵ For example, Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) draw on Marx to argue that the exploitation of labour power is more fundamental than is the market to capitalism, as this provides the engine that creates surplus value through a vampiric system of exploitation and expropriation. While Harvie and Milburn, (2011) make a similar point, I found some of their argument rather shaky in places, for instance, in respect to their claim that unlike slave and serf societies capitalism swallows the whole of a persons’ identity (Harvie & Milburn, 2011: 39). In my view there is an important difference between compliance and coercion. The slave lives in a state of coercion, controlled by violence, whereas the worker voluntarily complies with requests made by her employer (Bales et al., 2009: 31). While this may seem simple, criminals have muddied the waters by engineering situations where coercion masquerades as compliance. Women are induced into heavy alcohol and drug use as a means of ensuring their continued dependency on their traffickers. For instance, UK police authorities have mentioned cases where they have rescued trafficked women from brothels, who have insisted that they have been working voluntarily. In such situations the threat of violence is masked as it is directed not at the individual but their family members

³⁶ Fraser & Jaeggi, (2018: 15).

³⁷ I discussed the vexed arguments around the question of false needs by J.K. Galbraith, William Leiss and Jean Baudrillard in the first edition of Consuming Behaviour (Desmond, 2003).

³⁸ Fraser & Jaeggi, (2018, 75).

³⁹ Office of National Statistics (2023). Time use in the UK: 23 September to 1 October 2023

: Average daily time spent by adults on activities including paid work, unpaid household work, unpaid care, travel and entertainment. Experimental statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/timeuseintheuk/23septemberto1october2023. I have rounded up data to make it more intelligible.

⁴⁰ See Large, (2014).

⁴¹ McKibben, (2019, 90). He devotes a lot of space to discussing in chapters eleven and twelve Rand’s appeal to Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, that parrots Trump’s views and Elon Musk, amongst many others in “Big Tech” . However, despite Trump’s calls to ‘drill baby drill”, McKibben argues that even before Trump first assumed office, the oil industry had already effectively closed down action to reverse global warming (ibid., 122-123).

⁴² McKibben, (2019), chapter 15, The Name of the Game, from page 151.

⁴³ Incidentally, this concurs with the psychoanalytic conception of the subject, as it is by means of the formation of the ego-ideal by which the subject can reflect on the ego as if from a third-party perspective, that leads to the subject becoming fully human.

⁴⁴ Snyder, (2024., 21-25).

⁴⁵ Ibid., 23.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 46.

⁴⁷ My interpretation!

⁴⁸ Ibid., 49. In an appendix he further distinguishes negative from positive freedom on 22 dimensions (ibid, 277). In my reading of some of these, positive freedom emanates from leib or the body and government can play a positive role in helping all to fully develop their potential; negative freedom on the other hand is principally concerned with the perception of others as barriers to one’s self-becoming, where the market is all and where government is perceived as an impediment that must be removed.

⁴⁹ Tiebout, (1956) in Hirschman,(1980, 448).

⁵⁰ Orbell & Uno, (1972), in American Political Science Review.

⁵¹ Denegri-Knott & Tadajewsi, (2017).

⁵² Lukes, (2021, 116).

⁵³ See for instance Digesir (1992).

⁵⁴ François Ewald in Becker, Ewald, Harcourt, (2012).

⁵⁵ Raffnsøe et al., (2019) argue that articles on discipline formed the first wave of Foucault-inspired commentary and research in organization studies. This proved very influential, because of its ‘striking and graphic analysis and because of the potency of the image of the Panopticon. In the authors’ view this led to an over-emphasis on discipline that had a distending effect on the literature. The authors note that the focus of Discipline and Punish is from 1840 to 1860AD and that by the time the book was published in 1975, discipline “no longer seemed natural and inevitable”. They mention too that Foucault differentiated between the ideal of a disciplinarian society from the reality of a disciplined society.