• Classified power in 3 ways: personal, political and social.
• Personal- those who hold power as a result of their occupation or role, such as teacher’s and employers.
• Political- that held by politicians, the police and those working in the law courts.
• Social- those who hold power as a result of class, gender and age.
Influential Power
• E.g. advertisements, politics, media and culture
• These are not laws and rules which force us to respond to this power. We are not sent to prison if we do not buy the product after watching and advert. The media does not have a defined status as ours and don’t have the right to enforces us.
Instrumental Power
• E.g. law ,education, business, management
• This is explicit power. It has the right, enforced by the state to command us. Laws and conventions rule us and every organisation we are a part of and exert instrumental power due to hierarchy. In many, but not all, if we resist instrumental power we are punished.
Fairclough- 2001 (part of a critical linguistic group)
• Power in discourse- the ways in which power us manifested in situations through language
• Power behind discourse- the focus on social and ideological reasons behind the enactment of power. (Gender, class etc.)
• You cannot look at how power is communicated through language without looking at the society.
• Language is underpinned by strong ideological perspectives.
• No example of language used is a completely neutral.
Fairclough- Synthetic personalisation-
Basically when advertisements have the receivers name on them it makes them feel special and more engaged with what was happening.
Fairclough 2001- Power Asymmetry-
“Power asymmetry results in an unequal encounter.”
-An unequal encounter is one which where one participant has power over another.
-An unequal encounter involves a POWERFUL PARTICIPANT AND A LESS POWERFUL PARTICIPANT.
-powerful participants place constraints upon