Power as an enabling force: An integrative review

Abstract

The power literature’s focus on questioning power relations has gone at the expense of deliberate attempts to improve organizational practices. How can critical performativity and other scholars address power as an enabling force, thereby also allowing for more engagement with practitioners? We integrate the literature on power in and around organizations with studies of organizational change and behavior. By focusing on enabling instead of restrictive power, we draw attention to the potentially pivotal role of key actors—managers, other practitioners, and scholars—in fostering empowerment and emancipation within organizations. Our review points at four social mechanisms that drive enabling power: formal authority, language shaping action, community formation, and the dynamics of safety and trust. Furthermore, we identify various types of actions which can trigger these mechanisms that, in turn, may give rise to outcomes such as empowerment and emancipation. The main contribution of this paper involves an integrated framework of power as an enabling force. By synthesizing various separate discourses, this framework extends prior reviews focusing on power-over, resulting in a systemic understanding of enabling power and thereby creating novel avenues for research on power. The integrative framework also provides a foundation for an intervention-oriented body of knowledge on enabling power.