Balancing the Three Sources of Power -- Persuasion, Exchange, and Force

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

In 1989, Kenneth Boulding published a book entitled the Three Faces of Power, which argued that power can take one of three forms: threats (coercive power), exchange (the power to get things done through negotiation and compromise), and love (he said that "if love seems too strong a word, think respect"). Here he is basically talking about the integrative social ties that hold people together, regardless of what they might get in return — so we call it "integrative power."

A colleague of ours and Kenneth's (also a friend and mentor), Paul Wehr, coined the term "power strategy mix." Paul's notion was that it was rare that people use one kind of power alone. Rather, they usually use a mixture of forms of power — legitimate coercion, for instance, occurs when police enforce traffic laws. Legitimacy of the laws is the integrative system at work, while the police enforcement is a coercive approach to get us all to drive safely. When negotiations happen according to an agreed upon set of rules, that is a combination of integrative and exchange power.

Paul explained that disputants should use a mixture of integrative and exchange power most often, resorting to threats only when absolutely necessary, and then, using legitimate threats (such as police and the justice system to equally enforce the rule of law). He added that one should only use as little threat as is necessary to convince the recipient to consider your offers of integrative or exchange. As an example, he often talked about Gandhi, who would pause his nonviolent (but coercive) actions often, to give the authorities he was challenging a chance to negotiate or concede. If they did not, he would resume his nonviolent action and then, after the pressure had built some more, pause to offer the authorities an "off ramp."

This section of the guide explores all three of these forms of power in more detail, and discusses how they can be optimally balanced to get what one wants, with a minimum of backlash and the most stability going forward. The first article explains the theory in much more detail, and has a chart showing what mixture of what kind of power should be used when. The next resource is a video that explains the same thing, and the following resources either put this idea in a larger context, and/or give examples of how it works in the "real world."