Post-structuralist approaches to power - from http://revisesociology.wordpress.com/

All the perspectives we have looked at so far say power can be understood by examining the structures in society. For example, Marxists say power can be understood by the type of economic base in a society.

However, Foucault claims power lies outside of these structures. He instead said that power operates in discourses rather than structures. A discourse is how we talk about something. An example of how power could be seen in society is through changes in society such as feminism. At the start of the 20^th century women having the vote was a ridiculous idea, however, as more people began to talk about the subject, and opinions started to change, the distribution of power in society shifted from being completely patriarchal, to being much more equally spread.

In summery Foucault doesn’t see power as set to one group…