The great thing about Amazon is how easy and inexpensive it is to track down potentially interesting texts referenced in footnotes. The outlay of 1p plus £2.70 post and packaging secured the arrival of a copy of Kenneth E Boulding’s “Three Faces of Power”. This arrived virtually in mint condition other than a barcode and a stamps indicating that it been discarded from the library of the Ecole Superieur de Commerce de Paris – and certainly with little evidence that it received much attention from the ESCP’s students.
Published in 1989, it addresses – albeit from a different angle – the three currencies that have since the early 1980s been among the core elements of the Escondido Framework. The publisher’s blurb on the back cover claims that Boulding’s “creative analysis lays the groundwork for important future debates about power.” I have been scratching around for this sort of stuff – albeit as hobbyist rather than academic – since leaving Stanford in the summer of 1980. The fact that it has taken me so long to come across this work and that it, in turn, appears to have sunk almost without trace, reminds me of T S Eliot’s lament:
“And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again”
(from East Coker, No 2 of The Four Quartets, T S Eliot)
Boulding divides power into three major categories: “threat power”, destructive in nature and applied particularly to political life; “economic power”, resting largely on the power to produce and exchange items, and on the constantly changing distribution of property ownership; and “integrative power”, based on such relationships as legitimacy, respect, affection, community and identity. These three categories do not map directly onto the three currencies within the Escondido Framework, but Boulding himself accepts that they are what mathematicians call “fuzzy sets”. However, there is a rough approximation for “threat power” to the approach to transacting using the “force” currency. It is easy to see how Boulding’s “economic power” maps onto the approach transacting using the “cash” currency. Unsurprisingly, his “integrative power most closely relates to the “influence” currency of the Escondido Framework.