When you can cause a person to make a choice that they other wise would not make, that is power.
But power is better when you can control the range of choices they see as possible.
Power is at its best when you can control the range of ideas from which possible choices might come. This is the third dimension of power. This is the use of power in the most secretive of ways.
This is the level upon which information works as a mechanism.
I am powerful if I can get you to see things my way. I am more powerful if I control the information you use to make a decision. I am ultimately powerful – leading to the concept of domination - if I can control the way you see your reality.
We all need information to make decisions and judgments. We use our five senses to gather data about what we call reality. We will use our sight to read and our ears to hear. But since we cannot hear and see everything we need others. We willingly take, at second hand, the information from those we trust.
We do this because we have not the time to learn everything, nor the ability to know everything. We need as much information as we can get but it must come from a place or person that we believe will not be sharing that information with us to achieve their ends. We want sources that share information with us for our own benefit. We want a caring altruistic source.
Hence we trust our parents because they have as much to gain from our happiness as we do. We believe that our parents want us to succeed and thrive. They would not lead us astray. They would not take advantage of us.
In the same way we trust our teachers. In truth there are times in our lives when we trust our teachers more than we trust our parents. After all teachers are “experts.” These are people chosen and rewarded and paid by our society to provide us with the information we need for success in life and career.
Teachers and parents are inherently trustworthy.
But from time to time teachers and parents are little more than participants in a larger social context. They too are reliant upon others for the information from which they construct their reality and make their decisions and choices.
Then we turn to the press. The various information and news media provide us with the truth our parents and teachers do not have. It is natural to turn on the television or the radio the instant we need to know. We will ‘Google’ any topic and seek the “truth” on the matter.
In all information there are base assumptions. These are the fundamental ideas we do not question.
For example there are always good guys and bad guys. Someone is right and someone is wrong in every circumstance. There is always someone at fault. There is a victim, a perpetrator and a redeemer.
So, for example, in the case of a college faculty strike, if the carrier of the message can frame that message in those terms – victim, perpetrator, redeemer, and the assigning of fault - they will have that third dimension of power.
They have what you need. They deliver it in the form that you have come to expect it and find it easy to accept. They are “unbiased” and reliable – trustworthy. Whether you have an awareness of it or not they have power over you. For it is in being the one with the information you need, that they are the one who can impact your choice.
Check out the writings of Noam Chomsky on the “manufacturing of consent” and the use of modern propaganda. This would be necessary reading in the power course. As we talk about the importance of critical thinking and critical awareness. I usually use a recording of a Chomsky lecture as a replacement of my lecture in week 10 of the course. Click on the title above to read some Chomsky-isms...
To understand propaganda you must break down the message into its component parts. Look to the words and their meanings. Often there are implied meanings that form the heart of the message.
Semiologists refer to the denotation of the symbol and the connotation of the symbol. A word is nothing more than a symbol. But as a symbol it has to be deciphered and interpreted. It is in the proactive choice of symbols that carry meaningful connotations along with their denotations, that we use the need for information to generate power on the most sublime level.
The choice of vocabulary and use of numbers is the simplest and most effective form of propaganda and it is being used fairly well by the College Management.
They have started the discussions related to this matter by calling them college “teachers.” With that comes the connotation of classrooms, summers off and playing with children.
However, the vast majority of college professors have graduate degrees, experience in research and although they may use a “classroom,” they are lecturers and seminar leaders. You can’t get a job in any college school of business anymore without an MBA or equivalent. You sure don’t need that to teach high school business.
It is the use of the connotation of “teacher” that begins the mistrust on the part of parents and students.
In the past teacher strikes have been seen as the exploitation of students by the teachers to get what they want. In this case, if you read the facts, the Management forced this strike. They made no attempt to bargain toward a settlement because they didn’t want one. They wanted to exploit the “teachers” to gain a position of pressure upon the “government.”
FYI - I always encourage my students to see the word government as two words – bureaucracy and taxation.
So here we are with a dramatic change in the allocation of the victim/perpetrator roles implied in our message. The fault for the loss of classroom time cannot fall to the professors because they didn’t want the strike – they just couldn’t get an offer. That is why there are formal charges against the Management for Bad Faith Bargaining.
But there are even better techniques at work. The use of numbers adds a legitimacy or empirically infallible character to a message.
In this case however the numbers are virtually fabricated and misleading. Use the average class size number being proposed by the Management. It has been calculated by taking all of the students in college and dividing it by the number of all of the “faculty designated” people – librarians, counselors, active faculty, faculty on sabbatical and other types of leave, faculty doing jobs for the college which are other than teaching and even those faculty who are away from the job because they are ill.
This is not average class size. This is a meaningless number. If you want to have the average class size you take the number of class situations – lectures and seminars and you average the number of people in those rooms at the time. Interestingly enough no one has made that calculation.
To speak of average class size is ridiculous for those of us teaching in business.
We deliver the courses in lectures of 200 and seminars of 40.
Some programs have less than 40 students at each stage (semester 1,2, or 3 etc.) and as such their average class size is less than 40. Others have more than 40 and sometimes have to learn in classrooms with 50 or 60 in them.
I am teaching ten distinct classroom situations – four lectures and six seminars and I have an average class size of 42.6. My lecture of 106 is offset by my lecture and seminar to 26.
How’s that for using numbers….?
Finally they have used a great misleading combination of numbers and terminology.
Management claims they are giving a 12% increase over four years to faculty thus making them the best paid college “teachers” (professors) in the country.
If faculty were given a 12% increase this year that statement would be correct. Since that is not the case it is a lie. It is a well crafted lie. It is a lie with truth within it. That may explain why Management is not ashamed to utter it. But it is a lie nonetheless.
The increases are in fact a little more than 2% each year compounded over four years. Moreover with each year, every other faculty union in every other province will be getting largely the same (or more) of an increase. This will mean that Ontario College Professors will continue to be in the same position relative to the other provinces that they have always been. By the way, that is not the highest paid provincial group.
In fairness Management has been subject to the same kind of propaganda lie. The Premier wants to be called the great advocate for the education system and has promised $6.2 Billion over the next five years. Divide that by five (years) and then again by 24 (colleges) and you get a number of about 50 million. Larger colleges will get a larger share and smaller ones will get a smaller share. Not quite the billions of dollars it seems at first blush. Not quite the reality that $6.2 Billion seems to imply.
Propaganda.
By choosing the vocabulary and the presentation of the empirical support, the College Management has successfully framed the issues in terms that make it easy to faculty as the villain, students as the victim, College Management as the steadfast leader and the province is at fault.
They have used the information as a mechanism of power to define your reality and hence control who you pick as the good guy.
Three dimensional power at its subliminal best.
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