The Micro-Macro Constitution of Power
Cristiano Castelfranchi, ProtoSociology Project · ProtoSociology · 2003
How important power is in human relations, organizations and societies does not need many words to be argued. Consequently, power is also a fundamental topic in the social sciences, in particular in sociological theory (starting from classics like Marx, Pareto, Weber), in political science, in organization sciences, in anthropology; but also in economics (negotiation power, position power, theory of oligopolies and monopolies, etc.). On the contrary, Cognitive Science and, in particular, models of artificial intelligence and interaction have systematically ignored this perspective (Castelfranchi, 1991). This is probably due to the fact that the prevailing perspective in AI was ‘individualism’ and ‘mentalism’ (Gasser, 1991) that looks far from this social phenomenon. We will on the contrary show that for a good theory of power