To respect the logic of the series “Concepts to Conceive 21st Century Society”, this book is divided into two separate parts. The first is dedicated to the epistemological foundations of power. It clarifies the concept independently of the disciplines in which it is used by confronting theories that, over time, have made it possible to establish and then reassess it. The second part is based on the contemporary issues in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) that involve the concept of power, with the aim of establishing the topics to be researched and analyzing them.

The concept of power took root among the classical philosophers who united two significant questions: a political question, through which they examined tyranny and democracy as they wondered how a people or a group should or could be governed, and a rhetorical question, through which they wondered how this power was wielded in speech. Beyond the diversity of the theories we will encounter in this work, these questions continue to leave their mark on a large number of research topics, regardless of the time period, in the disciplines and theoretical frameworks that address the concept.

In the first part, which addresses the epistemological foundations, a historical continuum could have been adopted to present different uses of the concept of power in the humanities and social sciences. This is what the philosopher Jacqueline Russ (1994) did, beginning in antiquity, from the time of the first analyses of political power, to the contemporary period, during which the interactionist approach to power relations “has considerably enriched the notion and the theory of power” (Russ, 1994, p. 55). We have instead chosen a slightly different path, which nevertheless distinguishes a political, institutional and organizational power from a subjective and intersubjective power in which relations are dominant. In effect, these two conceptualizations do not correspond in this study to two periods that are as clearly distinct and successive as in Russ. Political, institutional power still deserves to be explored and explained in the current period. The concept of intersubjective power can be traced to roots that significantly pre-date the analyses conducted by Michel Foucault and Michel Crozier¹. Furthermore, a third category of conceptual use should be taken into consideration, taking into account our experience as a researcher in Information and Communication Sciences. It is a question of discursive or linguistic power that, for its part, has been understood in very diverse periods and theoretical or disciplinary frameworks.

Once the epistemological foundations have been explored, the second part of the book presents work in information and communication sciences that uses the concept of power. It is centered around three major research questions, the first of which somewhat extends the chapter about discursive power in Part 1 (Chapter 3).

In effect, since the earliest days of ICS, the exercise of power through language has called out to researchers building the disciplinary field. The first among them, Roland Barthes (1978, p. 12), explained that “this object in which power is inscribed for all of human eternity is: language – or, more precisely, its necessary expression in speech”. He saw in this a “fascist” essence, because as soon as it is proclaimed, it goes to work for a power that manifests through “the authority of the assertion and the gregariousness of the repetition”² Roland Barthes (1978, p. 14). This language, which, in Barthes’ eyes, is more effective for subjugating than for communicating, has thereafter continued to be studied in the context of power within ICS by exploring different research questions. These will therefore be the subject of the first question in this second part, entitled: “Linguistic power in ICS” (Chapter 4).

Beyond work concerning linguistic and discursive exchanges, another research axis in which the concept of power is frequently used in ICS concerns informational reconfiguration and, consequently, communicational reconfiguration of our societies. This manifests particularly through diverse studies concerning, on one hand, the existence of an information society, and on the other hand, the developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) that reinforce control and the relocalization of powers. If some characteristics point in the direction of a reinforcement of counter-powers – a fear, which ICS aims to analyze, spreads: is ICT generating an accumulated visibility, a surveillance that can be assimilated into a new panopticon or a society of control whose signs were described in a visionary way by Gilles Deleuze (1990)? These different studies will be featured in the second question we explore, entitled: “Power, society, and developments in ICT” (Chapter 5).

Finally, a third axis of studies that use the concept of power seems to us to emerge within the discipline and from its dialogs with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: this is a question of the examination of everything that can be called media in the broadest sense of the term. In addition to the development of new arguments in the ICS community that build on the work of media sociologists, political scientists and others on the nature of the power exercised by the media in general, some work has been dedicated to the study of a specific media or media organization, and others, undoubtedly more numerous, to the power of journalists as a social group caught up in a power relationship with other social groups. These latter works align with the broadest question concerning mediators and the power they possess. Finally, closely connected to the media, but also to non-verbal communication, it is the power of the image that is examined by researchers in ICS, both in the specific field of advertising and in the wider field of all audiovisual or “multichannel” communication. All of these works will be presented in a third question entitled simply “Media power” (Chapter 6).