A manager can issue an order alone; but for the order to take effect thousands of people must record it, pass it on and accept it as normal. Looking only at the summit of the map of power means missing the ties built below.
When we discuss what needs to change in a country we usually turn our eyes to the names at the very top. We believe problems will be solved if the government changes, if the mayor goes, if the company’s chief executive is replaced or if a fairer person heads the institution. The expectation is understandable, because those at the top have great influence over budgets, appointments, laws and resources. But explaining everything by the character of the person above renders invisible the web of relations that makes them powerful. A manager can issue an order alone, yet for the order to take effect thousands of people must record it, transmit it, apply it and accept it as normal.
Power does not work only like a liquid flowing from top to bottom. It circulates in different forms in the family, at school, at work, among friends and on digital platforms. Sometimes it arises from someone’s money, sometimes from their knowledge, sometimes from a position that connects others to each other. Even the quietest-seeming person in a group may carry significant power if they alone hold critical information. This does not require us to treat large institutions and small relations as equal. The state’s capacity for coercion is not the same as social pressure in a circle of friends. But looking only at the summit of the map of power leads us to miss the ties built below that keep the top standing.
The small decisions at the door
Many decisions affecting people’s options in daily life are taken not by senior managers but by officials in between. A clerk can ease a transaction or delay it for months; a human-resources employee can select which application reaches the manager; a moderator can determine which comment stays visible. Even if on paper the final decision belongs to someone else, whoever holds the gate of access holds significant power.
These small decisions sometimes look like personal whim and are sometimes presented as the requirement of procedure. But how a procedure is interpreted, to whom flexibility is shown and who is treated as suspect are not distributed equally. Acquaintance, language, clothing, gender, class and social status can affect how easily doors open. Power appears here not only in formal authority but in the privilege of interpreting the rule.
Holding knowledge and hiding it
Within a structure, who knows what usually determines who can speak. That only one employee understands the technical system, that only certain people can access the files, or that informal conversations before a meeting are limited to a few, produces a power independent of the formal hierarchy. Everyone may have an equal vote; but if the knowledge needed for the decision is not shared equally, the votes do not carry equal weight.
Sharing knowledge is therefore not merely a matter of transparency but of distributing power. Yet opening raw data to everyone is not enough on its own. Knowledge must be intelligible, there must be time to reach it, and technical language must not exclude people. Publishing a hundred-page document at the last moment and saying “anyone could have read it” may provide formal openness but creates no real participation. Power sometimes hides inside a secret and sometimes inside an openness too complex for anyone to use.
Those who stand in the middle of relations
Some people occupy the centre of a network without holding a formal title. They know who knows whom, carry news, connect different groups and mediate when conflict arises. This position can be valuable for a community; but over time it can also create a sense of indispensability and an unsupervised influence. Someone whom everyone needs, yet whose work nobody fully knows, can become an invisible manager.
Digital platforms use this power of mediation on an enormous scale. While presenting themselves as neutral spaces that merely bring users together, they decide who will see whom, which content will come forward, which seller will count as trustworthy and whose account will be closed. The intermediary appears to have disappeared while an algorithmic centre takes its place. Power becoming invisible does not mean it has decreased; it usually makes objecting to it harder.
Can the top stand without support from below?
Power at the top does not stand by coercion alone. Rules must be applied, records kept, taxes collected, production continued and orders turned into daily behaviour. When the people who do this work withdraw their cooperation, the dependence of apparently powerful structures becomes clear. Strikes, boycotts, work-to-rule and mass disobedience touch precisely this point of dependence. They show that power lies not only in the boss’s safe but in the workers’ capacity to produce together and to stop production.
Yet it is easy to say “let us all withdraw cooperation and let the system collapse.” People depend on wages, health care, housing and security. The price of disobedience is not the same for everyone. Noticing the power below therefore does not mean calling individuals to lone heroism; it means building organised ties that can share the cost. Power may be found below, but when scattered it easily remains ineffective.
Seeing our own share
Treating power as belonging only to bad administrators is morally comforting. We are merely those exposed to it; oppression always comes from outside. Yet in daily life we too sometimes withhold information, raise our voice at someone weaker, leave the burden of care to another or overlook whoever is left outside the group. These small powers are not on the same scale as great inequalities; but they are the places where our claim to build another kind of life is tested.
Power is not only at the top, but this should not be understood as “everyone is equally powerful.” On the contrary, we must distinguish which power is backed by law, money and violence and which is a fragile capacity to resist. The aim of widening the map of power is not to trivialise the great centres but to see through which everyday ties they are fed. Change sometimes begins by replacing the person at the top, but it does not end there. When the relations, habits and silent cooperations that made that person possible remain the same, new faces quickly learn the language of the old order.