ABSTRACT
The most influential post-war American sociologist, Talcott Parsons, gave a new direction to the subject of power, especially in his later works. In Parsons' opinion, just like the wealth generated by the economic system, power can instead be thought of as a quality generated in expandable quantities by the social system. For Luhmann, especially for Luhmann, power is a means of communication by which each social subject freely accepts and trials subordinate or super-ordinate roles. Clearly, if one maintains that there is a communicative dimension to strategic and identity structures, then from the point of view of a communicative perspective there are also strategic/utilitarian and identity aspects which need to be taken into account. In the mid-1970s Foucault's centre of interest moved from what he called archaeology of episteme to a genealogy of power as knowledge. Only social organizations, that is, institutions, offer regulation and enable power relationships to develop and so create a foundation for their relative permanence.
