ABSTRACT
The hierarchy of methodological dominance/subordinance led to the presumption that positivism could account for the meaning of all experience. Positive collaboration is uncompetitive, empathetic cooperation. It is a self-affirming, socially constructive practice that has nothing to do with the conflict spectrum that nonempathetic cooperation and competition lie along. Like the most radical forms of feminism, positive collaboration is an evanescent ideal. Positive collaboration would seem to involve a very different idea of power from the one normally used. The experience of power as the experience of extended understanding is seen to be more a female than a male one, since it is females more often than males who are taught, in most societies, to sublimate or eschew the desire to compete. Disintegrative power, for example, is the power large numbers of people possess to overload legal systems, defy “law and order,” withhold labor, and generally wear down the social, economic, and political superstructures of those who seek predominance.
