Reflections on Political Research and Workgroup Conflict

Research in the political perspective attempts to illuminate one of the most profound dimen­sions of workgroup conflict—power—and its connection to group communication and inter­action.

It is something of a paradox that research in the political perspective often features con­flict in terms of the absence of conflict—that is, in the suppression or avoidance of conflict. However, the dynamics of power dictate that it often can be sustained best if it remains hidden. Once the bases of power are revealed and are open for discussion, they are also open to challenge. Research in this tradition thus has to delve into hidden power, trying to discern the power behind a series of influence moves or the deep-seated power structures sustained by a taken-for-granted discourse that must be deconstructed. Though it may accord the most importance to communica­tion of the three perspectives, the political perspective also tends to regard the commu­nication surrounding power with skepticism, as though it obscures as much as it reveals. Perhaps the hidden, below-the-surface aspect of the political perspective explains why we found substantially less research in this tradi­tion than in the other two since the previous edition.

One potential for this area to grow is through connecting pluralistic with structural conceptions of power. Pluralists tend to focus more on the surface and look for power in direct interaction (or the lack thereof). Structural views tend to focus more on deeply held, unarticulated, and unexamined premises and attempt to describe how they are com­municatively constituted and sustained and how they undergird power in groups and organizations. The research approaches and basic assumptions of the two positions seem to run in different directions. Notwithstanding, the hints in structural studies such as those by Kirby and Krone (2002) concerning how structural power plays out in the discourse among interest groups and in studies like Dalton’s (1959) concerning how positions of privilege are sustained through communica­tive interaction make us wish there was more articulation between the two positions.