Florea’s account of symbolic power in communication begins from the idea that communication depends on shared symbolic codes, yet these codes are never politically innocent, because the capacity to define meaning is also the capacity to define reality; symbolic power therefore works by making particular interpretations appear common, obvious or legitimate, so that domination becomes difficult to recognise as domination . Weber’s theory of legitimate domination develops this further by explaining why obedience persists: people do not obey only because they are forced, but because authority becomes socially recognised as valid, whether through tradition, charisma or legal-rational bureaucracy; in this sense, power becomes stable when it is translated into forms that subjects can believe in, such as custom, office, law, procedure or personal devotion.
Austin shifts the discussion to the level of speech itself, showing that language does not merely describe reality but can perform acts: a promise, oath, verdict or marriage vow changes the social world when uttered under accepted conditions; this means that words can generate obligations, statuses and institutions, provided that social conventions authorise them . Bourdieu then exposes why not all speakers possess equal power to perform or persuade, since language circulates within unequal symbolic markets where some accents, vocabularies and styles are treated as legitimate while others are devalued; his concept of linguistic capital shows how class, education and institutional authority become embedded in speech, making language a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced as taste, competence or refinement . Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis continues this argument by treating discourse as social practice: texts, conversations and institutional exchanges are shaped by social relations while also helping to reproduce them, meaning that power is present not only in explicit commands but in assumptions, turn-taking, politeness, grammar, naming and silence; his example of institutional talk shows how ordinary language can naturalise hierarchy by making certain roles appear self-evident, such as expert and patient, police officer and witness, teacher and pupil . Daldal’s comparison of Gramsci and Foucault places this problem within two broader theories of power: Gramsci explains domination through hegemony, where ruling groups secure consent by turning their worldview into common sense, while Foucault examines disciplinary power, where institutions produce obedient subjects through surveillance, classification, examination and normalisation; together they show that identity is formed both through ideology and through practical techniques that organise bodies, habits and knowledge . Boltanski and Chiapello demonstrate how capitalism survives by absorbing critique itself: demands for autonomy, creativity and liberation from bureaucracy are incorporated into a new managerial spirit of flexibility, networking and project-based labour, so that capitalism does not simply repress opposition but reuses its language, turning insecurity into freedom and self-exploitation into entrepreneurial self-realisation . Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” introduces a more severe problem of representation, arguing that the oppressed subject is not simply unheard because she lacks volume, but because dominant intellectual, colonial and patriarchal frameworks determine in advance what can count as meaningful speech; her discussion of sati shows how the subaltern woman disappears between imperial rescue narratives and indigenous patriarchal authority, both of which claim to speak about her while making her own position unreadable . Tuck and Yang sharpen this critique in relation to settler colonialism, insisting that decolonisation cannot be used as a metaphor for general improvement, critical thinking or institutional diversity, because decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; their concept of settler moves to innocence identifies gestures through which settlers acknowledge harm symbolically while avoiding material relinquishment of land, power and privilege . Bhattacharya’s social reproduction theory expands the analysis from language and representation to the hidden labour that makes capitalism possible, asking not only who produces commodities but who produces the worker; cooking, cleaning, childcare, emotional care, education, health care and community maintenance are often feminised, racialised, unpaid or underpaid, yet they are indispensable to the reproduction of labour power, which means that class cannot be understood only at the factory or office but must include the households, schools, hospitals, welfare systems and migration regimes that sustain life itself . Cugurullo, Acheampong, Dusparic and Gueriau bring the same concern into urban futures by showing that autonomous cars are not merely technical devices but political objects likely to reshape cities, sustainability and everyday mobility; their Dublin study shows that people may fear autonomous vehicles while still imagining their use, and that the eventual outcome will depend not only on technological capacity or consumer preference but on urban politics, because shared autonomous systems could reduce car dependency and free public space, while private autonomous vehicles could intensify sprawl, inequality and energy consumption . Across all these works, the common concern is therefore not a simplistic claim that “everything is discourse”, but a more precise argument: social life is made durable when meanings, institutions and material practices support one another, so that identities appear natural, authority appears legitimate, work appears necessary, land appears owned, speech appears neutral, technology appears inevitable and inequality appears common sense. The deepest shared insight is that power rarely survives by force alone; it becomes effective when it enters ordinary life, when it is spoken in legitimate language, written into law, performed through rituals, built into schools and cities, hidden in domestic labour, repeated through media, or protected by academic categories. Yet these theorists also show that power is never total. Because social reality is produced, it can also be contested: symbolic codes can be challenged, bureaucratic legitimacy can collapse, performative authority can fail, linguistic hierarchies can be exposed, discourse can be critically analysed, hegemony can be resisted, capitalist freedom can be revealed as insecurity, subaltern silence can be interrogated without appropriation, decolonisation can be returned to land rather than metaphor, reproductive labour can become politically visible, and urban technology can be redirected through democratic planning. The central argument, then, is that identity is not merely personal and power is not merely external; identity is formed within structured fields of recognition, and power works by shaping those fields in advance. To study society critically is therefore to ask who has the authority to name, classify, speak, command, represent, design, employ, care, exclude and remember, and also who is made silent, dependent, illegitimate, disposable or impossible within those same arrangements
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bhattacharya, T. (ed.) (2017) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.
Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, È. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by G. Elliott. London and New York: Verso.
Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Edited and introduced by J.B. Thompson. Translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cugurullo, F., Acheampong, R.A., Dusparic, I. and Gueriau, M. (2020) ‘The transition to autonomous cars, the redesign of cities and the future of urban sustainability’, Urban Geography, 42(6), pp. 833–859.
Daldal, A. (2014) ‘Power and ideology in Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci: A comparative analysis’, Review of History and Political Science, 2(2), pp. 149–167.
Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power. London: Longman.
Florea, M. (2018) ‘The legitimacy of the symbolic power in communication’, International Journal of Communication Research, 8(2), pp. 126–129.
Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, pp. 271–313.
Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012) ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1–40.
Weber, M. (1978) ‘The types of legitimate domination’, in Roth, G. and Wittich, C. (eds.) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 212–242.
