Power is the condition, not the exception

Why legitimacy is never separate from power.

Much of this collection has argued that communication is relational: that organisations should listen, that conduct precedes communication, and that legitimacy is conferred rather than claimed. The objection that follows is obvious, and it is correct. Organisations do not meet their publics as equals. They enter relationships with capital, lawyers, access, data, expertise, infrastructure, decision rights and institutional standing. They have power, and sometimes a great deal of it.

The objection is correct but incomplete. Power is not an embarrassment to a relational theory of communication; it is the condition that makes such a theory necessary. If organisations had no power, their conduct would matter less, and listening would be a courtesy rather than a discipline. The stronger the organisation, the less adequate it is to treat communication as explanation after the fact. Power raises the standard. It does not lower it.

What power means

Power is usually imagined too narrowly, as the ability to compel. That is one form, and not the most important one here. Organisations exercise power principally when they shape the conditions under which others act. A company with essential infrastructure does not merely sell a service; it structures dependency. A platform does not merely host interaction; it governs visibility and access. A bank does not merely price capital; it sets the possibilities open to households and firms. A food producer does not merely place a product on a shelf; it enters the routines, and sometimes the bodies, of the people who buy it. An employer does not merely purchase labour; it shapes income, identity and belonging.

Power is therefore structural, institutional, informational, economic and symbolic before it is ever coercive. It lies in ownership, expertise, standards, networks, data, switching costs, agenda-setting capacity, and the simple fact that others cannot easily opt out. This matters because organisations prefer to speak as if they were merely participants in a conversation. Often they are participants carrying heavier instruments, and the disparity does not vanish because a forum has been created, a report published or a comment invited. That is the first discipline of power: honesty about the asymmetry. Without it, engagement becomes what Anti-PR calls a buffer – here, a buffer with better manners.

Legitimacy scales with power

Legitimacy is not the opposite of power. It is one of the ways power is made acceptable – the social condition under which power can continue to operate without constant resistance. A powerful organisation can act for a time without broad approval, on legal right, market position or technical control. But in an open society those advantages are never self-sustaining. They rest on a continued acceptance by institutions, markets, employees, regulators and the public that may be quiet, reluctant, renewed by habit rather than enthusiasm – and is still a form of consent, and can still be withdrawn.

The more consequential the power, the more demanding that test becomes. A small company may be forgiven its clumsiness; a systemically important one is not. A marginal actor is judged by its intentions; a dominant actor is judged by its effects. A company that provides essential services is assessed not only as a market participant but as a steward of capabilities others depend on. Power changes the question. It is no longer only whether the organisation is allowed to act, but what standard follows from the power it holds.

Public affairs as stewardship

This is where public affairs most often goes wrong. Understood as the pursuit of favourable policy, power becomes simply a resource – access, argument, coalition, timing, pressure. That is a fair description of practice and too small as a theory of the function. For an organisation with significant structural power, public affairs cannot only ask what the company wants from the political system; it must ask what the political system is entitled to expect from the company. The stronger the position, the less credible advocacy from private interest alone becomes.

That is the difference between lobbying and stewardship. Lobbying asks how to win the issue. Stewardship asks what position the company can defend, over time, given the power society has allowed it to hold. The second question does not replace the first. It disciplines it.

Power as the content of structural exposure

Because power is a standing condition and not a variable that appears only in controversy, it belongs inside the foundational approach rather than beside it. A company’s defining characteristic produces a structural exposure, and that exposure is always partly a question of power. If the company produces food from the commons, its power lies in turning shared natural conditions into private production. If it places ready-to-eat food on the plate, its power lies in entering the body without a final safety barrier between its conduct and the consumer. If it runs critical digital infrastructure, its power lies in shaping the connectivity on which commerce, security and daily life depend. In each case the legitimacy test is set by the specific power held, and the standard follows from it.

Listening, under these conditions, is not the pretence that all parties are equal or that every concern can be met. It is three harder things: clarity about what is genuinely open to influence and what is not, seriousness about evidence from outside the organisation’s own field of vision, and a willingness to change conduct where the organisation’s power imposes unreasonable burdens, risks or exclusions. The last is decisive. As Listening is a moral discipline argues, listening that cannot change conduct is intelligence-gathering, not recognition.

This does not reopen the question of symmetry, which is settled elsewhere. Pure symmetry remains a fiction and pure asymmetry remains unstable, because power used without recognition accumulates its own opposition – in regulators, courts, investors, employees, communities and owners – over a horizon longer than the tenure of those who created the exposure. That is the argument of The arc of history toward symmetry. The point here is narrower and prior to it: power is what makes the standard scale, and therefore what makes the whole relational discipline necessary rather than optional.

The honest position

So the honest position is that corporate communication is never merely communication. It is the discipline through which an organisation understands, explains, tests and sometimes changes the way it exercises power. This does not raise communication above strategy, law, finance or operations; it makes it dependent on them. If the conduct is indefensible, no communicative model redeems it. If the power is denied, the listening sounds false. If legitimacy is treated as owned rather than granted, the public eventually corrects the error. Power is not a separate chapter from legitimacy. It is the reason legitimacy matters.

The more power an organisation holds, the less it can afford to treat listening as optional. Power without recognition becomes resistance; power under discipline can become trust.