Don’t know where to start? Here are some questions to consider

You might already have a clear sense of what questions you want to answer using power research. If you do, check out our research guides, which outline how to investigate different kinds of corporations and individuals. 

If you’re not sure about what kinds of questions you want to answer, a fruitful place to start is: who holds the power where I live? How is my local power structure organized?  

From Professor William Domhoff’s “The Class Domination Theory of Power,” which can be found here. 

When trying to understand who holds power in a region, there are four questions that we can ask to get started:

• Who benefits? Who gets the things that are valued in our society despite oppressive conditions for the rest of us?
• Who governs? Who makes the policies that we live under?
• Who wins? When there are arguments over issues, who wins them?
• Who has a reputation for power? When we think of power in our region, who immediately jumps to mind?

By finding answers to these questions, we can tell stories about who is benefitting, governing, and winning from certain policies and propose new stories about who should be.

Once we begin to understand the power networks in our region we can start to zero in on how these networks affect us. Some questions to get started:

• What is the issue you are working on?
• Who are the powerful people, boards, committees, etc. that control the conditions of your concern?
• How do the power networks we uncover overlap with our targets?
• Are there other campaigns that share your targets?
• Where can we identify leverage within these networks?

Once you identify who is powerful, you’ll want to investigate their networks. Our research guides below walk you through how to investigate powerful corporations, organizations, and individuals and provide an overview of many of the most important online tools for strategic corporate research.