Ideal Typing (In)visible Power in the Context of Oligarchic Isomorphisms

This chapter presents a framework for a Weberian (1992) “ideal type” mapping of visible and invisible power within what Albrow (1996) refers to as “epochal” change from one distinctive arrangement of power and the related social contract to another arrangement of power and the related social contract. This chapter also questions claims that those industrial revolution economics and social compacts so associated with Weber’s oeuvre, especially Weber’s (1978) “iron cage” of top-down, hierarchical organizations with extensive bureaucracy, are part of a past epoch. The past epoch is now replaced by a new epoch or new mode of contemporary (in)visibilities drawn from ubiquitous, “revolutionary” information and communications technology (ICT) assisted by the free flow of democratic ideas/ideals, market transactions, and especially information, that supposedly creates a new global environment, a new constantly interconnected humanity, a new type of organizing virtually beyond the restrictions of time and space, a new way of living dependent on one’s own sovereignty, and a new approach to dissent where the most revolutionary act(s) is/are to merge into cyberspace itself. It is a space where the past no longer matters, the present is everything, and the only possible future is the continuance of the transparent present.