Open Access

Reiner Keller

• The main purpose of the present article is, in relation to Foucault’s analytics of power/knowledge regimes, to add a new concept to those he introduced - in line with and beyond Foucault’s own terms: positional power. The argument is presented in four steps. It starts with a discussion of the social construction of the valuable and the worthless/devalued as a basic social process within societies. In the following step the concept of positional power is situated within Foucault’s analytics of power/knowledge regimes. The current proliferation of dispositives of placement, that is of agencies establishing and attributing qualifications of worth to individual or organizational actors, and thereby providing grounds for third parties decision-making, can be seen as highly significant in this respect. Building upon that, this contribution presents an outline of an empirical sociology of positional power, introducing its characteristics and dimensions in a more detailed way.