Power is the concept that runs through all four critical traditions, connecting them despite their significant theoretical differences. But each tradition conceptualises power differently, and these different conceptualisations are complementary rather than competing.

CRT: racial power and structural racism. CRT analyses power primarily as racial power, the structured advantage that accrues to white people in societies built on racial hierarchy, and the structured disadvantage imposed on people of colour. This power is not primarily individual (exercised by racist individuals) but structural (embedded in institutions, laws, and systems that produce racially unequal outcomes regardless of individual intent). CRT’s concept of interest convergence analyses how racial power shapes when and whether reform occurs.

Feminist theory: patriarchal power. Feminist theory analyses power as patriarchal power, the structured advantage that accrues to men in societies organised around male dominance. This power operates through institutions (law, medicine, the family), through culture (norms, representations, language), and through economics (the gender wage gap, the devaluation of feminised labour). Intersectional feminism extends this to examine how patriarchal power intersects with racial and class power.

Marxist theory: class power and capital. Marxist theory analyses power as class power, the structured advantage that accrues to those who own the means of production over those who sell their labour. In the contemporary AI economy, class power is concentrated in the hands of the corporations that own AI infrastructure, data, and the platform monopolies through which AI systems reach markets and populations. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony extends this to examine how class power operates through ideology, through the production of common sense that naturalises existing power relations.

Postmodern theory: diffuse, productive power. Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge departs from the other three traditions in important ways. For Foucault, power is not primarily a possession held by one group over another, it is diffuse, relational, and productive. It does not merely repress, it produces: producing knowledge, producing subjects, producing norms. The panopticon produces self-disciplining prisoners. The clinical gaze produces patients who understand themselves through medical categories. AI systems produce knowable, legible, classifiable subjects.

What the four conceptualisations reveal together:

An AI hiring system exercises:

• Racial power, encoding and reproducing the racial hierarchies of existing labour markets
• Patriarchal power, reproducing gendered assumptions about competence, authority, and career paths
• Class power, serving the interests of employers in identifying workers who will be productive and compliant, while obscuring the labour relations involved
• Disciplinary power, producing job applicants who understand themselves in terms of the categories the system uses, and who modify their self-presentation to anticipate algorithmic evaluation

No single framework captures all of this. Together, they produce a rich and accurate analysis of how power operates through AI.

Reflection question: Take an AI system you know. Trace how each of the four conceptualisations of power applies to it. What does the combined analysis reveal that individual frameworks miss?