ACBPP 2015 - Asian Conference on Business & Public Policy 2015

Power as a commodity has challenged the minds of social scientists and philosophers while its exercise has always fascinated historians. From classical thinkers’ works such as Aristotle’s Politka or Machiavelli’s Il Principe through modern figures who manipulate power in the media, like Silvio Berlusconi or Rupert Murdoch, to the vast networks that support major heads of state, power has been a necessity to some or like an aphrodisiac to others. The dynamics of power and its associations with wealth and status now shape the contemporary world more visibly than ever. It is a research challenge to all fields of the social sciences to offer some explanation of its magnetism and its mechanisms.
The term “power,” among its many other uses, can be applied to identify one of the most important mechanisms employed in the corporate world. It can refer to anything from the exercise of authority in an office context to the manipulation of complex negotiations leading to a large-scale merger or acquisition. The psychological use of power and the psychological structure power plays of any scale share numerous common characteristics. They entail persuasion, compromise, positional movement, veiled threats, or the obverse side of blackmail, namely “white-mail,” where the moral stakes are raised to the point at which the opposition risks loss of reputation by resisting cooperating.
As a conference theme, power in its many aspects is a hub concept that researchers, analysts, and practitioners alike can reflect on and speak about both in the abstract and from experience. Power and its perception can therefore be an invaluable concept in the exploration of the globalization of both business and politics, and we expect this theme to excite a number of stimulating research paths, and look forward to their outcomes as we gather in Kobe in 2015