Knowledge, knowers, and power: understanding the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge

ABSTRACT This article seeks to contribute to recent theorizing around the concept of powerful knowledge. I begin with a discussion of the current use of the term in both academia and the wider institutional environment of schools. I then give a detailed account of its origins in social realism before exploring different iterations of the concept in recent academic work. The second half of the article seeks to develop the idea of ‘power’ in powerful knowledge by engaging with the criticisms of philosopher John White. I do this by bringing in the philosophical work on the concept of power offered by Peter Morriss. I conclude that Morriss’ analysis of power can help reveal why ‘power’ is best seen as a disposition to effect certain ends. I suggest that this helps resolve some of the concerns of White and provides a template for how to think about powerful knowledge going forward.


Introduction
The pages of this journal have included a number of contributions exploring the concept of powerful knowledge (Deng, 2021(Deng, , 2022;;Hordern, 2022;Hordern et al., 2021;Muller & Hoadley, 2021).The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of that concept by charting its origins, development, and various iterations since its initial formulation.I also attempt to contribute to some of the more recent theorizing, particularly in relation to power, using the work of philosopher Peter Morriss.This builds on the more recent work by Young and Muller on the 'power' element of the concept (Muller & Young, 2019).
In doing this, I will first explore the origins of the concept by looking at the intellectual traditions it was a reaction against.I then go on to chart its initial formulation as a sociological concept before exploring some of the ways it has evolved into its modern, somewhat fragmented, usage within various educational discourses.I then outline some of the prominent objections to the concept levelled by philosopher John White.In response I draw on Peter Morriss' philosophical work on power, thus far not included in any of the discussions of the concept, to provide a philosophical justification for the 'power' of powerful knowledge.I conclude that when we understand 'power' as an ability to effect certain ends, many of the concerns surrounding the concept can be allayed and, more importantly, a vision of what is powerful in disciplinary knowledge more fully realized.
The motivation for this article can be seen as taking up an implicit call from Michael Young himself.Namely, to add an adequate concept of 'power' to go with the 'knowledge' of powerful knowledge.Young argues that he and his collaborators are clear on the socio-epistemological basis of the concept, namely, social realism.Yet, he concedes they do not yet have an adequate theory of The retreat from relativism: origins and background of powerful knowledge An important starting point in trying to recapitulate the concept of powerful knowledge is distinguishing its social realist epistemological commitments from the social constructivism that it sets itself in opposition to.According to social realists, social constructivists commit themselves to the position that 'how we think about the world, our experience, and any notion of "how the world is", are not differentiated' (Young & Muller, 2007, p. 178).The consequence of this commitment is that all claims to objective knowledge are challengeable and, perhaps more troublingly, all such claims are ultimately arbitrary.There are different intellectual variants of this understanding of knowledge which are beyond the scope of this article to survey.However, they include various forms of culturalism, Romantic nationalism, Indigenous Knowledge movements, certain more radical strands of standpoint theory, and philosophical cultural relativism (Nussbaum, 1997;Rata, 2012;Williams, 2002).In the sociology of education, the constructivist argument runs that knowledge is constructed by cultures or groups and that there is, therefore, no meaningful distinction between 'social' knowledge and the disciplinary knowledge characteristic of the development of scientific knowledge (Rata, 2012, p. 104).
Michael Young's first major work, Knowledge and Control (1972), argued that school subjects were, 'no more than the socio-historical constructs of a particular time' (Young 1971, p. 23).This is a view he later moderated under the influence of writers such as Rob Moore (Young, 2008).The concern was that using his earlier social constructivism as an intellectual underpinning of educational knowledge meant all schools could really be doing was imposing a 'cultural arbitrary' in which the whims of the ruling elites are imposed agonistically on the oppressed masses (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).The only seeming antidote, given that all knowledge is socially constructed within cultures, would be the assertion of a hitherto undefined 'working class', 'feminist' or 'postcolonial' epistemology.If then, knowledge claims are merely the epiphenomenal outcrop of social arrangements and, given that these social arrangements encode the cultural predilections of the already powerful, any knowledge claim can be challenged and reimagined under different and more equitable social relations.The thought naturally follows that if we change the social relations, the nature of knowledge and truth could also change.
In response, social realists might commend the revolutionary zeal of such approaches but hesitate at the reduction of knowledge to its context of production.In constructivism, we have an intellectual approach to education, knowledge, and the curriculum that imagines the disavowal of truth, objectivity, and knowledge as tools for emancipatory politics.It could do this by embracing a postmodern position in which all truth claims were contingent.Equally, it could associate itself with various 'voice discourses' in which truth claims were only evaluable in relation to the various standpoints of the knowers (Moore, 2009;Young, 2008).Such a position was embraced by those that sought to identify with subordinate groups and imagined, following broadly constructivist logic, that the positionality of the knower within the group generated a sui generis type of knowledge.To be on the right side of a political struggle would, then, involve deferring to the knowledge claims of marginalized groups rather than hubristic pronouncements about objective truth (Rata, 2012).Rejecting this, social realists instead embrace a critical realist ontology which comes to underpin both the objective and social basis of certain forms of knowledge (Moore, 2013b).
The above account of the intellectual trajectory of knowledge and the curriculum can be developed if we also recognize that much of the relativistic impulse in educational thinking was itself a reaction to, and self-conscious turn away from, behaviourism and positivism in the social sciences.In turn, concepts such as 'objective knowledge' became associated with an imperialistic authoritarianism anathema to social justice.This is what the 'New Sociology of Education', pioneered in the 1970s by Young and others, drew on in attempting to debunk the idea that school curricula provided neutral, objective knowledge.The point here is that knowledge, within the sociology of education, has been conceived either as a device for political control by ruling elites or as a tool for political revolution by the oppressed.The social realist project aims to rehabilitate an understanding of educational knowledge that goes beyond the vested interests (be they left or right, revolutionary or conservative) of those that claim it (Young & Muller, 2013).The retreat from social constructivism in the sociology of education is therefore an attempted remedy to the evacuation of disciplinary expertise and specialized knowledge from thinking about the curriculum (Young & Muller, 2013).

Beyond constructivism: social realism, Durkheim, Bernstein, and Vygotsky
What is the alternative to constructivism in the sociology of education and how might it solve some of the problems raised above?Emile Durkheim and Basil Bernstein are perhaps the two biggest influences on the social realist approach to knowledge (Moore, 2009;Young, 2008).Durkheim's distinction between the 'sacred' and 'profane' has provided one enduring pair of concepts (Durkheim et al., 2008).At its most basic level, the distinction refers to the separation of the practices of early religions-specifically totemic ones-from the everyday experience of the tribe or group.However, rather than seeing the religious as a realm of mere superstition or codified custom, Durkheim saw the preconditions for the distinction between specialized knowledge and the knowledge of practical experience and day-to-day life.This sacred/profane distinction becomes the prerequisite for intellectual and scientific knowledge that requires abstraction and generalization.
Young, in particular, tethers the Durkheimian insight about differentiation and specialization to Vygotsky's understanding of the distinction between everyday concepts and scientific (which is to say academic) concepts.This builds on Bernstein's previously made connection between the two (see Moore, 2013a).Vygotsky becomes important in so far as he also saw a clear differentiation between everyday knowledge and the kinds of knowledge schools ought to be in the business of inculcating within students.He saw access to theoretical concepts associated with different disciplines as the goal, and the complex pedagogical relationships needed to achieve that goal as the job of teachers and educationalists more generally (Young, 2008;Young & Muller, 2013).
Where Durkheim provided a social account of objective knowledge, Bernstein sought to conceptualize the internal relations that explained how knowledge domains are structured (Bernstein, 2000).Out of this comes the distinction between vertical and horizontal discourse.The latter, like Durkheim, relates to heavily contextualized knowledge of the community, experience and the everyday.Within the vertical discourse Bernstein draws a second distinction between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures.The former relate to disciplines like the natural sciences in which knowledge builds in a cumulative way.Progression occurs via the subsumption of older knowledge by newer theories and observations that supplant the old because of their greater explanatory force (Moore & Muller, 2002).A horizontal knowledge structure is characterized not by 'subsumption' but by the 'addition of parallel theories, languages, or sets of concepts' (Young & Muller, 2013, p. 239).This description is more typical of the humanities and social sciences.
We can see why the social realist approach to understanding knowledge leads to a bifurcation between knowledge and experience; the kind of knowledge the curriculum should valorize reaches beyond the 'profane' of the everyday and allows us to abstract from our own context to a more abstract kind of symbolic representation.We can also see, to be more precise, it is really a bifurcation between two different types of knowledge-the horizontal and vertical in Bernsteinian language and the sacred and profane in Durkheimian language.Having given an account of what motivates some of the social realist thinking, I turn now to giving a positive account of the features of this hierarchical, disciplinary knowledge before identifying how it can be conceived as powerful.

From social realism to powerful knowledge
Powerful knowledge has been given several clustered definitions, each of which have undergone scrutiny.My purpose here is to outline these various definitional projects before evaluating its most recent incarnation.This will allow me to bring in philosophical work on power to help shore up the concept.
As we have seen, a social realist account of knowledge is a reaction against both positivism and constructivism.The positivist view suffers, according to the social realist project, because it starts from an asocial conception of knowledge insensitive to the communities of research which produce it; it is as if knowledge was derived from some platonic, pre-social, Archimedean point.The other version of knowledge, in many ways a reaction to this, is oversocialized in that it reduces all knowledge claims to the 'voice' of the knower and their cultural or social group.As such it vitiates any attempt at objectivity and truth.The result is a kind of relativism that renders knowledge as the arbitrary expression of knowers and groups of knowers rather than something that can transcend 'the traditions of its production' (Young, 2008, p. 26).
A social realist account recognizes the social basis of knowledge whilst also accepting that some knowledge is powerful in so far as it allows for the kind of abstract thought that empowers us to think the unthinkable (Bernstein, 2000).As Young and Muller put it, "a social realist theory sees knowledge as involving sets of systematically related concepts and methods for their empirical exploration and the increasingly specialized and historically located communities of enquirers'" (Young & Muller, 2010, p. 14).Their first formulation suggested three features of powerful knowledge that are cumulative, each depending on the one(s) prior to it.The three features are: • The distinction between 'knowledge of the powerful', and 'powerful knowledge'.
• The distinction between non-specialized knowledge and specialized knowledge.
• The distinction between specialized powerful knowledge and specialized less powerful knowledge.(Young & Muller, 2013, p. 233) A brief elucidation of some of these ideas is necessary to explore how subsequent controversies surrounding them have arisen.Given the definition of knowledge outlined above, Young and others have been keen to distinguish between the knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge.
The former concept refers to the knowledge of elite, powerful social groups, whereas the latter refers to the disciplinary knowledge produced in epistemic communities, like university departments, that offer our best attempts at finding truth about ourselves and the world (Young, 2008).For Young, powerful knowledge has its own power and is not merely a 'handmaiden to power' (Young & Muller, 2013, p. 197).This is at odds with a sociological tradition that has focused largely on the way inequalities characteristic of the background society are amplified, reproduced, and exacerbated in educational settings.As such, many have seen schools as playing a conservative role in society by perpetuating the iniquitous status quo.Social realism suggest that this is no doubt true and in dire need of redress, however we also need to recognize that powerful knowledge is part of a more etymologically conservative project; one that we ought to defend.The argument here is that there is a kind of conservatism that is ineradicable from the idea of education.Knowledge is conserved and transmitted as part of the division of cognitive labour that ensures the next generation do not need to rediscover knowledge ex-nihilo.The connotations of 'transmission' are unfortunately Gradgrindian yet reveal an important truth.
If we accept that there is a meaningful distinction between knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge, then researchers would do equally well to attend to the nature of the knowledge that we ought to conserve as well as to the inequalities that schools can perpetuate.In their most recent articulation of the concept, Young and Muller have further argued that knowledge of the powerful isn't really knowledge at all, or at least not in the sense they now understand it.Rather, it represents the way in which knowledge is wielded and hoarded by certain groups for reasons of maintaining power over others within an unjust social hierarchy.This kind of power, according to young and Muller, treats knowledge as a 'rivalrous good' which pits those without it in zero-sum competition with those that have access to it (Muller & Young, 2019).
Specialized knowledge, the second criterion above, is the outcome of Durkheim, Vygotsky, and Bernstein's insights into the nature of knowledge, derived in certain kinds of disciplinary contexts.Young and Muller reframe Moore's criterion of specialized knowledge and suggest powerful knowledge is specified by its systematic revisability, emergence, realness, materiality/sociality (Moore, 2009;Young & Muller, 2013).It is therefore a version of hierarchical, vertical discourse in Bernsteinian language.Under this view, powerful knowledge becomes a pyramidic structure of increasingly abstract concepts which neophytes are to master on their way to competence within a specific domain.However, it soon became clear that this would not do as an explanation of the arts.Much of the push back against the work of Young and others resides in the extent to which powerful knowledge necessarily relies on this definition of specialized knowledge.Yet, recent work has sought to ease these tensions.

From powerful knowledge to the power of knowledge
Understanding powerful knowledge in the way outlined above meant that it became apposite as a description of mathematics and, arguably, some social science but said little about the arts and humanities.Young and Muller have subsequently revised the concept of powerful knowledge with a specific focus on the concept of power (Muller & Young, 2019).The initial formulation was overly biased towards the 'hierarchical knowledge structures' that rely more on empirical verification, conceptual integration, and sequential progression.In a subject such as English Literature, it is far from clear that it is these features that mark it out as a conceptual field of enquiry.Instead, Young and Muller seek to keep hold of the distinction between knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge, as well as the primary importance of differentiation and specialization.However, they now recognize that this was narrowly focused on the project of returning the concepts of truth and objectivity to the sociology of education.As such it ended up focusing on 'power as a "socio-epistemic property" of knowledge, rather than on power as potential or capacity for social actors to do something' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 199).
To adequately deal with the disciplines in the arts and humanities, they now conceive of certain sorts of specialized knowledge as conferring power to those that have access to it.This is instead of thinking of powerful knowledge as referring to properties solely within the knowledge itself.Instead, as I argue below, the knowledge activates latent abilities within students.One way this distinction is made is by invoking a difference between potestas and potentia which Steven Lukes takes from Spinoza (Lukes, 2005).Potentia refers to 'power to', or the ability and capacity to do something; and potestas, roughly 'power over' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 202).The point here is to recognize that when we talk of the 'power' of powerful knowledge we are now talking about an ability to do something worth doing.The kinds of knowledge advocated as the guiding curriculum principles for schools should therefore be thought of as a version of potentia; the cultivation of abilities.
Powerful knowledge is currently conceived by Young and Muller as referring, then, to at least three distinctive things.Firstly, of academic disciplines which 'produce specialised discourses that regulate and ensure reliability, revisability, and emergence' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 209).Secondly, the link between power and the school curriculum which 'provide signposts to the structure of the subject before adepts are empowered to generate new ideas' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 210).Thirdly, power as a generative capacity in which students can 'make new connections, gain new insights, generate new ideas' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 210).All these Young and Muller now understand as being part of the development of sets of 'powers' to do certain things.It is important also to note that theorizing around the concept is not an undertaking solely of scholars in the anglosphere.Much recent work has attempted to connect powerful knowledge to other educational traditions, for example didactics (Hudson et al., 2023;Vollmer, 2021).

More than a catchy phrase? The philosophical grounds of powerful knowledge
There has been a range of criticism of the concept of powerful knowledge.These include its inability to enact social justice (Zipin et al., 2015), a suggestion it valorizes a western-centric notion of knowledge, ill-attuned to the enduring legacy of colonialism (Rudolph et al., 2018), that the theory rests on unsustainable conceptual and epistemological premises (White, 2018(White, , 2019)), and that its focus on knowledge developed in disciplinary communities misses the distinctive purpose of education in the arts (Eaglestone, 2020;Yandell & Brady, 2016).Here, I want to focus on the criticisms of the coherence of the term itself, a criticism most prominently raised by philosopher John White.In doing so, I accept his general point that any account of the value of disciplinary knowledge must have a justification beyond itself i.e. it must have a political and normative justification at its base.Given this, I then want to offer a philosophical defence of the recent conception of powerful knowledge offered by Young and Muller by drawing on the work of Peter Morriss.Morriss has given one of the most sustained philosophical accounts of the concept of power to date and, I argue, helps clarify the importance of the concept (Morriss, 2002).
One area of tension between White and Young is a perennial question in the philosophy of education about the purpose of schools.White favours the view that schools should be rooted in aims and values and the curriculum should play the role of promoting these wider political and ethical goals (White, 2004).Young, at least in some writing, is much more sceptical about linking the purpose of the curriculum to specified wider social and political goals.Instead schools are in the business of providing access to certain kinds of knowledge (Young, 2014;Young et al., 2014).I take this to be an unnecessary bifurcation of the purpose and nature of schooling as I will argue below.
White has offered several criticisms of the concept of powerful knowledge (White, 2018(White, , 2019)).The thrust of all of these being that the term is freighted with emotive weight that, in effect, legitimizes a traditionalist curriculum.In fact, argues White, when we look for what is 'powerful' in powerful knowledge, we find little of substance.Initially this criticism focused on the claim that the notion implied a 'sui generis systems of interrelated concepts' (White, 2018, p. 326).White points to the study of literature in schools and argues that students 'rarely if ever get to grips with aestheticians' concepts' (White, 2018, p. 328) such as form and aesthetic value.He goes on to suggest that the 'novelists, dramatists, and poets they read use every day, non-technical' concepts (White, 2018, p. 328).
Further to this, he argues that the study of literature isn't really a question of knowledge, rather, it is 'aesthetic experience of various kinds' (White, 2018, p. 328).This is slightly confusing as only a few sentences earlier White seems to claim students of literature in schools do not grapple with 'aesthetic experience'.I take him to mean that students studying literature primarily engage with the text for its experiential value, the sheer pleasure of the thing, rather than the analytical reading typical of literary theorists and critics.I do not, even under this somewhat generous reading, find this claim convincing.In brief, it is an empirical matter whether students do in fact learn about concepts such as form and aesthetic experience (as a longstanding English teacher and head of department, in my view they certainly do).Secondly, even if it was the case that they don't, it is a further question whether this is desirable.Arguing for a curriculum informed by powerful knowledge is a future directed project as outlined in Young and Muller's three futures paper (Young & Muller, 2010).It is not intended as a description of the status quo.It is unusual, then, that a philosopher no doubt aware of Hume's is/ought distinction would end up conflating the two (Hume et al., 2000).
White also takes issue with the recent reformulation of powerful knowledge as a version of potentia.Recall that Young and Muller argue that potentia 'extends horizons, it imagines new futures . . .involves the capacity to achieve something of value' (Muller & Young, 2019, pp. 201-202).White points out that this is an unjustified embellishment of the meaning of potentia which in fact just means 'the power or capacity to do something' (White, 2019, p. 432).He goes on to argue that there are plenty of powers in this sense that it would be bizarre to call powerful-drinking a glass of water, winking, tying my shoelaces.These are all version of potentia but it would seem excessive to call them 'powerful'.Young and Muller's proposal to recast the 'powerful' of powerful knowledge as potentia is unsuccessful because the term is too encompassing and therefore uninformative.
Anticipating a potential response from Young and Muller, White appears to recognize that we might then just be specific about what is powerful within each disciplinary form of knowledge.Young and Muller attempt this by suggesting that academic subjects develop the capacity to generate new ideas (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 210).However, White remains unimpressed by this attempt at glossing disciplinary knowledge as powerful.He claims that someone 'mildly paranoic may be able to spin out all sorts of new ideas about the enemies surrounding him, extend his horizons in the process, imagine new futures' (White, 2019, p. 433).What White misses with this criticism, though, is that Young and Muller add more than just the generation of new ideas in their definition.Namely, that the generation of ideas is specific to the 'deep structure of their subject' and therefore leads to developing the 'quality of their discernment and judgement; in their appreciation of the range and reach of the substantive and conceptual fields of the subject; and in their appreciation that the substantive detail they have learnt is only part of what the hinterland of the subject has to offer' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 210).Paranoid delusions would therefore not be admitted into this.It is still nevertheless true that we still might ask why immersion in conceptual fields of subjects is so important, but the claim that any random cognitive power is what Young and Muller advocate seems a misrepresentation of their argument.
White ends with a criticism of Young and Muller's claim that invoking potentia implies 'achieving something of value' (White, 2019, p. 432).Here, White points out that I can have the power to do malevolent things to others.I can 'kill my pet cat for fun or . . .domineer over others' (White, 2019, p. 432).Importantly, White uses Lukes' own supposition that power-over others (potestia) is also a subset of potentia.Again, White's sustained critique aims to show that in moving towards a concept of power as 'power-to' we are left with very little of substance.We still have the potential for 'power-over' others, for the banal or arbitrary power to do trivial tasks such as scroll through the television or imagine bizarre and pointless ideas.Perhaps rune reading allows us such 'power', yet Young and Muller are clearly not considering that as 'powerful' in the relevant sense.In what follows I want to draw on a philosophical analysis of power to help address some of these concerns and help salvage the concept of powerful knowledge form White's critique.

Power reimagined: Peter Morriss on power as ability
What is power's most basic use in English and how might this bear on the discussion from White above?Let us remember that what motivated the project of social realism was the desire to escape the collapse of all talk about knowledge into simply talk of power.Such a tendency is not uncommon in the sociology of education.It has been a mainstay of the post-Bourdieuian approach to education that analyses schools as sites of the reproduction of background social inequalities.In what follows I offer some arguments in response to the call from Michael Young to develop a theory of power that could exist productively alongside the theory of knowledge hitherto developed by social realists (Guile et al., 2017).
That such a theory will need to move away from some of the traditional sociological accounts of power is unsurprising if we consider the concerns of those that have influenced the trajectory of sociological thinking in the sphere of education-Bourdieu, Foucault, Marx-to name three of the most influential.As a result, a cursory Google search of 'power and sociology' returns 'pluralist', 'elite', 'ruling class', theories of power, all of which have either a tacit or explicit understanding that power is relational and involves domination i.e. it is 'power-over' others.This version of power is, however, not our basic one.A compelling analysis of the term power reveals that power is best conceived as 'power-to'.The philosopher that has argued this most lucidly and rigorously is Peter Morriss in his landmark work on the subject (Morriss, 2002).Morriss' work has not been referred to in the literature on powerful knowledge but, I suggest, offers some useful concepts and clarifications that might help develop the theory of power Young and Muller argue for.
One aspect of Young and Muller's use of Lukes' work on power that they do not draw attention to is that it has been influenced by Morriss' work on the concept.It was Morriss who first recognized that power-to is 'more basic' than power-over and, most importantly, that the latter is not reducible to the former (Morriss, Moore & Muller, 2002, p. xiv).Morris begins his account of why we might distinguish between power-to and power-over by comparing the words power and influence.He does this because he notes that many interested in providing an analysis of power in the social world collapse the two together.Morriss endeavours to show why they are analytically distinct and why there are 'good conceptual reasons for this' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 8).One of the central distinctions noted by Morriss is that 'power' 'always refers to a capacity to do things, whilst "influence" sometimes (and typically) does not' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 12).Influence in contrast is a 'specific form of affecting' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 11).Thus, Morriss concludes that power is best understood as 'an ability, capacity or dispositional property' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 13).
One way to make this explicit is by looking at the verbs both words typically take.To influence is to affect something whereas power is concerned with effecting.As Morriss notes, 'to affect something is to alter it or impinge on it in some way . . . to effect something is to bring about or accomplish it' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 29).This entails that to affect someone or something is not necessarily an exercise of power, whereas to effect (or accomplish) something is.Compare, 'the divorce affected him emotionally for many years' to 'the divorce effected his recovery from depression'.This explains why power-over others is misleading if it is taken as the primary use of power.Power-over is when a power to do something also affects someone or some group.As such it is not an essential component of power but rather a specific example of it.It is surely the case that we have many things we can effect that do not have affecting as part of their conceptual structure.To say I have the power to write this article is to say I can effect a desired outcome.It would be strange to couch this in terms of power-over others.If my aim is to reduce the reader to tears of boredom, we might talk of it having a power-over the reader, but this would surely be a rare and unusual usage.
Morriss then moves to considering power as a dispositional property.Dispositional properties are the 'relatively enduring capacities of objects' (Moore & Muller, 2002, p. 14).This is different to events themselves.A seed is disposed to flourish into a plant whether it actually does or does not flourish.A sugar lump, to take Morriss' example, is soluble whether or not it is in fact dissolving at any particular time and will remain soluble even if it never encounters a liquid.If we consider powers as dispositional capacities to do something intended, then we recognize that whether a person is in fact doing that thing is not essential in analysing their powers.To conflate the exercise of a powerdissolving in water, blooming into a rose-with the disposition to do so, is what Morriss describes as the exercise fallacy.Morriss points out that social scientists have been apt to commit this fallacy as they look for ways to quantify and measure power.Yet, it remains the fact that if power is a disposition, it is, by definition, separate to its exercise.To sum up the account given thus far, power as a concept is to be contrasted with ideas such as influence, control, and domination.These latter forms of 'power-over' are not the primary way in which we ought to understand power.Instead, we should follow Morriss in recognizing that power-to is the basic form of the concept.Power-to is about effecting certain outcomes rather than affecting others.

Powerful knowledge revisited
In spelling out these distinctions we can now return to powerful knowledge and some of the concerns about its grounding as a concept useful for thinking about educational knowledge.We can agree with White there are a range of powers that we might not confer the modifier 'powerful' to.Therefore, relying on the very broad notion of potentia is unilluminating.However, the crucial point is that the knowledge prescribed in a school curriculum confers power by cultivating dispositions within students.Different subjects will foster different sorts of powers whilst overlapping; mathematical abilities might transfer across the natural sciences, sensitivity to musical inflection and intonation might serve us in both music and dance.However, once learnt, they become the kinds of dispositions Morriss' work on power helps to elucidate.
The other key import of Morriss' work is that it helps further refine one of the key motivators for the project of powerful knowledge in the first place.Namely, that there is a distinction between the knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge.Young and Muller do not explore power as a dispositional concept, however doing so helps clarify the conceptual justification of the dyad.Young and Muller realize that knowledge of the powerful isn't really knowledge, instead it refers to 'its use or origins, and the interests of those originators or users' (Muller & Young, 2019, p. 198).Yet, we can now go further and suggest it therefore isn't really power either; rather it is the exercise of power-over.To consider it power would be to commit the exercise fallacy as outlined above.
Instead, knowledge of the powerful might better be thought of as domination, itself a subset of power-over.The way in which elite groups use knowledge to shore up positions of domination, and keep those without access to it subordinate is, under my analysis, doubly distinct from the concept of powerful knowledge.The 'powerful' of powerful knowledge refers to a disposition to be able to do certain things as the result of having access to disciplinary knowledge.Whereas knowledge of the powerful is a description of a specific exercise of domination and, therefore, not a true power in the relevant sense.Getting clearer on this conceptual distinction helps shed light on why the concept of powerful knowledge is important.
In knowledge of the powerful, the relevant sense of 'powerful' is the initial one given by Lukes i.e. it is perhaps better expressed as knowledge of the dominant-this is less catchy but more accurate.As both Lukes and Morriss now agree, talk of power in the social sciences is really talk of domination (Morriss, 2006).Moreover, we ought to be careful as well to remember that the power-over concept is also distinguishable from domination.A teacher, an example given by Lukes, is in a power-over relationship viz-a-vis their students but not (necessarily) one of domination-that is if they are a good teacher rather than a tyrannical or vindictive one.The point is that domination involves demeaning or exploiting someone.Suffice it to say, the concept Young is concerned with in developing the notion of the knowledge of the powerful is now quite distant from the concept of power.It is this distance that explains the gulf between powerful knowledge and knowledge of the powerful.Morriss makes a similar point when arguing that Lukes isn't actually talking about power; he is talking about domination as it is enacted which is distinct from power.Power is an ability or a capacity.Lukes' central question is 'How do the powerful secure the compliance . . . of those they dominate?'(Morriss, 2006).This is not a question about potestas (which is the capacity to dominate).It is a concern with actually existing domination which is the exercise of a capacity rather than the capacity itself.This is analogous to Young's knowledge of the powerful where 'powerful' refers to those that do in fact exercise domination over others.
Where we might now agree with White is that we still have a relatively thin sense of precisely what sorts of powers are being cultivated by the study of subjects such as Mathematics, History, French, Music, and English Literature.But the aim for those with expertise in various subject areas is surely then to make this explicit to themselves and their students.In doing this they bring the powers of their disciplines to the forefront of their practice.This necessitates a discussion about why the powers of knowledge, promoted by school subjects, are valuable for individuals and society.Here, White seems to agree that this is a project worth pursuing when he says of Young and Muller's project, 'they need to go further than the definition they propose.We are still no further forward in discovering what makes the subject knowledge in which Young and his colleagues are interested powerful knowledge' (White, 2019, p. 433).
It is my view that Young and Muller, as curriculum theorists, are working at a level of abstraction above being able to give a detailed answer to this question.It is up to subject specialists, practitioners, and disciplinary communities to wrestle with this issue.No doubt it will be more contested in some domains than others, but this should not vitiate an attempt to provide such an account.Furthermore, the concept of power we have hit upon needs to be tethered to a political and normative account of its purpose.This is something I think White would agree with.He has himself put forward an account of education linked to aims and values (White, 2004).
Young and his collaborators have not been full throated enough in explaining why the cultivation of powerful knowledge is so important for society.However, as I suggest above, this isn't obviously their remit.Rather we need both a conception of justice applicable to education and then an account of how the various domains of potential powerful knowledge do or do not reach towards that aim.In this I agree with recent contributions from Deng and Lambert that look to build a link to the Capabilities Approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Deng, 2021;Lambert et al., 2015).Doing this puts the programme of powerful knowledge in conversation with discussion in political philosophy that can help provide a real programme for educational change.

Conclusion
Social realism aimed to escape both crass positivism and reductive relativism about knowledge.In doing so it gives a social account of knowledge which recognizes the centrality of specialization, differentiation, and objectivity.This gives certain forms of knowledge explanatory reach beyond the local and particular and towards the universal.Powerful knowledge as a concept contributes to describing this project within the context of schooling.
However, in articulating the concept, its authors struggled to give an account applicable to many arts and humanities subjects.This is because of Young and Muller's initial, tacit reliance on hierarchical and vertically structured disciplines as the paradigm case of powerful knowledge.In response they moved towards understanding the 'power' of powerful knowledge as a capacity or power of the person rather than as a property of the knowledge itself.They did this using Steven Lukes' work on the concept of power.I have suggested, responding to some of White's criticisms, that using Peter Morriss' work on power can further enrich the concept, especially regarding the distinction between knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge.This leaves the door open for curriculum makers, teachers, and subject specialists to articulate the 'power' their disciplines cultivate.Some of this work is already taking place, for example in the Geocapabilities project (Lambert et al., 2015;Uhlenwinkel et al., 2017).Such a project is surely more vital than ever in an era of increasing de-professionalization, centralization, and instrumentalism and could provide succour to those aiming to defend the importance of subject based schooling whilst reaching towards greater social justice.