# Power & Mary Parker Follett

*Tom Geraghty · Power, History & Foundations*

A deeper dive into power dynamics through Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) — writer, social worker, political theorist and organisational consultant, called 'the woman who invented management' and named as his guru by Peter Drucker, whose 1950s reframing of businesses as social as well as economic systems was directly inspired by her. Because of society's attitude to women at the time her ideas were not widely known, yet she addressed the LSE and advised President Theodore Roosevelt. Follett breathed humanity and common sense into a world dominated by Tayloristic views of work as a machine with humans as components, framing organisations instead as social institutions of complex interactions between people, processes, tools and economics. Her central contribution here is the typology of power the practice still uses: power-over (extractive — getting more of the pie, taken from other people or the natural world), power-with (collective action — making the pie bigger by making it together), and power-to (productive and generative — the power to create new things, even a different pie). She also framed social interdependence through three expectations: expect to need others, expect to be needed, and expect to be changed. A foundational source for the practice's whole approach to power and the flattening of gradients.

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## Connected concepts (3)

- [PS is Political](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-is-political.md)
- [Typologies of Power](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/typologies-of-power.md)
- [Reducing Power Gradients](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/reducing-power-gradients.md)