MGMT 8405M Week 7 Power Reading Example

Who Won the Vote and What Never Reached It: A Power Reading of a Cooperative Board's Dispute Over Closing a Creamery, Layered Through Dahl's Open Contest, Bachrach and Baratz's Agenda and Lukes's Shaped Preferences

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Walden University

MGMT 8405M: Challenging Conventional Leadership and Influence

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Month Day, Year

Who Won the Vote and What Never Reached It: A Power Reading of a Cooperative Board's Dispute Over Closing a Creamery, Layered Through Dahl's Open Contest, Bachrach and Baratz's Agenda and Lukes's Shaped Preferences

The Dispute as Recorded

In March 2025 the board of Prairie Bend Dairy Cooperative, a composite farmer-owned cooperative with about 340 member farms and three processing plants, voted 7 to 4 to close its oldest plant, a creamery in a small Minnesota town, and move its butter production to a larger plant 90 miles away. The minutes record a long debate. The general manager presented a consultant's study showing that consolidation would save about $2.6 million a year. Four directors from farms near the creamery argued that longer hauls would raise their costs, that the town would lose its largest employer and that the cooperative had a duty to its members beyond lowest cost. After two meetings, the closure passed.

The First Layer: The Open Contest

Dahl (1957) defined power in terms of observable outcomes: A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something B would not otherwise do. Studied this way, power is seen in decisions where preferences conflict openly and one side prevails. Read on this layer, the creamery vote is straightforward. The general manager and the seven directors who supported closure prevailed over four directors who opposed it. The minutes show the arguments, the vote and the winners. A leadership account built on this layer would credit the general manager with persuading a divided board.

The Second Layer: What Stayed Off the Agenda

Bachrach and Baratz (1962) argued that power has a second face: the ability to limit decision making to relatively safe issues, so that some matters never become decisions at all. To see this face, one has to look at how the agenda was set. The consultant's terms of reference, approved by the general manager and the board chair in mid-2024, asked for an evaluation of "plant consolidation options to reduce processing cost." They did not ask the consultant to evaluate options such as investing in the creamery to produce higher-value specialty butter, a direction two member farms had proposed in 2023, or changing the cooperative's pricing to members to reflect haul distances. Those options appear nowhere in the board packet. The four dissenting directors argued against closure but never presented an alternative, because the only analysis the board received compared closure with the status quo. The issue settled by the terms of reference, which questions the board would consider, was decided before any director spoke.

The Third Layer: Preferences Shaped in Advance

Lukes (2005) proposed a third dimension of power: influence over what people come to want, so that certain interests never surface as complaints because the people who hold them do not recognize them as their own. This layer is the hardest to evidence and the easiest to overclaim. The reading looks for one specific sign: whether members whose interests closure harmed nonetheless accepted the frame that lowest processing cost was the cooperative's goal.

There is some evidence that they did. In the member survey the cooperative conducted in 2023, the question on priorities offered four options: lower processing costs, higher milk prices, better hauling service and new products. The goal of keeping processing local, or of the cooperative serving its towns, was not among them. Members chose among cost-related goals. At the March meeting, even the dissenting directors framed their objection largely in cost terms, longer hauls raising their expenses, rather than in terms of the cooperative's purpose. Only one director, in a single sentence recorded in the minutes, referred to the cooperative's founding purpose.

What Would Defeat the Reading

The second-layer reading would be weakened if the specialty butter proposal had been evaluated informally and rejected on its merits before the terms of reference were written; the reading found no record of that, but a fuller investigation could. The third-layer reading would be weakened if members, given an open question about the cooperative's purpose, still ranked cost first. Lukes's dimension cannot be demonstrated from a survey with closed options; it can only be suggested. The reading therefore claims less for the third layer than for the second.

The Leadership Account Beside the Power Reading

The leadership account of this episode, a general manager who persuaded a divided board to make a hard decision, is accurate on the first layer. The power reading adds two things it leaves out. The general manager's influence operated earlier and more quietly through the terms of reference, which defined what could be decided. And the cooperative's members had, in some measure, been asked to think about their organization in terms that made closure the natural answer.

Connection to the Term's Argument

A leader's measured effect in any study depends on which decisions are counted. Studies that count only visible decisions will miss influence exercised in setting agendas, which may be large.

References

Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1962). Two faces of power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947-952. https://doi.org/10.2307/1952796

Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2(3), 201-215. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303

Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.