Having power means having influence on a complex system, not having control

Are there theories of power in society that look at it from a systemic, complex-systems viewpoint? It's something I'd be interested to read about. I assume that works in political science at least implicitly address such details, though I don't know if any of them explicitly look at things from that viewpoint.

There's a lot of misunderstanding about power, that come from not appreciating a systemic, complex-systems viewpoint.

The basic misunderstanding is thinking that having power means having control. But this notion of control is an abstraction. There's never unalloyed control. Usually, the reality is far from that.

Rather than control, there is influence upon a complex system.

People and organisations usually can't just want a particular result and make that happen. They can only introduce an influence into a complex system. The result that will occur depends on how that and all the other influences and factors come out in the wash.

There will be a number of different influences, on different levels, and the result will be result of the interaction of these things, and feedback, and so on.

There is a common (implicit) belief that the higher the position of power, the greater the ability the person/organisation has to control what happens.

But that's not how things are.

In reality there are many competing influences and issues, and there's a need to satisfy differing people and groups, and compromises that need to be made.

There is structure in situations, through which influence plays out. The structure plays an important role in how that influence will play out. It determines what options are available. So in a government, it may be necessary to secure the support of a minor political party in order to push through a particular measure. So in this particular circumstance, the less powerful party may actually have greater influence than the more powerful party.

The power is predicated upon the existence of these structures, and those structures can break down. So again, the power is not absolute control. E.g. governments have power, but if the population gets pissed off enough and revolt then that power structure can break down.

Too often people think of policies and laws as forms of control. They think that if politicians/parties want certain outcomes then they just need to set up policies/laws that will produce that outcome. And if some desirable outcome didn't come about, that's because the politician/party didn't actually want to make it happen (to be explained by them being greedy, or evil, etc). But there's no such means of directly controlling what happens and making an outcome happen. Policies and laws are only instruments of influence, and there is usually a lot of limitations on the influence that they can exert (as well as unintended consequences of them).