The mainstream of discussions about power usually approaches only organizational actors who have resources to exercise it, as, for instance, ownership conditions of production means, of location, of class, or of technical knowledge, in the organization or the society. However, even with all managerial technology of dominance and exploration developed in the 20th century, workers use political strategies to resist and to influence the owners of resources, trying to reach their own objectives through these maneuvers. This paper aimed to deal with the analysis of power strategies of social actors without resources in organizations. Driven by a qualitative approach, it was based on eighteen interviews with workers of a company selected under the criteria of time working in the company and accessibility. The data were treated through discourse analysis, suggesting four power strategies used by the employees: 1. bargained experience based on knowledge from experience; 2. diversification of affective relations to groups with or without resources; 3. submissive obedience to get recognition, permanence, and/or future valorization; and 4. planned popularity as a self-protection means based on visibility and good relations. One concludes that, although formal elements exhibit the real power in the organization, to achieve their own goals the employees interpret the game’s rules and build dynamic strategies in the context where they operate, exercising, this way, power. The main contributions of this paper, in the macro level of analysis, refer to the discussion of implications of the idea of private property, which does not fulfill the political dynamics in organizations. In the meso-level, this study discusses the objectivity of knowledge produced in the area of Administration, which, as a science, rather than an applied is a social one and, because of that, it needs subjects to exist, and it cannot be built against their intents. In the micro level of analysis, the contributions highlight that the social aspects are as important as the economic ones in the organizational context. There are rationalities - in plural - coexisting and competing in organizations, something organizational theoreticians cannot neglect, under the penalty of reducing the organization to an empty fiction, different from an effective organizational dynamics.
Power strategies; Strategy as social practice; Ideology; Real power; Symbolic power