In Alain Tourain‘s words:

Power used to be in the hands of princes, oligarchies, and ruling elites; it was defined as the capacity to impose one’s will on others, modifying their behavior. This image of power does not fit with our reality any longer. Power is everywhere and nowhere: it is in mass production, in financial flows, in lifestyles, in the hospital, in the school, in television, in images, in messages, in technologies……

…… Such is the central to which political thought and action must respond: how to restore a link between the excessively open space of the economy, and the excessively closed, and fragmented world of cultures… The fundamental matter is not seizing power, but to create society, to invent politics anew, to avoid the blind conflict between open markets and closed communities, to overcome the breaking down of societies where the distance increases between the included and the excluded, those in and those out.