If power begins with meaning, and meaning is shaped by gender, then the final question becomes unavoidable.
Part 3 of 3
Who is allowed to speak?
Not who is invited.
Not who is present.
Who is authorized?
Because in every organization, long before anyone raises a hand or offers an idea, an invisible line has already been drawn.
Between signal and noise.
Between insight and opinion.
Between leadership and interference.
We rarely talk about this directly. Instead, we talk about culture.
We talk about psychological safety.
We talk about voice.
We talk about inclusion.
We talk about speaking up.
But beneath all of that sits something far more structural.
Legitimacy.
Every organization operates with an unspoken hierarchy of credibility.
Some voices are presumed authoritative before they speak.
Some have to prove their legitimacy sentence by sentence.
Some are treated as strategic by default.
Some are treated as contextual at best.
This hierarchy isn’t written down.
It lives in tone.
In who is interrupted.
In who is deferred to.
In who is asked to elaborate.
In who is thanked for their perspective, only to be quietly ignored.
Silos quietly reinforce this hierarchy.
Not just by separating teams, but by separating interpretation.
Some groups see early signals.
Some only see outcomes.
Some are allowed to frame risk.
Some are only allowed to respond to it.
Information moves.
Meaning doesn’t.
And the farther someone is from where interpretation is first constructed, the harder it becomes to challenge what later appears as “strategy.”
Michel Foucault wrote that power works most effectively when it becomes invisible, when it no longer needs to announce itself because it’s shaped what can be said, by whom, and with what effect.
Inside organizations, this shows up as culture.
Culture isn’t values posters.
It isn’t engagement scores.
It isn’t town halls or leadership statements.
Culture is the pattern of who is authorized to make meaning.
Who can name risk without being labelled negative?
Who can surface emotion without being seen as unprofessional?
Who can challenge framing without being seen as disruptive?
Who can speak of uncertainty without losing credibility?
And here is the part we rarely admit.
Silence isn’t the absence of voice.
It’s the presence of discipline.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described symbolic power as the ability to impose meanings while disguising them as legitimate. Over time, people don’t need to be silenced directly. They learn which interpretations travel and which stall. Which questions open doors and which close them. Which truths are safe and which are costly.
So people adapt.
They soften.
They translate.
They delay.
They wait.
They say less.
Not because they lack courage.
Because they understand the system.
This is how organizations reproduce themselves.
Not through decisions.
Through legitimacy.
I’ve watched people with deep insight stop naming what they see because they were told they were too critical. I’ve watched leaders reframe lived experience as anecdote. I’ve watched warnings become whispers and whispers become culture.
Not suppressed.
Just absorbed.
Over time, this creates a very specific kind of organization.
One where alignment is high, but coherence is low.
Where agreement is visible, but understanding is thin.
Where dissent disappears, but risk accumulates.
And everyone believes things are fine.
Until they aren’t.
This is why psychological safety alone isn’t enough.
Safety tells people they won’t be punished for speaking.
Legitimacy tells them they’ll be taken seriously when they do.
Those aren’t the same thing.
An organization can feel polite and still be epistemically closed.
People can speak.
But only certain interpretations move.
This is where colonial governance quietly enters the room.
Colonial systems weren’t only about territory.
They were about authorization.
Who was allowed to define reality.
Whose knowledge counted as objective.
Whose stories became history.
Whose voices became governance.
Those logics didn’t disappear.
They were institutionalized.
Modern organizations still carry these patterns.
Executive authority as truth.
Rationality as legitimacy.
Emotion as noise.
Care as support.
Lived experience as bias.
And once those hierarchies are in place, silence becomes structural.
Not imposed.
Produced.
Which leads to the question that sits underneath everything I’ve written in this series.
What would it look like to design organizations where legitimacy is distributed, not centralized?
Where interpretation is treated as governance, not commentary?
Where the ability to name risk, surface emotion, and hold complexity is seen as strategic authority rather than cultural labour?
Where silence is treated as diagnostic, not benign?
Where culture is understood as an epistemic system rather than a behavioural one?
This isn’t about speaking more.
It’s about redesigning who is authorized to shape reality.
Because power at work isn’t only about who decides.
It’s about who decides what can be said.
And until organizations learn to manage legitimacy as carefully as they manage budgets, strategy will stay fragile, culture will remain vulnerable, and meaning will stay concentrated in places where it can no longer safely live.
Further reading
Foucault, Power and Knowledge
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power
bell hooks, Talking Back and Teaching to Transgress
Scott, Seeing Like a State
Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations
