Power is everywhere. It shapes our institutions, communities, relationships, and even how we see ourselves. But power isn’t held only by politicians, the wealthy, or large organizations. It also works through social structures, traditions, cultural expectations, personal desires, and the stories a society tells about what is normal and true.
In Challenging the Power Order for the Common Good, scholar, teacher, and community organizer Tex Sample examines how power works and how ordinary people can confront its harmful forms. Drawing on decades of teaching, ministry, and community organizing, he moves beyond the familiar idea of “power structures” to a broader concept: the “power order.”
The power order is more than a top-down hierarchy. It is a web of institutions, relationships, ideas, customs, identities, and desires. It can push people to the margins—and even convince those it harms that injustice is natural or unavoidable. Through personal stories and careful social analysis, Sample shows how race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and economics combine to create patterns of privilege, vulnerability, complicity, and resistance.
Sample draws on thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, John Gaventa, and Emilie Townes, but he keeps the discussion grounded in everyday life: families, workplaces, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and public life.
At the heart of the book is his conviction that justice can’t be imposed from a distance. It must grow from listening, honest relationships, careful analysis, and action rooted in the experiences of people who have been ignored or harmed. Community organizing, in this view, is not just a way to win public battles—it is a way to build trust, develop leaders, challenge domination, and discern the common good.
Sample offers no easy answers or guaranteed victories. Instead, he offers hope as a practice. Power doesn’t have to mean control or domination; it can also be shared, creative, and life-giving—the ability of people working together to change their communities.
With an extensive study guide for personal reflection and group discussion, this book helps readers see power more clearly, resist indifference, reclaim their shared ability to act, and join the work of transforming the power order for the common good.
