Disclaimers: I didn’t get my PhD before bailing on the process; there are some beverages I shall identify as Discipline of Sociology Kool-Aid which I did not drink; I had my own philosophical and theoretical agendas as a student and continue to do so now.
As Elizabeth Janeway expounds in Powers of the Weak, and as approached in a mildly different fashion by Marilyn French in Beyond Power, power itself is not a substance one can obtain or extract from those one subjugates. Hence the OP’s point (I think).
At the same time, Q.E.D.: societies clearly exist which would probably not match anyone’s notion of entirely consensual. (In fact, I would point to the most democratic and enlightened nations on the face of the earth and say “Damn few of the multitudes who live there were consulted on jack shit, and yet would be locked in a cage for being found, not always through particularly fair methods of inquiry, to have violated rules they didn’t consent to”. And it’s all downhill from there).
So on the one hand we have the thesis that power is invested in the hands of those who wield it by those over whom it is weilded; on the other hand, we have what we consider to be fairly concrete evidence that oppression nevertheless exists, ranging somewhere between “still not eradicated” and “omnipresently ubiquitous” depending on who you ask.
Although I am no marxist, a quick borrowing: “false consciousness”. The oppressed may be participating in their own oppression yet still not be responsibly blameworthy as if they were doing so fully cognizant of their participation and what it is that they participate in. And what the alternatives are, by the way.
And my own attitude: if, hypothetically speaking, the power really were possessed by the powerful and not in any way granted to them by the rest (“the consent of the governed”, with the implicit power to retract that consent), then we’ve defined out of existence the possibility of the oppressed doing anything about it.
I would also note at this time that if we define (explicitly or otherwise) power over other people as an unavoidably, intrinsically desirable situation to which all with any opportunity are inherently & necessarily drawn to compete, we’ve again defined out of existence the possibility of the oppressed doing anything about it. (You could call overturnings of the overseers “revolutions” but they’d only be rotations. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, etc).
Victim-blaming, someone says; but I say cool your jets and take a moment to rethink how you think about power. This is not about casting around for a culprit to blame, it’s the sociological physics of understanding how things work. When I say that the gravitational attraction between the earth and my body is a mutual arrangement between masses, the truth of that doesn’t detract from the everyday truth that I can fall and skin my knees. True physical, nonsociological coercion is where I wrap my stronger hands around your hands and physically force your hands to release their contents to me. Once I’m standing 6 feet away from you and using the understood threat of my ability to retaliate if you disobey in order to get you to do as I bid with your hands, it’s still coercion, but now it has a sociological dimension.
Change: I will again reiterate that I’m no marxist (see above ¶ about revolutions versus rotations — marxists are generally among those who do see power over others as “what it’s all about”); there are other ways of getting what you want from a social context with the consent of the other participants. People can empower each other communally and reciprocally, wherein lies the dream of democracy. I am sour enough to say the Representatively Elected Emperor that is our current western-states edition of democratic government is an emperor with no clothes, and far from what I consider a democracy, but I’m no cynic, quite the idealistic true-believer actually. Democracy is a good thing to aspire to. Whether it is attainable in some absolutely pure form in which no iota of coercion remains, it is nevertheless desirable in every increment of it that we can attain. The more democracy, the merrier.
And a people, with the vision of a more democratic way of interacting sufficiently clear in their mind, are inclined to cooperate and participate only in the most immediate face of retaliation, while lending very little of their enthusiasm and energies to coercion-bound social arrangments otherwise. They will instead communicate as much as possible with others who share such a vision, and work towards extending the gift of their own voluntary cooperation to those who ask and recompense their efforts rather than attempting to compel them with raw reward-and-punishment behavior modification. (Yes, reward as well as punishment is a common element of coercion. Yes, there’s a difference between motivating via reward and recompensating people in an environment of mutual cooperation and/or efforts towards a common goal).
It’s also (I should point out) not a binary choice between cooperating with an oppressor and participating in some hippy-dippy totally egalitarian flowerchild utopian consensus-only anarchy. A people with a vision of a more democratic way of interaction will cooperate with a less coercive despot who shows some disposition to listen and give back and do some works for the common good, when given the choice between cooperating with one such and cooperating with a more absolute tyrant whose modus operandi is strictly “do as I say or die writhing”. Therein lies the payoff to the power-seeking in granting some measure of power back to those from whom they seek to have power granted. Democracy takes root often enough when one of plural competitors seeking the throne obtains enough more “consent of the governed” by promising the governed more fairness, greater participation and consideration in public affairs, more rights, and more freedoms, to win out over the other competitors. It takes time, and it’s unfortunately reversible, but the one thing it has going for it is that although totalitarianism is more efficient for short-term organizational results, democracy outstrips it in efficiency for more complex, long-term cooperative tasks.