power and Social influence; Conceptual development and Critique on existing definitions

This article seeks to identify the boundaries of power from social influence and tries to answer the following questions by criticizing the existing definitions: Should power and social influence, as many writers, be considered as a single phenomenon or two phenomena? And what are the similarities and differences between the two? Can two different phenomena of power and influence be distinguished in reality? Or are these just two terms for naming a single phenomenon? If these two concepts are two separate phenomena, what do they have to do with each other? Is influence a form of power or, conversely, is power a form of influence?In order to answer these questions, the nature and sources of power and influence, the means of their application, the process of formation and scope of each, the sources of influence and the mechanism of formation and their differences and similarities with power are discussed. The conclusion is that, if we define power in the general sense as "the ability to influence another," there are different ways of influencing; One of them is power in a special sense (the ability to impose will on others) and the other is social influence. In this definition, influence is a form of power. But if we mean power in the specific sense of power, social influence is a phenomenon of the breadth of power, which is different from power in the sources and process of formation, means of action and flow.