“Foucault focuses too much on power, far less on how it relates to competence.” I think you identify precisely the point of departure from which postmodernism went too far, towards making knowledge utterly subjective for for the sake of ‘emancipation’ from even that form of ‘power’.

I have noting against decentralization — I am a Southerner, after all — I just think you grant way too much benignity to people who run businesses, especially large corporations. (The Civil War in which ancestors of mine fought was a war for a society based on the existence of slavery ,but at the same time it was a war against capitalism.) They have to be constrained. It takes big power to constrain big power.

Before the advent of civilization it was obvious to all that individual survival and cooperation within the group were unavoidably linked. Civilization severed that connection. It was replaced with exploitation: the more powerful treating the less powerful as nothing but means to their chosen ends.