Phenomenology and its derivatives have long insisted on the idea that social beings are free in nature. As social sciences have evolved towards more complex theoretical models, the limits of these approaches have become more and more obvious. However, in order to fully apprehend these limits, a change in paradigm, from an acter-based to a relation-based perspective is necessary. With this change comes a reflexion on the notion of power as theorized by phenomenologically-oriented theories, that is to say as something which can be detained and therefore used by social actors. A relationnal approach conceives power otherwise; in fact, it poses that power, as an analytical category, is not useful in understanding human relations. Through a series of indicators, we have operationnalized the concept of power as conceptualized by actor-based models by confronting it to data. This paper discusses the results of this analysis, results which suggest that power, when defined as formally distributed, does not explain the way in which information circulates and is not useful in explaining human relations.