John Scanzoni wrote "Sexual Bargaining: Power Politics in the American Marriage" in 1972 (revised in 1982) - it is obviously an old book, but is incredibly poignant and still relevant.  It may be helpful, especially if you are interested in gendered differences.  Regards, SAS

Facing power, by Eric Wolf, in American Anthropologist. 

John Gledhill, Power and its disguises. 

Joan Vincent, political anthropology. Anthropology and politico is a excelente book. 

regards

Marco Calderón.

Evan Imber-Black wrote Families and Larger Systems: A Family Therapist's Guide Through the Labyrinth (1988).  One of the biggest difficulties between larger systems (medical, welfare, juvenile justice, schools) and ordinary families is the imbalance of power -- sometimes real and sometimes perceived -- between them.  Imber-Black both describes these problems and offers strategies for dealing with them.

These are three sources that may help you:

Scott, James C. 1990.  Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press

Scott's book is about the creative and strategic ways that oppressed peoples find to safely express dangerous criticism and dissent.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.  New York and London: Routledge.

Pratt's book looks at travel and exploration writing about Africa and South America in the age of European expansion (starting c. 1750).  It shows how travel writing goes about creating the domestic subject of European imperialism and provides insight into ways that colonies select and appropriate metropolitan modes of representation.

Neulander, Judith. "Conjuring Crypto-Jews in New Mexico: violating ethnic, scholarly and ethical boundaries" in Boundaries, Identity and Belonging in Modern Judaism. Eds., Maria Diemling and Larry Ray, New York and London: Routledge (2015) 208-224.

This essay looks at how naive academics, unschooled in the modern specialties required for useful investigation (e.g., folkloristics and genomics), have misrepresented the ethnic, biological and religious heritage of an entire Spanish-American population, ripping at their social fabric, and reviving for a bamboozled public, the pseudo-ethnography, race-science and quack medicine of nineteenth century imperialism.

Best of luck,

Judith Neulander

Classic study of power in ancient Egypt, the Polish novel from late XIXth century, the only novel which Stalin kept in Russian translation at his bedside: Boleslaw Prus - The Pharaoh. On top of that Machiavelli, as usual. Adam Smith in his more philosophical writings in which he claims that historical cases teach more than abstract philosophies. Our contemporaries - well, Sheldon Wolin springs to my mind. Try him. Thomas Pynchon in "Against the Day" touches upon the anarchist connection, as does Orwell in "Homage to Catalonia". These readings should put you light years ahead of the mainstream academics. 

You might look at:

Mann, M.

1986    The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

and,

Saitta, D.

1994    Agency, class, and archaeological interpretation. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 13, 201-27.

I agree with Marco Calderon's suggestion that you look at Wolf's article, 

Wolf, E.

1990    Distinguished lecture: facing power—old insights, new questions. American Anthropologist 92, 586-596.

This is a succinct yet comprehensive account of how power in all its forms can be productively analyzed.

Good Luck!

 Hi Jeronimo,

If you are looking theory-oriented references, there is the old classic by Marcel Mauss “The Gift”. I do realize that some may not consider this to be a work of asymmetric power relationships but one of personal or the wider social gift exchanges. Among many Native American tribes; however, on a deeper level, I believe gift exchanges to be more of asymmetric power relationships.

If you are looking for culture-specific examples, there are many. Any place where a dominant culture or government has overtaken another culture. You can throw a dart at any spot on the globe, especially in the last 500 years.

Here are some recent references:

Cusick, James G. (ed). (1998). Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Center for Archaeological Investigations Occasional Paper No. 25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Zureik, Elia, Lyon, David, & Abu-Laban, Yasmeen (eds.). (2011). Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine. New York: Routledge.

Hope these help,

Patricia

Check out recent sources on Coercive Control, including Evan Stark's 2007 Coercive Control: How Men Entrap WOmen in Personal Life and my Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Intimate Relationships

Hi Jeronimo Amaral de Carvalho,

Here I have added a list of some references on asymmterical power. You can look at these sources and I hope you will find some of them helpful!

Avelino, Flor and Rotmans, Jan

2009    Power in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Framework to Study Power in Relation to Structural Change. European Journal of Social Theory12 (4): 543–569.

Bourdieu, Pierre

1990    The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, L.

1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 2(2): 279-303.

Farmer, Paul

2005    Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. California: University of California Press.

Joronnen, Mikko

2013    Conceptualising New Modes of State Governmentality, Power, Violence and the Ontalogical Mono-politics of Neoliberalism. Geopolitics 18 (2): 356-370.

Lukes, Steven

2005    Power: A Radical View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Royce, Edward

2009    Poverty & Power: The Problem of Structural Inequality. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Swartz, David L.

2007    Recasting power in its third dimension. Review of Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Book Review

http://www.bu.edu/av/core/swartz/recasting-power-in-its-third-dimension.pdf (Accessed 21 December 2013).

Perhaps you should look at the intermediate level between power in spray in person to person relations and exchanges on the one hand and the grand structured institutional interactions like regimes and economic formations on the other. This intermediate level might be provided by actual empirical study of negotiations in open situations, say the Atlas project in CERN (Boisot and others - Collisions and Collaboration is the case in point), or the anti-ACTA protests in all EU countries (very few studies, some excellent exceptions published by The European Center for Solidarity in Gdansk, Poland). Not much, but it's a start.

Maybe something about assymetric relations on interactional level: http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/details/nn749p2

Dear Jeronimo,

If you are interested in how to measure assymetric Power relationship, our centre has developed a scale called power-related proactive aggression, which you find described in eg. Fandrem, Strohmeier & Roland (2009): Bullying and victimization among native and immigrant adolescents in Norway: The role of reactive and proactive aggressiveness, Journal of early adolescents, 29, 898-923.