Economic cycles shape organizational power but not personnel power

Evidence

This difference is connected with the fact that organizational power is to a much greater degree sensitive to cyclical conditions. In business recessions, the danger of dismissal grows, and with it the readiness to conform to norms and to be excessively obedient. An economy with full employment has the opposite effect. Personnel power remains relatively untouched by such ups and downs, because there is always a shortage of attractive jobs. Organizational systems which, because of the economic situation or, in the case of state and church organizations, because of legal guarantees of tenure, have at their disposal only a small degree of organizational power, must, therefore, be able to fall back on personnel power to a greater extent or, otherwise, more or less give up influencing their personnel by the use of power. Accordingly, the limits of organizational power lie in the shortage of usable personnel, while the limits of personnel power lie in the shortage of attractive jobs in the organizational system. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 793

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Luhmann’s overall thesis on how power reduces contingency — the institutional dependence on scarce attractive jobs explains why bureaucratic deference persists regardless of economic climate, relevant to Stevens’s unshakeable devotion despite Darlington’s moral failure.
• SEED: Angle: how full employment psychology vs. recession fear-of-dismissal explains servant/worker obedience — Stevens’s servility as conditioned by permanent shortage of attractive butler posts.