Informal communication cannot substitute for formal technical power

Evidence

Faced with this power deficiency, the ‘human relations’ movement can be characterized as a search for other sources and forms of influence. However, one cannot sufficiently compensate for the shortcomings and limited achievements of a highly technical instrument like formal power with forms of communication and interaction which are less technical, more concretely focused, and more context-dependent. … The error of the ‘human relations’ movement lay in collapsing different levels of system formation and this error is faithfully repeated in the amalgamation of participation and democracy. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 808

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with Giddens’s facework, and with Stevens’s human-relations-style personal devotion in Ishiguro’s novel—which ultimately cannot rescue formal institutional power. — connects to: Digital party organization cannot replace vanished civil-society substructures — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 300