Organized power reduces information costs by resting on pre-established generalized submission.

Evidence

Information problems are in terms of content closely connected with two further questions – the form of motivation and the attribution of the selection. There are codes such as love and money which solve the problem of motivation partly by selecting already motivated partners – with correspondingly high demands on information in the selection of partners. The same applies to power, if one first has to look for durable combinations of alternatives. This is difficult because partners ready to subject themselves to power are unlikely to object to presenting themselves as partners who are ready to love, or ready to buy, or interested in truth. Thus, many technically possible power combinations fail due to excessive demands for information. The demand for information decreases in respect of those means of power, such as physical force, which are, to a great degree, independent of motivation structures, or with regard to organized power, which rest on previously and generally established submission and thus also, so far as it goes, (!) operate independently of motive. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 685

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — institutional hierarchy and established submission substitute for interpersonal facework and motivation checking, exactly Stevens’s position.
• QUESTION: This passage says organized power operates ‘independently of motive’ — how does that reconcile with Luhmann’s broader claim that all power needs self-selecting partners? Worth chasing for the thesis.