Personnel power weakens when formal rulebooks govern job assignment

Evidence

Finally, reference to the formal rulebook of the organizational system is correspondingly different. Organizational power, with its own contingency, serves to stabilize these contingent rules. It has an official character. Against this, personnel power tends to be weakened if tied to formal rules for the occupation of jobs, to criteria, to job analyses or standardized personnel evaluations. It uses reference to such rules rather as a camouflage, as an excuse or as a possible way of making one person’s negative treatment appear as another person’s positive treatment. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 794

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project: Stevens’s total role-absorption means his power is organizational (official) not interpersonal/personnel power, matching Luhmann’s distinction. Also links to Giddens’s differentiation of expert-system trust from face-to-face trust.