Power emerges when rewards are threatened with withdrawal to exact unenvisaged conduct

Evidence

Power is used only when a more unfavourable combination of alternatives is constructed in the face of a given expectation. The differentiation between favourable and unfavourable is dependent on expectation and therefore also on a given point in time. The initial premises of a power situation may well rest on positive performances on the part of the power-holder, for instance on promises of protection, demonstrations of love, or promises of payment. However, it is transformed into power when not just the initial premises themselves but also their suspension is made dependent on the conduct of the power-subject. If, for instance, central government makes the grant of funding dependent upon a local authority’s commitment of its own resources to a given project, this does not in itself constitute an expression of power; just as a normal purchase does not do so. Power comes in at the point when the threat of withdrawing the matched funds is used in order to exact from the local authority a form of conduct (say, abstention from making any remarks critical of central government) not originally envisaged in the programme of central grants. Here lies the difference – in the case of previous conditioning through positive rewards, the subject involved is free to reckon that, should a later revision of the conditions for these rewards occur through threats to withdraw them, he has already taken into account their availability and has, therefore, gained stronger protection against these changes. For this reason positive and negative sanctions differ also in their needs for legitimation. On the other hand, it is precisely this possibility of transforming positive performances into negative sanctions which makes available to the power-holder motivational resources and opportunities to effect matters, which might not otherwise be open to him. Power formed through organization rests to a considerable extent on this indirect route. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 622

Categorization

• DEFINE: Offers the precise operational definition of power as unilaterally constructed negative sanction, not reward.
• XREF: Directly maps onto the Darlington/Stevens situation — Lord Darlington’s patronage and Stevens’s deference become a threat-of-withdrawal power relation. Also feeds the reader’s Luhmann-Giddens-Ishiguro thesis. — connects to: Declining state reward capacity triggered elite runoff akin to a bank run — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1234; Governmental assurance steers conduct without defining it, unlike reward-based inducement — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 885
• QUESTION: How does this ‘power as threat of withdrawal’ distinction bear on Stevens, whose devotion to Darlington predates any explicit threat? The transformation of deference into suspended reward might be implicit.