Rationalizing personnel rules destroys the predictability power depends on

Evidence

Recent tendencies to reform and rationalize personnel matters in large organizations affect personnel power less through separating off than through systematization and complication. In this mixture, decisions about personnel, so rationalized that they lose that predictability necessary for them to be used in a power context, occur only in a situation where several previous decisions about job evaluation and personnel judgements about appointments and individuals coincide. Manipulating the system then becomes too difficult even for superiors, and subordinates realize that it is not clear how positive or negative attitudes held by the superior will affect the subordinate’s career. The system gains transparency on the level of criteria, but at the same time loses transparency on the level of decision-making. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 796

Categorization

• XREF: This is a key mechanism for the reader’s thesis: when the institution rationalizes itself (as Stevens’s role demands total rule-following), the individual’s power-dependency on the superior actually erodes; yet Stevens’s ethical abdication continues — illustrating that dependence on the system remains even when its power is opaque. — connects to: Rule proliferation paradoxically expands rather than constrains frontline discretion — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 145
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that rationalization buys transparency at the level of criteria while losing it at the level of decision is a dense, counterintuitive paradox about how formalization interacts with power — worth sitting with.