An institution can be pressed hardest by holding it to its own stated rules, because no organisation fully lives by them.
Rule four of Rules for Radicals, paraphrased. Alinsky's point was that every institution publishes more principles than it can keep, and that demanding it keep all of them at once exposes the gap between what it says and what it does. Workers use the same logic in a work-to-rule, following every regulation until operations slow.
In practice
- A group of passengers asks an airline to honour, to the letter and on the same day, every commitment in its own customer charter.
- A resident requests every public record the council is legally obliged to release, one request at a time.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that organisations run on unwritten discretion, which their formal rules assume away. Another is reputational: an institution cannot openly disown its own rules.
- In its favour
- Work-to-rule actions and compliance campaigns show its force; it exploits a real gap between formal rules and practice.
- Against it
- It can look like bad faith, and institutions can respond by rewriting rules or narrowing discretion. Critics across the spectrum note that it can be used to paralyse bodies that serve the public.
- Standing
- Compare malicious compliance, the individual version.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Rules for running organisations, and for pressing them