Officials act on what they expect others will tolerate, so power operates without ever being exercised.
Friedrich's 1937 concept, and the reason power is hard to measure: the most effective exercise of it leaves no trace, because the anticipated objection was never raised.
In practice
- A regulator never issues a direction, and every firm in the sector has a compliance department shaped by what it expects the regulator would tolerate.
- A team never receives an instruction about weekend work and nobody takes a full weekend before a release.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works