The Power of Knowing the Rules

Introduction

The U.S. federal government designed the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to provide states and localities the resources needed to provide high-speed Internet to underserved communities. These resources, provided by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) under the Department of Commerce, could take the form of both grants and loans and were available to public, private, and non-profit organizations. In Louisiana, a consortium of five public agencies collectively called the Louisiana Broadband Alliance (LBA) received an US$80 million grant in February 2010 to service universities and communities in an area known as the Delta, a historically under-resourced and persistently impoverished region of the southern United States. Fewer than 2 years into the project, the NTIA rescinded the entire grant, making the Louisiana BTOP the only grant out of nearly 300 to be rescinded by the awarding agency.

The public explanation of the rescission offered competing narratives of incompetency from the federal and state governments. The federal agency (the NTIA) cited the failure of state agencies to meet important deadlines. The state cited the failure of its contractor to produce deliverables in a timely manner and alleged that the program allotted insufficient time for the project. But in-depth interviews with officials involved in the Louisiana BTOP grant and careful review of documents describing the design, governance, and implementation of it revealed that the public explanation was too simplistic. The public description of the rescission concealed the technical competency of public officials to manage the administrative apparatus. Put otherwise, the grant did not fail because of incompetence; it failed through competence.

Explaining the rescission of the Louisiana BTOP grant begins with a conception of power that focuses upon the horizon between the visible and the invisible, an exploration of the complements between Steven Lukes’s (2005) notion of three-dimensional power and the conception of power offered by James Scott (1990), which focuses upon systems of domination. This theory of power is threaded throughout the story of the Louisiana BTOP, which is described in the section “The Louisiana BTOP Story,” but the qualities of this power are best displayed through a critical engagement of Wagenaar’s (2004) ideas of administrative action. Wagenaar emphasizes the importance to administrators of knowing the rules, shifting the focus from rules as a static system of external control to an enabling dynamic of internal use. This quality of knowing the rules makes rules ambiguous in their effects such that the intended goal of any given rule is subject to contingencies of actors’ uses of the rule. In his work, Wagenaar neglects to incorporate the importance of power in administrative work, a theoretical oversight that this article seeks to remedy. The case of the Louisiana BTOP is used to show the power in the invisible use of rules. The paper explores the implications of the invisibility of using rules in closed administrative contexts through a discussion of closure and contestation.

Seeing the Invisible

Steven Lukes (2005) describes power as an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956), meaning that people can agree on the facts of a situation but reasonably disagree about the locus of power. One view of power, that of pluralists such as Robert Dahl, focuses upon a decision situation where one party can get another party to do something that the latter would otherwise not do (Dahl, 1957). This view, dubbed one-dimensional power by Lukes, requires an “observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as express policy preferences, revealed by political participation” (p. 19).

The elite theorists famously critiqued this conception of power by describing the exercise of power in non-decision making in which an elite few possess the instruments of control (Bachrach & Baratz, 1963; Mills, 2000). Whereas the one-dimensional view focused upon actual decisions in observable situations, the two-dimensional view of the elite theorists added the dimension of non-decisions. Not only is the exercise of power evident when A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise do, but power also resides where A controls the set of decision possibilities. This power to set the agenda manifests in the suppression of issues before they even get to a relevant decision-making body.

Although Lukes acknowledged that the two-dimensional view of power improved on the conception offered by the pluralists, it did not go far enough in his view. His self-labeled radical view of power developed from a critique of what each of these conceptions shared, namely, a focus upon overt, actual behavior in conceptualizing power. Lukes accused the elite theorists of critiquing the behaviorism of the pluralists while retaining an allegiance to behaviorism. Lukes’s three-dimensional view of power accepted the pluralists’ view and the improvement offered by the elite theorists and extended the conception of power outward to those moments when there is no actual observable conflict. This is not to say that power is not within the ability to control the set of options for decisions or in the ability to get some party to do what you want and what it resists; Lukes’s (2005) conception underscores an invisibility to power where conflict is averted altogether. He explains,

The trouble seems to be that both Bachrach and Baratz and the pluralists suppose that because power, as they conceptualize it, only shows up in cases of actual conflict, it follows that actual conflict is necessary to power. But this is to ignore the crucial point that the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place. (p. 27)

Lukes directed attention to the potential issues that are excluded through social and institutional practices. Power is not only coercion but also manipulation in the passive sense where power is latent to the extent that it can be exercised by affecting the interests of others. Moreover, institutions, not only individuals, exercise power. Thus, individuals may be unconscious to the exercise of power as it may involve inaction rather than action itself.

Lukes articulated the third dimension of power as an empirical thesis, but the strength of the argument does not depend upon this. In the updated edition, Lukes distinguished his theory from other apparently competing theories of power (recognizing, of course, its essential contestedness), including James Scott’s (1990) conception of power in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Lukes, 2005). Scott’s thesis is that there is a public, observable side of domination in which interaction between the oppressed and the dominant is open and evident, what he calls “public transcripts.” There are also, though, “hidden transcripts” in which interaction between the powerful and the subordinate groups are unrealized. Scott’s attention to hidden transcripts focuses on resistance to domination, but there is a hidden transcript of the powerful as well. The relationship between Scott and Lukes is complementary if we accept relief from the somewhat trivial battle over the superior theory. The three-dimensional power concept of Lukes can be interpreted as a critique of the exclusive focus on the observable aspects of power. In Scott’s terms, this would mean an exclusive focus upon the public transcripts, which are “the self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen” (Scott, 1990, p. 18).

The hidden transcripts that Scott describes depict the potentialities that are at the very center of Lukes’s conception of power. The hidden transcripts provide insight into what could have been done, or how things could be otherwise. For Scott (1990), political resistance is realized when the hidden transcripts become public, such as the Saya San Rebellion in Burma. His exposition on public and hidden transcripts focuses upon the persistence of domination as only tentative; the ingredients for resistance are evident in the hidden transcripts, but the official story, the public transcript, excludes stories with an undertone of resistance.

The other side of the story of resistance to the system is the story of persistence of the system. Lukes’s description of power as a latent capacity, where A is able to affect B contrary to the interests of B, is an expression of the hidden transcripts of the powerful. Outside of the context of (neo-) colonialism described by Scott, the hidden transcripts of a Western liberal democracy will provide insight into how elements of that system of power prevail. Exercises of three-dimensional power are insidious because they prevent conflict and are done in such a way that the participant to power is likely unaware of how the actions were contrary to her interests. In the “Acknowledgements” of Domination, Scott alluded to how his project deserved to be considered as a dialogue with, among others, Steven Lukes on “the various faces of power.” This article contributes to that dialogue by focusing upon one face of power: bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is an uncredited main actor in both Lukes’s and Scott’s works, but it is difficult to conceptualize bureaucratic domination. As Arendt (2009) explains, “bureaucratic rule . . . is no less despotic because ‘nobody’ exercises it . . . it is more fearsome still, because no one can speak with or petition this ‘nobody’” (p. 97).

Lukes and Scott do attend to bureaucracy in their work (see, for example, Scott, 1998). Nevertheless, how a bureaucracy functions within the context of these theories of power is not fully developed, a gap that can be filled through an engagement with Hendrik Wagenaar’s work on administrative practice. In a bureaucracy, it is presumed that the rules dominate, and the rules are a public transcript. The hidden transcript, though, is the use of the rules. In terms of the work of public administrators, they do not simply follow rules; they use rules. In doing so, they create situations rather than simply respond to them, as discussed below following the work of Wagenaar. When situations are created outside of opportunities for contestation, they are invisible. The standard fear of public administration is that the political might infiltrate administrative domains, but the intense focus upon insulating administration from politics blinds us to how administration infiltrates the political.

Method

The investigation into the hidden transcripts as the use of rules in a bureaucracy is based on extensive interviews conducted from November 2011 through April 2012. These interviews were based upon the development and rescission of the BTOP grant in Louisiana and began as an investigation into the implementation and development potential of the grant for an impoverished region of the country, an area in northeast Louisiana commonly known as the Delta.

Shortly before the first interview, there was news of the rescission. The investigation adapted accordingly and focused upon the narrative construction of events leading up to the rescission. All interviews were recorded and transcribed with as much respect for the temper of the interview as possible to retain the performativity of the dialogue (Riessmann, 2008). The issues in this case were and remain contentious to those involved.

The interviews were semi-structured and focused upon the construction of a narrative (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008). The motivating question was fundamentally what happened to lead to the Louisiana BTOP becoming the only grant of its kind to be rescinded, but the analysis of the interviews was thematic. In reviewing the interviews and linking together the narrative through the various voices, the thematic concerns were accountability and power. This article reports the findings on power. In addition to the thematic analysis of interviews, facts and opinions were derived from public documents on the grant, minutes from meetings, contracts, and reports related to the project.

Narrative inquiry is a valuable technique for public administration and policy research because it allows the researcher to connect with the practitioner and link theoretical concerns with practice (Ospina & Dodge, 2005). Through interviews, the interviewer becomes a party to the generation of knowledge. As Kvale and Brinkmann note, there is through dialogue an “inter-view,” meaning two parties become involved in the construction of the story. This case is no exception, although great efforts were taken to allow the interviewees the opportunity to construct the narrative on their own terms. The selection of quotations in this article is meant to underscore the importance of how the practitioner experiences and understands the events and the manner in which these experiences teach researchers about important concepts in our field, in this case power.

The Louisiana BTOP Story

This article focuses upon two key elements in the implementation of the Louisiana BTOP: (1) the agency conflicts developed out of classification and authority questions and (2) the use of a standard in the implementation of the grant, what was referred to simply as The Manual. Figure 1 provides a general timeline of the events described in this section with attention to what interviews revealed to be the most impactful occurrences.

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Figure 1.

Timeline of events: The Louisiana Broadband Technology Opportunity Program grant.

The Power of “Knowing” the Rules

Administration is not simply a string of tasks that can be delineated structurally, although it is task-oriented. Rules constitute administration, but they do not in themselves standardize activity into a mechanical execution. As Wagenaar explains, actors are typically faced with particular situations and must collectively “produce the proper activity through their emerging understanding of what is right or fitting in that particular situation” (Wagenaar, 2004, p. 644). This view toward particularity draws attention to how administrative actors must “know” the rules to determine the best fit in achieving a given goal; their activities determine what is right through what Wagenaar describes as a dialectic between the situation and the broader context defined by organization, society, and culture.

Rules do not exist outside of a context but are constitutive of the context as they are used. There is an important distinction to be made here between what Wagenaar identifies as the production of the situation and what might, in a different scheme, be considered a creative response within a situation. An example of the latter is what Mary Parker Follett describes as the law of the situation. Jurists, according to Follett, show us the manner in which “law is endlessly self-creating” (Follett, 1919, p. 586). But this self-creation is of law itself, of the rules, in response to situations. Jurists have a way of changing the rules through precedent in response to situations or to apply to situations the rules and laws in place. The focus is on the decisions of judges, and they can either “accept a fossil purpose developed in bygone times [or] see the purpose a-growing within the very situation” (Follett, 1919, p. 586). For both Wagenaar and Follett, rules are central to our understanding of the creation of the reality around us through activity and practice. For Follett, rules are secondary to the situation itself and are subject to the evolving conditions through which the rules themselves change. For Wagenaar, though, the rules are used to produce the situation itself. This is an important insight of Wagenaar’s theory of administrative work as practice: The rules themselves are instruments used to create the situation in a feedback relationship; they are not simply by-products of past and present situations in which we seek order.

Follett’s construction of the situation is largely abstract, which might explain why the self-creation is confined to the law and rules. Cook and Wagenaar (2012) develop a non-dualistic epistemology that integrates knowledge, context, and practice so that practice can help explain knowledge and context rather than being the mere product of knowledge and context. Key to this epistemology is interaction with the world itself, both material objects and ideas. Reading Cook and Wagenaar as a dialogue with Follett, there can be no law of the situation because the situation itself is what produces the knowledge and context through which rules and laws are derived. In another paper, Wagenaar and Cook (2011) are more direct in stating that “what we know and the context in which what we know is situated emerge as aspects of practice—or more specifically, we see knowledge and context as artefacts of practice” (p. 193). Follett helps illuminate the constructed quality of situations as being in part produced by knowledge, similar to what Wagenaar and Cook call the Received View with some modifications. But Wagenaar and Cook suggest that situations precede knowledge and context and actually produce them. Importantly, though, situations do not arise ab nihilo; they depend on previous contexts and knowledge generated through past situations, including the material objects that are given meaning. Therefore, practice builds from and builds upon situations, and rules are an essential component of this feedback dynamic.

Seeing rules as instruments and situations as essentially constructed and constructive requires rethinking administrative work. Wagenaar’s theory of administrative work as practice avoids recourse to the rationalism of traditional theories that focuses upon the instrumental, efficiency-based notions of managerial control through rules. Knowing rules and how some rules are related to others allows an administrator to act as a part of a broader community by negotiating the world in the context of that community. Administrators rely upon their practical judgment, and so they must practice on a case-by-case basis because the logic of judgment in which a person recognizes something as an example of a rule, or when something suits the use of a rule, cannot be demonstrated (Gadamer, 2004).

This does not mean that standard actions, as in the routinized work of tasks, are never applicable. The question for administrators is how to act in the context of indeterminacy or uncertainty. As Wagenaar (2004) describes,

Administrators move about in indeterminate everyday situations by engaging in open-ended, action-driven dialogue with the world. Structure resides in situationally bound administrative practice. Yet, this unified account of knowing and acting does not explain how . . . administrators . . . sense, with any measure of consistency and reliability, what is the right or fitting thing to do. How does [an administrator] know in indeterminate, intractable situations where to go? (p. 650)

The response to this somewhat rhetorical question is what Bernstein (1992) refers to as a dialogical encounter, in which the administrator constructs the situation itself in an encounter with the world. Wagenaar’s theory of administrative practice depends upon practical judgment, Aristotelian phronesis (Flyvbjerg, 2001), and perhaps most importantly, an ontology of philosophical hermeneutics. In this ontological sense, Wagenaar follows Gadamer by situating the administrator as a dialogical being to “redeem those truths that can enable us to understand and critically evaluate the deformations of modern scientific technological culture with its deification of technical expertise” (Bernstein, 1992, p. 49).

Wagenaar’s theory of administrative practice compels us to focus upon the use of rules in administrative work. Rules are at the same time constitutive of every particular situation and the technical solution to social challenges or, as Wagenaar himself describes, “rules are simultaneously part of the problem as it presents itself . . . and part of the solution” (Wagenaar, 2004, p. 650).

Rules are not simply passive instruments of order. They can change according to situations, as Follett argued, and can be used in creating the situation itself. In the case of the Louisiana BTOP, administrators frequently divorced themselves from situations by noting the rules, which is the converse of what Wagenaar describes. But even passivity in deference to rules is a practical judgment. An official with the BOR explained,

What she meant by “centralized government” is that the Office of the Governor, through the Division of Administration, can control a wide variety of projects depending upon how they are classified. Moreover, the Division of Administration has the authority to classify most projects. The officials who were centrally involved in the design of the project explained how the project came to be classified as capital construction.

The engineer is careful to note that the state was steered and not them, but he is ambiguous about what “steered” the state. It was a hybrid program of services, according to the executive VP, and construction was only deemed to be construction through meetings and discussions with the DOA. But even 3 months after the project had been terminated when these interviews took place, they were still careful to suggest disagreement without expressing it explicitly.

This passivity in deference to the rules also highlights the importance of the dialogical encounter. The ability of administrators to create the situation through the very elements that are partly intended to control them, namely rules, is a remarkable power. In philosophical hermeneutics, dialogue is a way to clarify misunderstanding; but in a technocratic system, where the rules rule, this mutual and reciprocal engagement is secondary to an uncertain but necessary obedience to rules. The creation of formalistic structures is also the creation of structures of power.

The reciprocal quality of action and structure is a productive tension: We act under the constraints of social structures (both formal and informal) that our actions have the capacity to alter. Knowing the rules allows for the creation of situations, but creation can just as easily be manipulation. This is the duplicitous side of “knowing the rules”: the creation (manipulation) of the situation to produce an outcome incongruent with broader expectations or with the interests of those affected. This creation of the situation is characterized by exercises of power that are made possible by the very structure of administration generally thought to curb power. A way of exercising power of this kind is to close dialogue, and this closure is made possible by the rules that constitute administrative practice. Wagenaar (2011) describes how administrators view rules as practical-moral signposts to help acting on the situation at hand. There is no guarantee that we will recognize the truth in a situation, but through dialogue, we “can come to terms with the fallibility of our understanding” (p. 56). The entire situation, including the meaning itself, hinges on dialogue because administrative practice “is inherently dialogical” (Wagenaar, 2004, p. 651). Wagenaar (2011) expands the meaning of dialogue to include practices so that the dialogue is not only between two thinking agents but can also be between an acting agent and the world. The meaning of a situation is not predetermined (it is, in the words of Wagenaar, an indeterminate situation); meaning is constructed through dialogue, sometimes with other people but sometimes with only “the world.”

In a dialogue with the world where meaning is produced through interaction, rules serve as signposts, as guidelines for potential courses of action. The rules are used so that a previously ambiguous (indeterminate) situation becomes knowable (determined). This process of giving meaning to acts through actions is not necessarily an observable process. Having recourse into the use of rules through dialogue is important for avoiding subjection to the invisible power of the hidden transcript, that is, the use of the rules. Scott focused upon the hidden transcript of the powerless as an articulation of resistance, but the hidden transcript of the powerful manifests in the use of rules conceived of as necessary actions rather than actions resulting from deliberate judgment and discretion. The apparent objectivity of rules offers the impression that actions are predetermined, an impression that elides the construction of the situation that produced the action. Such a deterministic view, where the rules act on people rather than people acting on rules, creates conditions in which officials, such as the official from the BOR involved in the Louisiana BTOP, refuse to question what was done because what was done was standard procedure, or in her words “because we are a centralized government.”

So how do we avoid this duplicitous side of “knowing” the rules? It is not enough to simply consider the need for making social conditions “dialogic” as a way of renewing social democracy (Giddens, 1998, 2000) or of recognizing the constructivist quality of social relations (Bernstein, 1992; Wagenaar, 2004, 2011) if we overlook the power relations that structure them. A partial objective of a system of rules is to erase structures of power through a ruling technocracy. But noting the non-comprehensiveness of rule systems as a conceptual impossibility and acknowledging the reality that people create situations through the use of rules requires us to rethink how we make those structures of power visible. It requires us to consider more closely the merits of conflict and contestation as an inherent quality of democracy that opposes closure, especially closure through appeal to rules.

Closure and Contestation

The interview with the Commissioner of Administration began with a question from him; he asked where I wanted “to start out.” I told him that we could start where he thought was most relevant, and he responds,

He begins with the public transcript, the account of what happened procedurally. It is clear that the administration opposed this project, and, as he explains later in the interview, did so for the very reasons that it failed: a lack of a plan for “sustainability” and an unrealistic approach. The BOR was in charge of the project and the FPC was in place only for managing the contract, for just “the contract piece.” The contractor did not meet the deliverable schedule, and overall the BOR had proposed a bad plan. Ultimately, the opposition to the project from the administration was validated.

Hidden in this brief overview, though, are the decisions that created the conditions for failure. It is difficult to consider “the contract with benchmarks built in it” without also considering how those benchmarks were used, especially where they were irrelevant to the project itself, such as the schematics that must explain how the project abides by the Louisiana Code for Buildings. Even more importantly, though, is that the decision to use the Manual was made necessary by a division of administration decision to classify the project as a capital construction project akin to a facility and not a road. And although it is true that BOR was the formal recipient of the grant, to say that they were “responsible for administering . . . and the FPC . . . responsible for managing the contract” hides the fact that BOR was prohibited from speaking with the contractor for nearly 3 months to streamline the management of the project. But everything was done in accordance with the rules, so it was not “wrong” in the technical sense.

Public meetings are an obvious way to address this closure, but the very technical apparatus under consideration also structures public meetings. Public meetings, in fact, were a part of the process for executing the Louisiana BTOP. The commissioner explained,

So . . . the organization applied for the grant. If you look at the grant and then you do the, you talk to the private providers, it goes, you go all the way back to the beginning of the (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). And if you talk to, and we handled like 4 or 5 I will call them public hearings. Weren’t necessarily public, but they were in the sense that every private provider was there. LONI was there. BOR was there. If you go through it, I mean, there was a long history of what private providers feel like the LONI was infringing on, you know, what, on the private providers that already invested money in the infrastructure piece.

“(They) weren’t necessarily public, but they were in the sense that every private provider was there.” The commissioner’s concerns are the concerns of the private providers whose services were considered threatened by this project. It is clear that the public hearings were really hearings in which the private service providers sought to redesign the project to reduce the threat that the new infrastructure would pose to their business activity. In particular, they discussed the need for an IRU arrangement or else, they claimed, they would have to lay off employees. The “public” here is private service providers, a fact reinforced when the commissioner described how the BOR designed the grant itself:

[I]f you look at the way that, uh, that, you know, the (organization) had kinda built the grant, they would have had to, gone after fees that are used to help private providers expand their services. So, and that wasn’t something that was done in a public hearing. This grant was done without a lot of public input. Done sort of, you know, in a way that wasn’t very collaborative.

The BOR was expected to collaborate with the private service providers so as to reduce the impact of the project on providers’ existing businesses. And all of this was communicated through meetings that were technically public because they were advertised as such.

Inside of this discussion about the administration of the BTOP grant is a story about power relations. It is really a story about conflict and how it is domesticated through rules. The only conflict in this case was between the contractor and the DOA (through the FPC). This conflict was technical and not political: It was about whether the contractor did what was required to get paid. Although this conflict revealed some of the hidden motives of the DOA, such as support of the private providers and the use of an IRU, those factors were never made public as the project was underway. The reason is that the dialogue was effectively closed through the “public” meetings where the public was the group of private providers. The reality is that an agency that explicitly opposed a project was put in charge of administering that very project, and this was all done through strict accordance with established rules.

Following the rules and keeping order through law is a functional understanding of the liberal principle of the rule of law, a principle intended to check abuse of power. In practice, though, this projection of order hides the creative disorder of rule use. Rules cannot comprehensively address all potential happenings, which makes discretion of administrators not only necessary but inevitable (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003), and this discretion allows for the ability to create the situation itself, not simply respond to a preconceived situation. In a positive light, this kind of discretion allows for creative production and action, but the converse is the powerlessness generated by dependence upon rules as a technical apparatus that eliminates conflict. Although the rule of law as a principle opposes the rule of man, nevertheless it does not necessarily achieve protection from rule by law (Tamanaha, 2004).

A way of opposing the potential duplicity of administrative work as practice is through a radical and disruptive conception of democracy that promotes spaces of contestation, a reintroduction of politics into the one-dimensional world of technics. The technical apparatus through which and under which administrators work makes possible incredible collective acts, but it also neutralizes the power of many who are subject to such acts. Put differently, “[t]echnics, as a universe of instrumentalities, may increase the weakness as well as the power of man. At present stage, he is perhaps more powerless over his own apparatus than he ever was before” (Marcuse, 1991, p. 235). This weakness and powerlessness is a by-product of rules. There is a need to complement the liberal principle of the rule of law with a democratic system of contestation that resists attempts at closure, a system that does not try to eliminate conflict but actually recognizes its importance within the administrative apparatus.

A resistance to closure is a radical response to the specter of technocratic order, a response characteristic of agonistic conceptions of democracy. It requires engagement with the technical apparatus rather than subjection to it, and this engagement compels citizens into an agonistic contestation that disturbs efforts at closure (Connolly, 2005). This does not imply that closure is never achieved, but the closure that is achieved can be seen for what it is: an exercise of power that promotes, in the words of Chantal Mouffe (1993), a hegemony that explicitly excludes. Mouffe (2013) argues that the moment of closure corresponds with the drawing of “frontiers,” or a moment when a “we” is defined based upon the definition of a “they.” In a rule-exclusive setting, this moment of closure is purely technical and predetermined; the political has been eliminated. But without the political, without the confrontation with the moment of closure, there cannot be democracy understood as an ongoing conversation of competing hegemonic systems. There can only be an imperfect technocracy that reinforces an apparatus over which the public is powerless. As Lukes explains, the most insidious form of power is to ensure that conflict never arises, and avoiding conflict through rule structures is central to technocratic order. Power is hidden within the transcripts of how the rules are used, invisible other than where the actions finally end. Conflict and contestation are essential to exercises of counterpower, and the practices of such conflict are at root efforts to resist closure.

Wagenaar’s theory of administrative work as practice challenges the rationalistic framework for a society based upon a non-coercive consensus ordered by a system of rules. An implication of his theory is that this framework is not possible because contingent situations are created from within the system itself. Wagenaar’s theory is both a theory of administrative work as well as an administrative impossibility theorem that leaves empty an account of power. There is a logical and conceptual limitation to the technics of a rational rule-based system; this limitation requires an articulation of the political to address the powerlessness produced by technical rationality. The case presented in this article addresses that question of power through an account of administrative practice that highlights the invisibility of the exercise of power in the hidden transcripts of the powerful. Coming to terms with Wagenaar’s theory means coming to terms with the disruptive qualities of politics and the democratic efforts to resist closure, which means opening spaces for contestation that reinvigorate the political in the administrative apparatus.

Conclusion

Wagenaar’s theory of administrative work as practice is an important contribution to public administration. This article builds on his theory by discussing how the use of rules to create situations requires an account of power that converges Lukes’s ideas on three-dimensional power with James Scott’s ideas of the hidden transcript. The main point is that the use of rules is itself a hidden transcript, and power resides in the invisible use of rules.

The argument builds through a study of the Louisiana BTOP grant, which was rescinded by the federal agency administering the program. In this case, there appears to be some invidiousness, but this is non-essential to the argument. The main point is that the actions of the administrators in the case were both correct in a formal, technical sense and done through a deep knowledge of the rules invisible to other concerned parties. Administrators do not simply follow rules; they use rules, and in doing so create situations. Lacking an account of power, the creation of situations cannot be seen for its potential invidiousness. This does not mean that such actions are intrinsically problematic, as work on the need for discretion demonstrates. It does, however, direct researchers and practitioners to the need for thinking about the acts themselves and about what is required to accommodate this power. Such an accommodation of power prompts consideration of radical democratic theory and practices of resisting closure. Rules are formal structures of closure, which is why the power in the use of rules must be considered a political space of contestation and not merely a technical application of structure.