Our own analysis, tailored more specifically to organizations, has added the view that the conservation of a superior's impotent superiority is a precondition for the subordinate's power. Accordingly, if one must see amounts of power as variable and if increasing power creates countervailing power, the key to the problem must lie in a greater differentiation and specification of power sources and power communications, which would prevent reciprocal power potentials cancelling one another out.

XREF: Echoes Galbraith's notion of countervailing power and general systems theory on power balancing dynamics.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 802