Against this, personnel power tends to be weakened if tied to formal rules for the occupation of jobs, to criteria, to job analyses or standardized personnel evaluations. It uses reference to such rules rather as a camouflage, as an excuse or as a possible way of making one person's negative treatment appear as another person's positive treatment.

XREF: Counter-intuitive inversion where formalization reduces rather than increases power — parallels discussions of how written policy constrains rather than empowers managers.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 794