ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is a discrete set of possible organizational alternatives within which agents can operate. It presents a new framework to analyze organizational forms, based on how leaders obtain information on their agents’ behaviour. The chapter analyzes how three different authoritarian regimes organized coercion: Chile, Argentina and East Germany. It presents two important consequences of coercion, namely targeting and intensity and summarizes the analysis and discusses directions for further research. People in a wide variety of coercive organizations commit human rights violations. A centralized information clearinghouse indicates a higher level of internal monitoring than an organization where information is dispersed, and consequently more difficult to track down. Transparent coercion offers a different set of trade-offs. The country’s two main police forces, Carabineros de Chile and Investigaciones de Chile, also carried out searches, for instance within the shantytowns of Santiago, once the victim’s identity and whereabouts had been established.
