ABSTRACT
Each legal offense or administrative enforcement program is a separate game with its own stakes, penalties, and ploys, and these vary enormously from one such game to another. If we view administrative regulation as role-taking, it becomes quite understandable that policemen should occasionally choose this role. Once the pattern of role-taking is established within an administrative agency it becomes self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing. Administrative agencies are to be understood as economic and political instruments of the parties they regulate and benefit, not of a reified "society," "general will," or "public interest". Administrative activity is effective in inducing a measure of wide acceptance of all the objectives symbolized by the agencies only because the mass public that does the accepting is ambivalent about these objectives. Administrators are thereby able to avoid the sanctions of politically powerful groups by accepting their premises as valid; while at the same time they justify this behavior in the verbal formulas provided in the rules.
