Paper 1: The Socialized Tools of Power (STOP)

STOP (Socialized Tools Of Power) 

S - SILENCE AS STRATEGY

Withholding support, clarity, or affirmation to maintain power.

Silence as Strategy is about regulating clarity. 

Silence as Strategy is not about individual intent, but the patterned effect of forcing the person experiencing the silence to do the emotional labor of decoding why the silence exists in the first place. 

Silence is a valuable tool to preserve legitimacy and maintain control because there’s no quote for no response; not saying anything allows for plausible deniability. 

It can be used when someone steps beyond what is expected of them or disrupts expectations. Withholding a reaction becomes a tool to make the individual question themselves, while also maintaining control of the situation. 

Interpersonally, this type of behavior is experienced often. A silence after a thought is shared by an “outsider” is a learned response. The silence is an unspoken way to mark a boundary. The person experiencing the silence is left in a state of ambiguity, unsure of whether what they said is wrong, if they offended someone, or any number of other reasons for the lack of response they received. 

This silence doesn’t have to be planned if it’s done by a group of people. It can be the shared awareness that the person is stepping outside of the group’s expectations, and the common, normalized response to maintain control or status by saying nothing. 

We see this often with teams that have leaders who abuse power. For an individual team member to speak up and call out the bad behavior of a superior, the cost is high. It could mean losing their job, which would result in losing a major part of their identity, money, status, and belonging. 

The organization would have its own legitimacy threatened, and would have to go through great efforts to prove this person was abusing their power, which costs time, resources, and money. It is often easier to remain silent, maintain your position and status, and say nothing. 

Silence is the strategy. 

At the institutional level, this is often experienced as a lack of response. Applying for opportunities, institutions build silence into their operations. It may be communicated as due to a high volume of applications for an opportunity or role, or simply that the individual’s communication is of low priority to the institution. Whether intentional or not, silence results in the same predictable outcome: a lack of clarity that the individual is forced to decipher. 

Institutions have the ability to grant legitimacy to individuals, so a lack of response can produce a lack of legitimacy. 

T - TOKENISM AND TIMING

Offering recognition only when it's safe, strategic, or self-benefiting.

Tokenism and Timing are behaviors that regulate recognition. 

One of the ways we preserve legitimacy is by controlling when someone gets publicly recognized. When those with lower distributions of legitimacy are granted higher visibility, it has the potential to disrupt existing hierarchies and power dynamics. To maintain the status quo, Tokenism and Timing can be a tactic used to provide recognition without destabilizing one’s own position. 

On the interpersonal level, Tokenism and Timing are used specifically when the person, group, or institution attempting to maintain their position has an opening to offer recognition that won’t destabilize their own status. 

In the creative world, we can see examples of this. An artist can offer recognition to another only when that recognition doesn’t exceed their own. The artist may share another’s work on social media when the accomplishment is locally celebrated within a small artist community, but purposely avoid recognizing the other artist when they are celebrated more widely — like from a regional arts magazine — to limit the other artist’s exposure. Tokenism and Timing here serve to provide recognition when it’s safe and the absence of recognition when it could risk their own legitimacy. 

Institutions operate in Tokenism and Timing as well. Within an organization, an employee of a marginalized group may be deployed carefully, allowing this individual to greet prospective candidates who are also from marginalized groups, while being excluded from the decision-making process related to hiring. They are visible enough to signal inclusion, while also held at bay to avoid actual decision-making power. 

The individual may wonder, “Why am I trusted to greet these candidates, but my voice isn’t part of whether they should be hired?”

In both scenarios, recognition is offered when it serves to protect an individual’s or institution’s legitimacy, but withheld when it might threaten it. 

O - OPTICS OVER INTEGRITY

Prioritizing public alignment while avoiding private follow-through.

Optics over Integrity is about regulating perception. 

Oftentimes, our stated values, individually or institutionally, are aspirational compared to how we actually operate. Optics over Integrity allows for the signaling of alignment with values that are socially desired, while avoiding substantive change. 

A homogeneous team gets a new leader who is different from the group. In order to signal inclusion, the team performs polite engagement with the news of their hiring, posting congratulatory messages on LinkedIn. Though once the new leader is in place, the ideas they propose are consistently met with resistance and doubt, undermining their authority. Through Optics over Integrity, changes that the new leader tries to implement are either delayed or avoided, maintaining the status quo and allowing informal power to remain with the group rather than the leader. 

We can also see this behavior in institutions. Within them, not all visibility is equal. We see the empty calories of visibility with organizations that promote the diversity of their teams, while maintaining a monoculture among their leadership. The leadership gets to commend themselves on promoting the visibility of its members without ever being forced to ask themselves why those with different backgrounds are not among the leadership team itself. 

Optics over Integrity values perception over the experience of individuals, because aligning both would require change, and change often redistributes the allocation of legitimacy, control, and authority. 

P - PERFORMATIVE PROXIMITY

Maintaining a controlled closeness to avoid real risk, accountability, or investment.

Performative proximity is about regulating access. 

People want to be associated with others depending on what that connection might cost or gain them. These associations may connect us with these resources, providing an incentive to keep these people in our orbit. Most people want to maintain that association, but without risking anything themselves. It's a social escape hatch — if this person continues to accumulate status and authority, I want to continue to associate with them, but if they do something that loses public favor, I want to be able to remove my association. 

Performative Proximity is the name of this calculated dance. 

In a workplace, a new person with an impressive resume is hired. When they announce that they could use some help on a project they’re working on, you look for ways you can participate without fully committing. If the project seems to be going well, you’ll invest more time and visibility alongside this colleague, and if not, you want to be able to distance yourself in case the project becomes a mess. 

Being that institutions rely on their reputation as their legitimacy, Performative Proximity is especially curated. Arts institutions may celebrate an independent creator’s work by sharing it on social media, but when that creator applies for a grant that the institution provides, they may get rejected because their work is too experimental. Those with decision-making power don’t want to invest in work that doesn’t have an already established lane.  

Performative Proximity can be a standard mode of operation for individuals and institutions when working with others, limiting the potential of what true collaboration can create. 

3 Core Functions of STOP Behaviors

All four STOP behaviors are learned, adapted to as normal, and deployed, serving 3 main functions: survival, regulation, and reproduction. These functions rarely operate in isolation, as STOP behaviors may simultaneously be used for all three purposes. 

Survival 

Once granted legitimacy by a legitimacy structure, individuals must protect it to maintain their identity, status, and belonging. STOP then becomes a survival mechanism. 

To avoid punishment, individuals may use Silence as Strategy to avoid naming a truth that could be socially jeopardizing if exposed. To avoid a talented new coworker from receiving too much recognition, Tokenism and Timing may be used to manage their visibility. 

STOP behaviors are used at all levels within a legitimacy structure, from those who are granted the most, to those who have been allocated the least, because once an individual’s legitimacy is put into question, so too is their own identity — leading to emotionally charged responses to protect themselves and their belonging.

Those who hold the least amount of allocated legitimacy may rely heavily on STOP behaviors because their positions are often the most precarious. Group in-fighting, pettiness, gossip, and hostile interpersonal relations are common manifestations of groups of individuals jostling over fragile legitimacy distributions. 

The greater the legitimacy one accumulates, the greater the potential loss. A person who has been promoted from intern to director within an organization may internalize STOP as their conditioned professional demeanor because these behaviors have been repeatedly reinforced throughout their career.

Regulation

STOP behaviors are also used to regulate the distribution of legitimacy to others. 

Individuals do not always behave in accordance with their allocated legitimacy. An employee may challenge the decision of leadership. Children speak out of turn to their parents. When a disruption of expectations by an individual or group threatens the established hierarchy and puts legitimacy into question, STOP behaviors are used to enforce the status quo, maintain boundaries of roles, or create ambiguity in the service of control. 

Regulation is often visible — to set the standard for what is and is not tolerated. While STOP behavior in service of survival may be interpersonal, STOP behavior in service of regulation is about setting a tone for others to learn the boundaries set in place by those with higher allocated legitimacy distributions. 

Reproduction

Learning the behavioral grammar of STOP happens through common interactions with others and navigating legitimacy structures. STOP behaviors are reproduced by individuals without direct instruction. One’s survival and success within a legitimacy structure is determined by how well they can internalize and reproduce these adaptive behaviors to protect their own and the structure’s legitimacy.  

Seeing those with more authority and access to power exercising these behaviors creates an incentive for them to be reproduced by those with less. When engaged with those who are not cultured in the grammar of selective silences, managed engagement, or ambiguity norms, it can create clear distinctions of who’s in and who’s out, and who to disregard as illegitimate in themselves.

The corporate world disguises this as the unspoken cultural norms that dictate the daily operations and affect career advancement. 

Why STOP Matters

Taken altogether, the behaviors outlined in STOP are meant to preserve appearances. Preserve the appearance that a system is fair, reasonable, and functioning properly. If that appearance is stable, legitimacy remains in place, and the standard mode of operating cannot be called into question, because doing so would call into question a seemingly objective system. Individuals, then, are forced to reckon with their own lack of reasonability, while the legitimacy structure never has to face its own biases. 

STOP doesn’t require coercion, as legitimacy structures incentivize adapting to this behavioral grammar as the standard mode of operating. It naturally rewards those who adopt this behavioral grammar by providing them with identity, access, status, promotions, and belonging in exchange. 

Even those harmed by STOP learn to internalize the behaviors as their position within a legitimacy structure changes. STOP becomes part of how the social architecture of spaces is formed, without ever considering if alternative builds are available, reproducing cycles of harmful, existing power structures.  

While legitimacy structures may be a vital part of any modern society for social coordination, STOP is not. STOP creates unhealthy work environments where the emotional labor to decode this behavior is pushed downstream to individuals with the least amount of legitimacy to challenge it in the first place. Individuals are forced to question themselves, and never the structures, as doing so comes with high social costs. 

Structure, process, and order are all valuable, but when they are enforced to stifle expression, suppress insight, and limit innovation, they become a cage disguised as a foundation. 

By naming these behaviors, people gain the ability to recognize and interrupt these micro-moments of legitimacy preservation. By doing so, it helps people make sense of their reality as patterned behaviors that are not normal but are incentivized. 

Interruption becomes a starting place for new ways of belonging. 

Limitations

The STOP framework does not encompass all the ways in which legitimacy is maintained socially or institutionally. This set of behaviors is common enough to identify across interpersonal, cultural, and institutional situations, but humans are way too complex to identify every example of legitimacy-preserving behavior. 

STOP should be used to identify patterns, not isolated incidents. People forget to respond to an email. They can be unaware that they are only showing token support for an individual. They may know they are protecting an authority figure by not naming their abuse of power, but be unsure of how else they are supposed to operate without risking their career.

STOP is an adaptive behavioral grammar, and only once we are aware of these legitimacy-preserving behaviors can we begin to think of new ways to allow for legitimacy structures to serve their role in society, while simultaneously allowing for curiosity, expression, and engagement to coexist. 

Conclusion

Legitimacy is a necessary part of societal social coordination. Legitimacy structures allocate legitimacy in helpful ways, and by doing so, they lower our cognitive load and provide shortcuts to whom we should trust and consider for various tasks, ideas, and decisions. 

Because legitimacy cannot be distributed equally, individuals have a strong incentive to protect their allocated amount. This incentive creates adaptive behaviors that individuals and institutions use to protect their presumed legitimacy. Over time, this protective function can become regulatory in ways that exceed legitimacy’s original coordinating purpose. 

The STOP framework identifies four legitimacy-preserving behaviors meant to regulate clarity, recognition, perception, and proximity: Silence as Strategy, Tokenism and Timing, Optics over Integrity, and Performative Proximity. These adaptive behaviors serve three purposes: survival, regulation, and reproduction, becoming a behavioral language one must learn in order to survive and navigate a legitimacy structure, no matter the individual’s allocated legitimacy.  

These behaviors replicate across society, creating harmful power structures that punish the questioning of alternative options of belonging and incentivize conformity. By identifying these behaviors that can often be hard to name, we can interrupt these patterns of behavior and find healthier ways to belong together. 

Legitimacy can be preserved without psychological harm.  

Mirror Moment

STOP behaviors are so common that it would be easy to call out others (individuals, groups, or institutions) for using them, but oftentimes, we may ignore how we are using these behaviors ourselves. 

Individuals lead institutions and learn to internalize and replicate the same legitimacy-preserving behaviors outlined in STOP. 

Reflect on your own behavior. What STOP behaviors do you use, with whom, and in what situations? How could you engage without trying to control others in the same space?