Page 209 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 3 from San Jose, California 195

worthwhile. “Strategic actors must find a way in which to bring together as
many groups as possible to form a center or core,” Fligstein (1997) says. By
creating an appropriate “cultural frame,” Delors and EU staff members
made the Single Market Program appealing.
Fligstein notes that actors have to select from “a small number of
tactics” to build a powerful core around an appropriate cultural frame.
Among the tactics he discusses are these:

• Agenda setting: Getting people to agree on what will be talked about
• Framing proposed actions: Convincing people to think that what
will happen is (a) in their interest or (b) natural, given values that
they accept or should accept
• Taking what the system gives: Seizing unplanned opportunities, and
seeing opportunities where others see only constraints
• “Goallessness”: Appearing open to others’ needs, free of values ori-
ented to personal gain, not wedded to a course of action, and there-
fore an appropriate broker among others
• Brokering: Helping people with different attitudes to communicate
and reach agreements 2

Such tactics can bring together important people in the system to sup-
port a new way of thinking so that a new course of action can be adopted
and institutionalized. Delors and his allies built a body politic in all Europe
to support a reworking of Europe’s market institutions using the tactics
Fligstein discusses. He focused on agenda setting from the beginning, telling
European leaders that he would take the presidency of the EU only if they
committed to a big project and then quickly concluding after a tour of
European capitals that the idea of “completing the single market” was the
most popular alternative. Thereafter he had legitimacy to focus discussion
on that. Delors and EU staff members framed the project as in the interest
of all Europeans. Initially, there was essentially no definition of “complet-
ing the single market,” but the idea of eliminating barriers and harmoniz-
ing regulations could be sold as a source of great efficiencies. Then shared
belief in “completing the single market” could be used to persuade people
to support changes they had previously opposed. Delors’s relatively goalless
attitude when he took the presidency gave him credibility. People believed