Reminders

It is important to remember, first, that our conceptualization of the relationship between actors and resources starts with the idea that this relationship is strongly structured by the basic institutional rules of the political system – the Swiss political system in my case (for example, rule of law, human rights, executive federalism, principle of direct democracy). This structure is reflected in institutional rules governing possession (right to dispose of and thus mobilize a resource), behavioural institutional rules (permitted and prohibited use of a resource) and decisional institutional rules (time and space for mobilization based on the different stages of the public policy cycle). Neither the appropriation nor mobilization of these resources by the actors are chaotic processes; they are regulated like a Swiss timepiece, particularly during the implementation stage. Thus one can hardly refer to the mobilization of public action resources without referring to the rules that govern these processes. Hence the conclusion already drawn in the previous chapters to the effect that an actor who holds a relatively weak portfolio of resources can emerge victorious from an actors’ game thanks to the intelligent activation of these rules that are sometimes enacted to protect such vulnerable actors.

Second, it should be recalled that the purpose of the mobilization of public policy resources is to influence the competent public actor(s) in relation to the decisions taken on each of the six products of the public policy cycle. Thus it is not primarily a question of influencing the social, economic or socio-cultural behaviour of a partner or adversary actor. Accordingly, in the area of company mergers, the mobilization of an actor's resources for the acquisition of a competitor company consists in the simple mobilization of these societal, economic and social resources ‘outside of public policies’. Given that the crucial product of the public policy on cartels is the approval or rejection of this cartel by the regulator (COMCO, the Competition Commission, in the case of Switzerland), the actor purchaser will mobilize specific public action resources to ‘convince’ COMCO that, despite this purchase, it will not assume a dominant position in the market, a development that would contravene the aims of competition policy.