Or, as Foucault summarized, "the state can only be understood . . . on the basis of the general tactics of govern mentality" (Burchell et al., 1991, p. ix). The purpose of the state is to govern, albeit sometimes in the name of sovereign rights. Securing those sovereign rights for a population makes necessary the acts of discipline and governance that also (as if by happy coincidence) keep government in power. Of special interest to public administration studies is the shift from law to regulation, a shift tracked by Hunt and Wickham (1994) in their Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance. Those authors note that although Foucault did not write a systematic treatment of regulation, the term is still important in his work.
If law is the stipulation of general rules then regulation is more task oriented and less prohibitive, in that it is employed to define detailed goals and targets for training and other forms of intervention directed at the behavior of individuals. Regulation characteristically involves techniques of detail. (Hunt & Wickham, 1994, p. 22)