 One of Hart’s rhetorical devices provides a useful starting point for the development of a social scientific (functional) concept of governance. To introduce the concept of a secondary rule, Hart [1961] recounts a fable concerning the emergence of a legal system in a small community. He suggests that a small, homogeneous, stable, and closely knit society requires no differentiated structures of governance. These structures emerge to resolve problems that arise in societies that are large, heterogeneous, or subject to environmental uncertainty. Though Hart identifies only three such problems, we shall identify four distinct functions that might be distributed across societal structures: (1) the characterization of socially acceptable (or unacceptable) behavior, a task the importance of which grows as the rate of change in society increases;(2) policing of behavior to identify likely instances of deviant behavior; more anonymous societies may require more institutionalized policing; (3) definitive adjudication of non-conformity to social norms; again, when society is no longer face-to-face, such adjudication may be necessary to trigger sanctions; and (4)sanctioning of deviant behavior; informal sanctions grow more difficult to impose when society is not face-to-face.