4. We need to carry the actor-situation scheme one step further in an effort to rid ourselves of the troublesome abstraction state. It is one of our basic methodological choices to define the state as its official decision-makers those whose authoritative acts are, to all intents and purposes, the acts of the state. State action is the action taken by those acting in the name of the state. Hence, the state is its decision-makers. State X as actor is translated into its decision-makers as actors. It is also one of our basic choices to take as our prism analytical objective the re-creation of the world of the decision-makers as they view it. The manner in which they define situations becomes another way of saying how the state oriented to action and why. This is a quite different approach from trying to recreate the situation and interpretation of it objectively, that is, by the observer's judgment rather than that of the actors themselves.
To focus on the individual actors who are the state's decision-makers and to reconstruct the situation as defined by the decision-makers requires, of course, that a central place be given to the analysis of the behavior of these officials. One major significance of the diagram is that it calls attention to the sources of state action and to the essentially subjective nature of our perspective.