The city core? The seat of power? It’s just that it’s, well, different here.

Sooner or later, anyone who spends enough time trying to understand Los Angeles lights upon two questions: Where is the center, and who’s in charge?

The glib answers, partly true, are nowhere and no one. The whole truth is more complicated.

Los Angeles today does have pockets of power, clustered in this community and that. Their tenuous ties and episodic alliances mirror the region itself, a corner of America memorably described by novelist Thomas Pynchon as “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special-purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to [the] freeway.”

In a city and region where identification is so loose, power is hard to accumulate and wield. And yet, Los Angeles today is witness to a growing and changing leadership elite.

Often, the city responds to the will of a confederation of business executives--mostly but not exclusively white men--who come together on Los Angeles’ iconic projects but whose chief relation to one another is mutual suspicion bordering on hostility. They sit astride a city government that struggles to do its job, led by an unconventional mayor, Richard Riordan, who has used his good standing with the public to make his most lasting marks by circumventing the government, not by mastering it.

They are joined by an increasingly influential labor movement that has picked its recent battles well and tapped the city’s great and growing source of strength: Latinos.

And looming in the background, as it always has, is the Los Angeles Police Department, an institution rocked by scandal, undermined by brutality and wrestling with corruption--but also a proud organization embedded in community life in ways that make it a formidable presence.

The Business of Leadership

Through the early 1900s, Los Angeles was transformed by an oligarchy of willful businessmen who refused to let even the fact that the closest reliable water supply was hundreds of miles away dissuade them from building a city here. In those days, no one questioned who ran the place. They did. Mayors and others deferred. Los Angeles thrived under their leadership but ultimately outgrew it.

Today, Eli Broad--the city’s most important business leader and philanthropist, a man who made his first billion dollars building homes and then compounded that success in a retirement services firm--may be the closest thing Los Angeles has to a civic-minded power boss in that old tradition. He is the person most responsible for reviving the stalled fund-raising for Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown. He periodically wades into school reform or other political debates. But he can be prickly, and he does not command a coalition like Los Angeles’ old oligarchy. He doesn’t, as even his many admirers acknowledge, play well with others.

More important than Broad’s personality, however, is the changed business community around him.

The old Los Angeles business leadership was one of builders--chief executives and plant bosses of car companies, aerospace firms, banks, insurance companies, oil producers. Those businessmen were tied to Los Angeles not by goodwill but by their interests and the interests of their workers.

Not one Fortune 500 company is based downtown anymore. Los Angeles generally is a polyglot of small- and medium-sized businesses. Most political power no longer emanates from big industry but from the city’s law firms. Warren Christopher is the preeminent example. He’s a lawyer, police reform champion, former secretary of State, a sage and forceful presence in the life of Los Angeles. But Christopher is one of the city’s most influential citizens because he loves politics and public service, not because he’s the representative of a huge work force.

Just last month, the City Council helped prove how far the business community’s power has ebbed. When Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg proposed allowing thousands of protesters to have the run of Pershing Square, in the heart of downtown, during the Democratic National Convention, the business community howled. The motion passed anyway, and though the council later reversed itself, that was mainly in response to the LAPD.

The Shift in the Labor Movement

Once one of the nation’s foremost antilabor bastions--a philosophy stridently reinforced for decades by the Los Angeles Times and its founder, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis--Los Angeles today is riding a rebirth of organized labor. Indeed, the city’s emerging labor movement, with its strong connections to the nascent political power of Latinos, may be the most potent political force in Los Angeles--not yet mature, but growing by the year.

Less than a generation ago, Southern California unions were dominated by white building trade unions--carpenters, plumbers and the like. Today, they are mainly service industry groups, populated by the city’s working-class Latinos, first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and beyond. They are more political than their predecessors, more liberal, more aggressive and more effective.

Next year, labor will help elect a mayor, a city attorney, a city controller and six members of the City Council. If recent history is any guide, labor will win more of those races than it loses.

More viscerally, labor also increasingly displays its power in the streets. A strike last spring by Los Angeles janitors captured national attention and won wage hikes for some of the city’s working poor. Less renowned but no less effective have been the dogged efforts to expand living-wage laws from the city to the county to the airport. Security guards and baggage handlers at Los Angeles International Airport, once forced to work for poverty wages, got salary bumps in recent years because of the dogged influence of Los Angeles labor activists. Time and again, labor in Los Angeles is winning.

The evolving and expanding power of labor closely tracks the city’s cascading ethnic change. Indeed, one of the most portentous power shifts here over the last 25 years has been the replacement of African Americans as a voting and political force. When Tom Bradley came to office in 1973, he launched a 20-year transformation of Los Angeles political power, one that brought blacks to City Hall and helped integrate them into the city’s residential and business life as well.

But Bradley lost his focus and mission by the end of his long tenure, and though some of the men and women he helped start out are still around--people like City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.--African Americans no longer command much of city government. Three of the council’s 15 districts traditionally served black majorities; today, Latinos are the majority in two of those. Not a single significant black candidate has a serious chance in the race to succeed Riordan. Indeed, the man most blacks favor, at least at this point in the campaign, is City Atty. James Hahn, who grew up in South-Central and whom Bradley admired and supported--but who is unmistakably white.

Police Chief’s Role Reformed

Over the long arc of Los Angeles history, there has been at least one other center of power, the LAPD. Early in the century, the Police Department ran prostitution and political payoffs for Mayor Frank Shaw, a scandal that toppled Shaw. Interestingly, though, while the reforms growing out of that era helped weaken the mayor’s office, they strengthened the Police Department and its chief, partly by making the chief extraordinarily hard to fire.

Police chiefs understand power and wield it. They have used their community organizations to muscle the City Council. They’ve defied mayors and spied on adversaries. They command an armed complement of nearly 10,000 men and women. One chief half-seriously once requested a submarine from the City Council to patrol the harbor.

So central has the chief of police here been over the years that Chief Ed Davis once was asked if he would consider running for mayor.

Why, Davis responded, “would I give up all this power?”

By the 1990s, the chief’s dominance over city politics was such that Bradley had to commit a political version of murder-suicide to dump Daryl F. Gates out of office, eventually forcing out Gates but so wounding himself that the two left the stage close together. Compare that to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York when he tired of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton. Giuliani said the word, and Bratton was gone.

To be sure, scandal and reform have lessened the chief’s place in Los Angeles politics. But even after Rodney G. King and Rampart, the fiasco of the O.J. Simpson case and the devastation of the 1992 riots, the chief of police remains one of Los Angeles’ most recognizable and influential figures. Poll after poll turns up only three public figures in this city who enjoy the approval of a solid majority of residents. Riordan is one, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony is another. The third in Police Chief Bernard C. Parks.

Riordan Forges a Stronger Post

As mayor, Riordan has found ways to amplify the modest power granted to him under Los Angeles’ City Charter. He outlasted Police Chief Willie L. Williams, denying him a second term, and got Parks, the chief he wanted. He may not be able to tweak school district budgets, but when his patience with the Los Angeles Unified School District finally ran out, he launched an overthrow of the school board, leading and partially financing an election campaign that replaced a majority of its members with people he supported.

Through those and other moves, Riordan has demonstrated that Los Angeles’ mayor remains a central and significant figure. Oddly, the only person who seems to argue otherwise is Riordan himself, who spent years laying the groundwork for an overhaul of the city charter largely in order to strengthen the mayor’s office.

Because of Riordan, the city last month adopted a new charter approved last year by the voters. This one cures some of the eccentricities of its predecessor--one adopted to curb corruption, mainly by preventing anyone from having the power to do anything. Under that system, the City Council wielded the bulk of government authority, though it so rarely manages to operate as a cohesive body that no one has ever mistaken it for a genuine power center.

Under the new charter, Los Angeles’ mayor, who once lacked even the authority to dismiss his own commissioners, now has that and more. Riordan has exercised that power already--he’s fired a couple of commissioners who support Hahn’s mayoral candidacy, which Riordan opposes. In the process, he’s demonstrated that charter reform meant something--albeit not necessarily something that everyone wanted.

Riordan’s bigger contribution, though, has been to reconnect business and government, mostly by bringing his rich friends to the messy business of political reform. The school board campaign was paid for in part by Riordan and his allies. So were charter reform, the technological retrofit of the LAPD, the construction of a Disney Concert Hall and Roman Catholic cathedral downtown and the attracting of the Democratic convention. Those do represent the formal exercise of mayoral power, but they stand as monuments to Riordan’s influence.

A Lack of Common Ground

Riordan and his allies have done much to change Los Angeles despite a long history of determined civic apathy and steadfast resistance to leadership. There are explanations for that resistance, partial but telling.

One is a long-standing aspect of Los Angeles’ civic psychology. This is an area settled and regularly resettled by loners. It is no coincidence that Los Angeles is home to some of the most striking, eclectic residential architecture in the world, and yet it lacks grand spaces for public gatherings. It is a city of individuals and their homes, not of governments and coalitions.

Los Angeles “is a place where people have come over the last century to get away from the old strictures of religion, poverty, persecution . . . and family expectations,” Robin Kramer, former chief of staff to Riordan and one of the city’s more admired leaders, recently wrote. “We did not come here to become ‘joiners.’ ”

Los Angeles also suffers from the absence of a culture of constructive shame--or what Theodore Roosevelt Sr., father of the former president, once referred to as a “troublesome conscience.” That’s not a small defect. When the international economy flinched in 1907, J.P. Morgan summoned bankers to his study in Manhattan and refused to let them go until they acted; shamed into saving the banking system, they did. When Roosevelt Sr. wanted Big Money to come to the aid of needy children in 19th century New York, he hosted a lavish dinner and filled the room with threadbare children; the wealthy dug deep.

Here, billionaire David Geffen, the spectral character who is the “G” in DreamWorks SKG, helps woo the Democratic National Convention to Los Angeles only to then refuse to contribute a nickel to the effort. Organizers fume, but Geffen shows no apparent signs of embarrassment. Instead, he shrugs and walks away. Taxpayers end up with the tab.

And there is at least one other idiosyncrasy of Los Angeles that thwarts conventional notions of power here: the conflict between leadership and fame, exaggerated by Hollywood.

In many cities, notable citizens acquire their identities partly through their participation: Carnegie, Rockefeller, the Kennedys. Philanthropy and participation are routes to respect, to fame, to power. Here, Hollywood imposes its own definition of fame. Actors and actresses are famous not because of what they contribute but because of how they look or act. They get their strokes irrespective of whether they help to make Los Angeles a better place. Not surprisingly, few of them do. As a result, they and their industry--the city’s biggest--largely sit out civic participation. When they do play a role, it’s generally in national and international politics, not local affairs.

So, who runs the place?

Hollywood runs itself and shuns the rest of the city. Riordan runs the government with limited success but prevails most often outside it by turning to Broad and other allies. Broad commands what’s left of the business community, with an occasional assist from executives such as investor Ron Burkle or Jerrold Perenchio, the chief executive of Univision. Christopher remains the ultimate voice of steady reason, but he rations his influence and wields it more nationally than locally. Lawyer Bill Wardlaw and a few like him work the inside game, elbowing for advantage at City Hall and beyond. Labor, run by Miguel Contreras, picks its battles and usually wins.

And the LAPD looms on the sidelines, ever poised to return to greatness, ever shooting itself in the foot.