Authority

Conceptual Overview

Questions of authority in industry and organization have featured highly in 20th-century organizational sociologies and theories of management and administration. Especially prominent among theorists on these questions was Max Weber, whose exploration of his famous question of when and why people obey continues to offer much relevance in the 21st century. For Weber, authority in organizations is a form of domination. It is a type of power relationship in which a person imposes his or her rule over other persons. Importantly, the power holder believes in his or her right to do so and the persons over whom the power is exercised consider it their duty to obey.

How is this form of domination justified in the modern world, and how does it successfully operate? Critical to Weber's response is the notion of legitimacy. Legitimacy allows domination to be exercised as authority. To exercise authority over large numbers of people requires a complex system of administration to link the ruler and the ruled. The rational bureaucratic form of organization generates administration systems in which authority is vested and transmitted through hierarchies of formal relationship. For Weber, organizations are a type of social relationship that cannot exist without authority and actor-meaningful courses of social action. The rational bureaucracy rests on a number of key elements. Importantly, it vests authority in offices and the officeholder must meet described rational criteria for the post. Technical expertise and due qualification are required, as well as observed exercise of the duties and functions of the post. In this resides the basis of legitimacy whereby subordinates consider it their duty to obey the instruction and directive of superior officeholders. The “official” is the holder of the power to command; he or she never exercises this power in his or her own right. Instead, the official holds power as a trustee of the “impersonal and compulsory institution.” Weber distinguishes this ideal type of rational and legal authority that prevails in bureaucratic organizations from two other principal types of legitimate authority: traditional and charismatic. Traditional authority in the Weberian schema is based on people's belief in established and immemorial traditions that are held to be inviolable and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority on the basis of those traditions. For Weber, a principal example of this type of authority is patriarchalism. Partriarchalism refers to the authority of the father, the husband, the senior male of the household. A chief characteristic of patriarchal authority is that the system of inviolable norms is considered sacred and any transgression of them would result in supernatural evils. Accompanying this system is a realm of free arbitrariness and favor of the lord and master, whose judgments operate at personal rather than abstract or functional levels of relations. In this sense, for Weber, traditionalist authority is irrational.

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