Authority, the exercise of legitimate influence by one social actor over another. There are many ways in which an individual or entity can influence another to behave differently, and not all of them have equal claim to authority. A classic hypothetical example serves to differentiate the term authority from other forms of influence: One person wielding a club forces another person to hand over money and possessions. This act might be considered coercive—the exercise of brute power, which in many instances would be criminal. If, however, the person with the club is employed in a position that involves repossessing goods—thus, a person occupying a legitimate role in a society—and menaces the other person in the process of doing so, the act of influence may well be legitimate and constitute the exercise of authority.
The example illustrates the basic distinction between authority and coercion by physical force. As the psychologists John R.P. French and Bertram Raven pointed out, however, these are only two of the common bases of social power, and the distinctions between authority and other forms of social influence are somewhat more subtle. For example, if the person no longer held a club but instead offered the other person an incentive to hand over all the money, the reward might be seen as a source of power but probably not authority. A banker who rewards a client with future interest payments for doing exactly that has no authority over the client, because the client is always free to decide not to deposit the money and, later, to require the money’s return. The same might be true of peer pressure, a good argument, or any other form of influence for which one cannot say, “Person B has an obligation to obey Person A and hand over all the money.” Indeed, it is in this sense that there exists some normative relationship between A and B, some duty that B has to obey A, which constitutes authority.
Governments are perhaps the most familiar example of an authoritative social actor, as, by most accounts, they generally possess a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force to compel obedience to their mandates in a given geographic area. The soldier or police officer serves as an extension of state authority and shares its legitimacy. However, even these familiar forms of political authority as exercised by the state have limits. For example, a police officer who compels a confession from a suspect or extorts money steps outside the limits of the legitimate authority usually accorded to the police; the officer thereby engages in coercion, which is the opposite of authority where the presence of a normative relationship is involved.
The exercise of authority thus defined is neither limited to the state nor confined to the use of physical force. Instead, the concept of authority extends to cover a variety of social interactions and resides with a variety of social actors. In publicly held corporations, shareholders and their boards of directors exercise authority over the executives through the mechanisms of corporate governance. They have, for example, the right to hire and fire the chief executive, to set the executive’s wages, and to review important corporate policies. Business firms create rules to regulate and, thereby, exercise authority over employees. Indeed, the very notion of hierarchy that characterizes most complex organizations rests on the exercise of authority by superiors over subordinates. Much of the early scholarship in organization theory centred on questions of why authority dynamics arise in organizations and how those dynamics facilitate the coordination of organizational action.
As a central concept in the study of societies, states, and organizations, authority has drawn the attention of several very different fields of study. The nature of authority and what makes the exercise of authority legitimate is a central focus for political philosophers, who examine questions regarding when a state may legitimately compel its citizens to act and, conversely, when citizens may legitimately refuse to obey state mandates. For sociologists and political scientists, the more-pressing questions concern the antecedents and effects of de facto state authority—that is, existing state authority, especially as it actually exercises its power rather than how it is supposed to do so (according to a country’s constitution or a philosopher, for example). They ask, Why do individuals, groups, and organizations submit to authority? How do broader social institutions serve to legitimate this authority? How does the form of authority exercised by a state affect society and its members? For social psychologists, the more fundamental question concerns individual reactions to the exercise of authority. Why do individuals obey authority? And what are the limits of this obedience, especially where other normative considerations are concerned?
Authority as a normative question
To the political philosopher, the central question concerning political authority is: Under what conditions can state action be considered legitimate? It can be agreed that authority requires some clear appeal to a higher sense of legitimate state function, but agreement on that point does not imply agreement either on the principles that define what is legitimate or on the limits of this legitimacy. When, for example, are citizens obliged to obey laws that either imperil their own lives or conflict with other important moral considerations? Such questions have occupied political philosophers for centuries and have inspired important contributions by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Rawls.
Commentators such as Robert Paul Wolff have placed such questions in starker terms, considering authority to present a paradox: If legitimate authority requires people to act in ways contrary to their own judgment and if moral autonomy (i.e., the right to exercise reason on moral questions and act according to one’s reason) is a fundamental human right, then the exercise of authority is always a violation of the other person’s moral autonomy and is immoral. This has given new life to the discussion of normative justifications for legitimacy.
Authority as a sociological question
To the sociologist, the legitimacy that distinguishes between coercive power and authority rests not on some theoretical normative foundation but rather on de facto social convention (actual social convention, meaning here that legitimacy is not whether an actor’s behaviour satisfies some ideal ethical norm but whether it fits with social norms held in common by real people in society). Society confers on certain actors the right to influence others and to expect their obedience. A community member who stops others on the street and searches their possessions against their will is a vigilante, exercising coercive power. A police officer who engages in the same behaviour in accord with legal procedures, validated by social convention, is exercising authority.
Max Weber identified three inner justifications, or sources of legitimacy, for the exercise of authority: (1) traditional norms sanctified by long-standing convention, (2) charisma, which attracts the personal confidence and devotion of followers, and (3) rational-legal considerations supported by belief in the validity of legal statutes and functional competence. Much of the authority cited in organizations rests on a rational-legal source of authority. In business, for example, it is the combination of a manager’s position relative to statutory and rational structures that constitutes the right to expect obedience from subordinates. Stockholders share a similar type of authority in their dealings with the corporation via governance mechanisms.
Authority as a psychological question
To some psychologists, the interesting issue concerning authority is how it can overcome other considerations in compelling individuals to obey orders, especially basic considerations such as survival and basic morality. In the latter half of the 20th century, this question took on particular importance as social scientists struggled to make sense of the nightmares of World War II, particularly the willingness of ordinary German citizens and soldiers to take part in the extermination of Jewish and other minorities in the concentration camps. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, conducted the most famous (and infamous) of these studies designed to understand the limits of a person’s willingness to obey authority. Milgram discovered, as he later wrote in his book Obedience to Authority (1974), that adults would do almost anything when commanded by an authority, including inflicting painful electric shocks remotely on an unseen person (who, unknown to the subject, did not actually receive any such shocks). He traced this willingness, in no small part, to the division of labour that characterizes modern society and alienates individuals from the consequences of their own actions.
The willingness of individuals to authorize others to control them raises a serious dilemma. On the one hand, this willingness to obey represents one of the key psychological underpinnings of complex organizations. For example, the reason companies adopt hierarchies rather than leaving every corporate practice or decision to be worked out by ad hoc means is that it is more efficient and less costly for a person to obey a superior rather than engaging in constant negotiations. On the other hand, many of the most infamous moral lapses in recent organizational history have involved individuals who were willing to follow authoritative commands rather than questioning their morality. For political philosopher Hannah Arendt, commenting on the behaviour of Adolf Eichmann during World War II, this “banality of evil” represents the ultimate horror of bureaucracy, in which even unspeakable acts can become normal and routine through the exercise of authority.