Where does authority collide?

A legitimate form of domination: the probability that a command will be obeyed because those who obey regard the order as valid. In Economy and Society Max Weber uses the German term Herrschaft, rendered as authority or domination, and distinguishes three pure types by the ground of their legitimacy: traditional authority resting on the sanctity of long-standing custom, charismatic authority resting on devotion to an exceptional person, and legal-rational authority resting on belief in enacted rules and the offices that apply them. The referent is a structure of rule in a society or organization, and the unit is a legitimated command relationship, not a person's psychology and not a citable text. Weber's question is why domination is treated as valid, which is a different question from whether a given individual will comply.[1]

Unit

A legitimated command relationship (a type of rule)

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Historical and comparative classification of regimes by the claimed ground of their legitimacy

An individual's willingness to comply with the commands of a person perceived as an authority, even when the commands conflict with the person's own conscience. In his 1963 experiment Stanley Milgram had participants deliver what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to another person at the instruction of an experimenter, and most continued to the highest level; he developed the account further in Obedience to Authority in 1974. Here authority names a feature of a social situation that produces a behavioural response, measured as the point at which a participant refuses to continue. The referent is one person's obedience in the presence of a command giver, not a societal form of legitimate rule and not a source cited to a court.[2][3]

Unit

One person's compliance with a command

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The maximum shock level administered, or the point of defiance, in a laboratory obedience task

A source that a court may rely on to decide a question, classed by the force it carries: binding (or mandatory) authority, such as a statute or a precedent from a higher court in the same jurisdiction, which a court must follow, and persuasive authority, such as a decision from another jurisdiction or a scholarly treatise, which a court may follow but need not. In this meaning an authority is a countable thing: a lawyer cites an authority, and Black's Law Dictionary defines the term as a legal writing or precedent taken to settle a question. The referent is a text (a case, a statute, a rule, a commentary), and what matters is its precedential weight, not the legitimacy of a regime and not anyone's willingness to obey.[6][4]

Unit

A citable legal source and its precedential weight

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Classification of a source as binding or persuasive by jurisdiction and court hierarchy

The formally delegated right to make decisions that guide the actions of others within an organizational hierarchy. Herbert Simon, in Administrative Behavior, defines an authority relation as one in which a subordinate holds in abeyance their own critical judgment and accepts a superior's decision as the basis for their own action, within a zone of acceptance set by the role. Authority here is a property of a position and the reporting line attached to it, allocated by organizational design, not a type of societal domination, not a psychological pull, and not a citable source. The word overlaps with Weber's legal-rational type, but the management meaning is the concrete decision right of an office rather than the ground on which rule is seen as legitimate.[5]

Unit

A position's delegated right to decide for others

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Position in the formal hierarchy and the scope of delegated decision rights