This week’s readings include a discussion of authority and its role in persuasion. Following is a brief (for sociology, anyway) discussion of the idea of authority. For instance, if you’ve had a lousy boss at work, you know that you have to keep your nose clean. But not necessarily because you like or respect your boss. You understand the consequences of ‘insubordination,’ though. Legitimate authority occurs when people essentially reach, collectively anyway (though individuals are always at different levels of agreement), some consensus that a source of authority is okay. That means in the case of the boss, he/she doesn’t have to scrutinize every employee’s move 24/7 with videomonitoring equipment. At the level of the state, it means the government may not have to hold a gun to people’s heads to get them to, for instance, obey laws or pay taxes. Obviously, legitimate authority reduces the costs of compliance, as sociologist Max Weber might have said, it makes the functioning of social systems much more efficient because they have some level of public acceptance. Weber identified what he considered three types of legitimate authority: Charismatic, Traditional, and Bureaucratic. This focuses mostly on bureaucracy (which Weber saw coming a long time ago as the dominant organizational form, and if you think about it, our lives are ordered in many ways by various bureaucracies).

Bureaucracy–Whose idea was it? Bureaucracies have been around, in various forms, for many centuries (think the Roman Catholic Church . . . ). It was sociologist Max Weber who first understood the importance of the bureaucratic organization and its increasingly pervasive influence on modern society. According to Weber, who like many sociologists, was interested in the sweeping social changes taking place during the Industrial Revolution (opposed to anthropologists, who were more interested in archaic, traditional societies and culture), the bureaucracy was an organizational variant of a process he referred to as rationalization. We have bureaucracies because they are efficient organizational means of dealing with increasing size and complexity, which characterized the growth of most societies from the 1800s on.

Weber talked about three sources of legitimate authority–charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. The first is charismatic authority–think of the cult leader, the Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Adolph Hitler, Fidel Castro, etc. These individuals (historically most often men, imagine that!) commanded authority by their very personas. What often becomes difficult with authority based on a charismatic leader, however, is the problem of succession. Unless one can make the transition to some other form of legitimacy, successors aren’t likely to possess the sort of charisma that commanded allegiance. Charismatic leaders can do great things–the ‘benevolent dictator’ comes to mind, although it’s hard to find one who began and ended benevolently. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya began as a benevolent dictator, but his reign ended in corruption. At least the more notorious and well-known were psychopaths (Hitler, Joseph Stalin from Russia, Pol Pot from Cambodia, Idi Amin in Uganda, Jean Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic).

Traditional authority is, well, rooted in tradition. Another way of thinking about it is, ‘this is the way it’s always been done.’ This is often the rationale behind cultural explanations and justifications people give (some women’s support of female circumcision fits this explanation). An example of traditional authority comes from the monarchy, the alleged ‘divine right of kings’ (i.e., a king’s right to rule is straight from God). And how could you ask for a much better claim to authority and legitimacy than that?? Gerontocracies are also examples of traditional authority (e.g., the elders hold the highest positions, based on the belief that elders hold great wisdom and knowledge). The cliff-dwelling Dogon tribe of Central Mali was ruled by the eldest male, the Ogon, who presided from his stone throne, where he resolved disputes and made important decisions for the village. Traditional bureaucracies exist, and in fact Weber argued that the emergence of the rational-legal bureaucracy was an effort to root out some of the more severe problems associated with traditional authority–favoritism, nepotism, arbitrary rule, etc. And, I should point out, in most cases, there was patriarchal authority at play as well–tradition entitled the males to a disproportionate share of power and authority.

So the third type of authority Weber discusses is rational-legal. The US Constitution is a classic example–based not on tradition or personal charisma, but on the law. The University’s system of rules and policies is another. It’s all written down and relatively rational in terms of how it should function–in other words, Weber would say that its functioning shouldn’t change much with the change of individuals in the system. It’s structural, and rooted in law and convention.

Some traits of the rational-legal bureaucracy (we’ll skip the rational-legal part from here on out):

• equal treatment of employees
  • sources of unequal treatment-nepotism, politics, individuals’ personalities, sexism/racism/ageism
• people are hired/retained because of their qualifications, skill, expertise
• the office belongs to the organization, not the individual (separation of office and officeholder). So offices aren’t to be used for personal enrichment (e.g., shaking down welfare clients)
• standards of work and output. There are expectations of workers.
• record keeping (this allows a company or agency to hold people accountable to expectations, to what they’re supposed to be doing on the job)
• rules (serving organization’s interests, binding workers and managers)

Three areas of particular importance are:

Hierarchical structure

• Accountability–it’s important for knowing who is supposed to answer to whom, for instance
• Division of labor (based on expertise, training)–who’s supposed to do what. This often leads to specialization
• Formal rules governing behavior, performance–keeping those pesky humans from bringing too much of their personal lives to work . . .
• Provides control over what workers do (grounds for termination, for instance)
• Allows for coordination of effort (who is supposed to work with who?)
• Hierarchical structures can tend to concentrate power at the top, also. They are ‘top down,’ meaning decisions and authority flow from the top to lower tiers in the organization. But remember–looking at an organizational chart may not tell you a whole lot about how a bureaucracy functions in practice–only on paper. For instance, in many office situations, the clerical support staff are critical to the functioning of the organization, and office managers may be ‘gatekeepers,’ making relatively low wages, but controlling access to those higher up the food chain.

Rewards

• Fixed salaries–not bribes. Rewards should be relative to effort.
  • look at CEOs and stock options-CEOs of some of the fallen companies in the last several years (e.g., Enron, WorldCom) were filing fraudulent reports about their companies’ earnings, in order to keep stock values high (and investors buying based on false information), at least until they could sell off their own stock options at considerable gain;
  • There has been a great deal of fraudulent Medicare billing, for instance for services that were never rendered;
  • What if welfare case workers were rewarded for reducing the rolls (that is, having less clients, either through denying eligibility claims, or placing clients in work settings)?
• In bureaucracies there is a distinction between office and officeholder, separation of property ownership (property belongs to the organization, the officeholder draws a salary)

Individual protections

Some measure of security for workers:

• protection from termination, for instance
• tenure-willingness to invest in human capital for the organization (yes, sometimes people get tenure and become dead weight, but the benefits, says sociologist Charles Perrow, outweigh the costs–tenure is an incentive for people to invest in learning new skills, and it offers protection when the required skills sets change, which for instance happend during the agricultural mechanization period in the 40s and 50s)
• against arbitrary use of power (e.g., unfounded termination, expulsion, etc.)
• career-oriented, with promotions (again, for companies investing in the long -term, this represents efficiencies. In companies like McDonald’s, where employees job skills are so narrow, and they learn little over time, their value doesn’t increase, they could be replaced with a day’s worth of training and thus they are entirely expendable)
• obedience is to the office, not the person
• there are grievance procedures

EQUAL TREATMENT: These protections represent attempts to foster universalism over particularism–protection of employees, equity (in the name of efficiency, remember)

So . . . doesn’t sound so bad, does it? And it probably sounds different than what you’ve thought of–‘bureaucracy’ often has a negative connotation in popular literature. But without some fairly routinized procedures, for instance to deliver food stamps to millions of clients, it might be a very expensive proposition. So for some tasks, bureaucracies may be well-suited. The key becomes how people are treated, and there are times where we all wish we were treated as individuals (particularist), and others when we wish we were all treated the same (universalist).

How does apply to influence and propaganda? Authority perceived as legitimate is extremely useful for persuading the masses. This could be a charismatic speaker. Bill Clinton was an effective and persuasive communicator, not that republicans were happy about it. But he understood how to appeal to the masses without appearing to ‘talk down’ to them. There are all kinds of people who have some more specialized authority. Walter Cronkite was seen as a legitimate deliverer of the ‘news’ at the CBS network in the 1960s and 70s. Celebrities and athletes can often be used to sell products well beyond their areas of expertise–a combination of likability and authority. You’ve already read about the importance of source credibility.

On the other hand, because of the usefulness of source credibility, there are always attempts by propagandists to manufacture credibility where it doesn’t really exist. We read about this in Charles Pierce’s ‘rules‘ concerning his notion of ‘Idiot America.’

News consumers beware.

Problems with bureaucracies

Humans are pesky critters

Keep in mind–Bureaucracies are TOOLS, often quite effective means of wielding organizational power, within and outside the organization. Even the best-intended bureaucracies can be used to serve narrow interests. This can apply to governments and to a news organization. Rules may be universal, but their application involves humans and human variability. CNN for instance has a vast capability to deliver the news, with staff all over the world. But too often they deliver non-threatening and sensationalized filler. Which can be developed into news-free stories dragged on for weeks. But they’ve got the music. Serious-looking anchors. Wolf Blitzer must have done something journalistic early in his career. It shouldn’t be comic material for Jon Stewart ….