Power, Authority, and Coercion
You want to play video games, your parents want to watch the news and your family only has one television. "Congressman A" wants to legalize gambling while "Congressman B" says that it is immoral.
Who makes the decisions about who will get to do what?
Whether it is your parents or the governor of a state, those who are able to make and enforce decisions have power.
Power is the ability of persons or groups to achieve their goals despite opposition from others. Through the use of persuasion, authority, or force, some people are able to get others to acquiesce to their demands.
Authority is the power accepted as legitimate by those subjected to it.
Coercion is the exercise of power through force or the threat of force.
A coercion threat may be physical, financial, or social injury. Ultimately, under this form of power, you do what you're told to do because of fear of the consequences. This type of power still exists, even on national levels.
However, in our society, this type of power simply does not work on a macro-level scale.
The sociologist Max Weber suggested that force is not the most effective long term means of gaining compliance because those who are being ruled do not accept as legitimate those who are doing the ruling. Consequently, most leaders do not want to base their power on force alone; they seek to legitimate power by turning it into authority. Some of the most important theories on authority come from Max Weber.
Weber points out that in pre-modern and modern societies, a hierarchy of command in which everyone must adhere develops in all forms of social institutions. In order for these institutions to operate, there must be some form of authority, someone in charge. He outlines three forms of authority in modern societies: traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. However, he also argued these forms of authority are ideal-types and rarely the forms of authority found in real life.
Traditional authority is rooted in beliefs and practices that have been passed down over time.
Traditional authority as a form of power is accepted and obeyed because of customs or the natural order. This type of authority is most common in societies based on kinship and descent, pre-modern, or tribal societies. Leadership, in these cases, generally depends upon occupying a traditionally sanctioned office, such as that of king or chief.
Charismatic authority rests solely on the personal qualities of individual leaders and on the receptivity of followers.
Because the loyalties of followers can be fickle, charismatic authority is unstable and difficult to sustain compared to traditional authority.
Charismatic authority is frequently a threat to traditional authority and often emerges in the context of changing social conditions in which traditional authority may be unresponsive or ineffectual. Charismatic authority is thus frequently an agent of social change, capable of mobilizing persons outside the existing structures of power.
Over time, however, charismatic movements either die out or succumb to a process of routinization, in which the movement codifies its principles and establishes a bureaucratic structure in order to pursue them beyond the range of singular charismatic leadership.
Legal-rational authority is a function of explicit laws or rules that define the legitimate uses of power.
Most authority figures in our culture have legal-rational authority. They came to power through legal means and they are held in check by laws, rules and regulations.
Remember that the three types of authority, for Weber, were ideal types, and were rarely (if ever) encountered in pure forms. Weber took particular interest in the social consequences that followed these different forms, and in their combinations, which tended to entrench support for a particular regime of power. He also focused on the transitional situations in which one form gave way to another, and on the role of charismatic leadership as a means of breaking, if only temporarily, the hold of modern legal-rational and bureaucratic structures of power.
