Influence versus Authority



Influence versus Authority

To a degree certainly, but the new view underlines the limitations of force without legitimacy and authority without identification (Turner 2005). In the old view, authority is the capacity to influence, to produce intended effects in others' attitudes and behaviours, based on various kinds of resources.

This view draws on the most general way of understanding authority, as the capacity to cause or have effects on things and people, but we think it is highly misleading as a conception of social authority. It confuses authority over people (a kind of social domination) with authority through people. The theory of authority which flows from self-categorisation theory argues that social authority is the capacity to have effects on people and things through people, through being able to rely on, or get others to carry out one's will. Being able to stop somebody by shooting him or her is certainly authority to have an effect, but social authority is where one can get others to carry out the order. Social authority also is being able to stop someone through influence and persuasion rather than coercion — through ideas rather than force.

There are three processes of authority in the new view - persuasion, authority and coercion - and all three rest directly or indirectly on identity and the influence processes which flow from it. Persuasion directly reflects shared social identity, authority is leadership legitimated by ingroup norms, values and structure and the coercion of people against their will requires that there be coercive agents over whom the leader has influence and authority. Persuasion, authority and coercion flow from leaders, elites, institutions and authorities acting in line with the rules, laws, principles and beliefs that 'we are supposed to share'. Unlike in the traditional model of authority, where control of resources leads ...