Childhood origins of beliefs about institutional authority

✍ Scribed by Nicholas Emler

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 776 KB
• Volume: 1992
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1520-3247
• DOI: 10.1002/cd.23219925607

✦ Synopsis

The evolution of the contemporary nation state has depended on the parallel evolution of forms of social coordination and control that extend beyond face-to-face relations among people who are related by blood, marriage, or personal acquaintance. The classic analysis of these evolutions and of the formal elements in social relationships was provided by Max Weber (1947). For Weber, the key process was the "bureaucratization" of relationships. Weber's point was that this process is a peculiarly modem experience; only from the nineteenth century onward have bureaucracies pervaded so many areas of life. This transformation in the relationship between individual and society rendered accommodation to bureaucracy and its requirements central to the process of political socialization in modern times.

Weber argued that the bureaucracy differs from other kinds of social organization, notably those based on ties of personal loyalty and those based on respect for custom and tradition, in the nature of the authority relations that underpin it, relations that he characterized as "legal-rational." His analysis of this form of authority emphasizes the following four features: (1) All positions of formal authority exist within a rationally organized hierarchyan institution or organization-and have no legitimacy except in terms of their positions in this system. (2) Each position always has specific, explicit, and formally defined and limited spheres of jurisdiction. (3) Holders of this authority can only legitimately .exercise it in accordance with formally defined, impersonal, and impartial criteria, and not in the service of personal

The original research described in this chapter was supported by ESRC Grant No. I 10230013 and CNRS Grant No. 95 5118.