Authority

John Wilson
Table of contents

Authority will be defined here as a form of legitimation which comes to be worked out on an interactional, social, and cultural level. The most obvious example of authority as legitimation is the law itself. The police, the courts, the judiciary are said to have a legal authority. This is also manifested, however, in many other levels of interaction. Parents, for example, have a legal responsibility, at a number of levels, for their children; in institutions and hospitals doctors will have, again at different levels, responsibility for their patients, and in the classroom teachers operate with a legal authority in relation to their pupils. These are examples of institutional and social allocations of authority in law, and hence legitimation seems an appropriate term.

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