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In an essay 800 words, you will explore the concept of authority.  Choose an example of authority (your textbook chapter 15 highlights many).  What sort of power does your example hold (also covered in chapter 15)?  How does that example keep power?  Has the example been challenged?   Be sure to demonstrate your understanding of key concepts covered under this topic.

Authority is all around us. It is an incredible force in our society.  Everyone reading this assignment has authority over others and is also under many forms of authority.  Watch the above video (it should stop at 3 minute 44 secconds)

The Milgram Study is one of the most famous studies in all of psychology, and it demonstrated that regular everyday people would comply with an authority figure even if it means going against their own moral values and harming others.

The study has been replicated over and over again in various ways. The results remain about the same. No matter what country or time period this has been tested in, full compliance has always hovered around 61 to 66%.  Be aware, that means that most humans are capable of harming or even killing another person under certain authority. 

Although this study is a psychological one, it has equal application to sociology. The Jewish holocaust that took place during WWII required the compliance of thousands of soldiers following Hitlers vision.  We are all susceptible to authority in ways that many of us would find upsetting. Authority is defined and supported by the norms of a social system and generally accepted as legitimate by those who participate in it. Most forms of authority are not attached to individuals, but rather to a social position, or status, that they occupy in a social system.

We tend to obey the orders of police officers, for example, not because of who they are as individuals, but because we accept their right to have power over us in certain situations and we assume others will support that right should we choose to challenge it.

Study materials:

Types of Legitimate Authority

• Authority is the justifiable right to exercise power. Charismatic authority is based on the personal appeal of an individual leader; traditional authority is based on appeals to the past or a long established way of doing things; and legal–rational authority is based on legal, impersonal rules that have been routinized and rationalized.
• Bureaucracy is a legal–rational organization or mode of administration that governs by rules and roles and emphasizes meritocracy.

Obedience to Authority

• The Milgram experiment tested people to see how far they would go in obeying an authority figure. The results showed that obedience to authority is a very powerful form of social control that can make “ordinary” people do unspeakable things.

Authority, Legitimacy, and the State

• Per Max Weber, power is the ability to carry out one’s will despite resistance and domination is the probability that a command with specific content will be obeyed by a given group of people. Weber also differentiated between domination by economic power and domination by authority, which is the willing obedience of the ruled to the commands of legitimate authority.
• Weber defined the state, the ultimate example of domination by authority, as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
• Coercion is the use of force, as opposed to authority, to get others to do what you want. Once a person or institution decides to use physical coercion, it loses all its legitimate authority.
• Most European states developed over the course of hundreds of years through a long series of fights over territorial boundaries, but many countries in the world have been somewhat arbitrarily “produced” through colonization and subsequent decisions by the influence of the international state system and the United Nations.
• The welfare state is a system in which the state is responsible for the welfare of its citizens. There are numerous theories about the origins of the welfare state, including the logic of industrialism thesis, neo-Marxist theory, and statist theories.
• Sociologist T. H. Marshall identified three types of citizenship rights—civil rights, political rights, and social rights.

Radical Power and Persuasion

• Steven Lukes describes three dimensions of power: the first dimension has to do with outright conflict over something that results in one side “winning”; the second dimension has to do with power that is so imposing that it seems pointless to resist; and the third dimension has to do with averting conflict altogether by limiting people’s choices or influencing their preferences.
• Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem shows how difficult it is for people to express their true, first-choice desires when selecting between more than two alternatives. When there are more than two choices, strategic voting quickly comes into play. To avoid this and to have more control over the outcome, authorities will try to limit the set of choices to two and then influence voters to make the “right” choice.
• Hard power is the use of military or economic force to influence behavior; soft power is the use of cultural or ideological means to influence behavior.
• Thomas Hobbes believed that the state of nature is chaos and that people submit to authority (the state) as a means of survival. John Locke argued that people live in peace and equality in the state of nature but that they ultimately submit to authority (the state) for financial reasons, for example, to help iron out disagreements about property.
• Barrington Moore has argued that the key factor for the development of a democratic government is a strong business class (or bourgeoisie) that can stand up to the land-owning, noble class.
• Using game theory, other scholars have argued that the masses, in resisting the domination of the elites with the threat of revolution, have a brief window of opportunity when they can try to change the distribution of political power to bring about democratization.
• The theory of collective action simply states that it is harder to organize larger groups than smaller ones because less accountability exists in larger groups and individuals in larger groups may find it easier to slack off and not do their part.
• In the United States, power is shared between three branches of government as well as between the federal government and the many state governments. Other important actors in our political system are the bureaucracy, political parties, and interest groups.

Beyond Strawberry and Vanilla: Political Participation in Modern Democracies

• Political participation is any activity that has the intent or effect of influencing government action. Studies consistently show great differences in rates and types of political participation across social groups in the United States, with those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder participating more and those at the bottom less.
• The civic volunteerism model of political participation focuses on individual-level traits that affect how politically active a person is. Some scholars reject this model and point to the American party system and political elites as being responsible for low political participation by instituting, or being slow to do away with, barriers that hinder citizen involvement.

Social Deviance

• Social deviance is any transgression of socially established norms. Minor transgressions of these norms can be described as informal deviance. Formal deviance, or crime, involves the violation of laws.
• Social norms and the punishments for violating them change over time and from place to place.

Functionalist Approaches to Deviance and Social Control

• Social cohesion refers to the way people form social bonds, relate to each other, and get along on a day-to-day basis.
• Émile Durkheim theorized that social cohesion is established either through mechanical solidarity (based on the sameness of society’s parts or members) or organic solidarity (based on the interdependence of specialized parts or members).
• Punitive justice is focused on making the violator suffer and thus defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior, while rehabilitative justice examines the specific circumstances of an individual transgressor and attempts to find ways to rehabilitate him 
• Social control is the set of mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals. Normative compliance is the act of abiding by society’s norms or simply following the rules of group life.
• Informal social sanctions—unspoken rules and expectations about people’s behavior—help maintain a base level of order and cohesion in society and form a foundation for formal social control—laws, the authority of police officers, and so on.
• In effect, the existence of deviants helps keep society together as it reinforces notions of what is correct or acceptable in a given group.
• Emile Durkheim’s theory of suicide proposed that suicide is a product of social forces, depending on a person’s level of social integration and social regulation.
• Robert Merton’s strain theory argues that deviance occurs when a society does not give all its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals.

Symbolic Interactionist Theories of Deviance

• Symbolic interactionists take a micro view of society, examining the beliefs and assumptions people bring to their everyday interactions in order to find the causes or explanations for deviance.
• According to labeling theory, people unconsciously notice how others see or label them, and over time they internalize these labels and come to accept them as “truth.” People then behave in accordance to expectations surrounding the label they’ve been assigned or that’s been assigned to another. In this way deviance is a social construct.
• Primary deviance is the first act of rule breaking that may result in the rule breaker being labeled “deviant” and thus influence how people think about and act toward him or her.
• Secondary deviance refers to acts of rule breaking that occur after primary deviance and as a result of a person’s new deviant label.
• A stigma is a negative social label that changes your behavior towards a person as well as changing that person’s self-concept and social identity. Stigmas have serious consequences in terms of the opportunities made available—or rather, that are not made available—to people in a stigmatized group.
• Philip Zimbardo’s broken windows theory of deviance explains how social context and social cues impact the way individuals act. People who wouldn’t dare exhibit a certain behavior in one social context might do so in another context where the behavior seems more permissible.

Crime

• Street crime generally refers to crime committed in public and is often associated with violence, gangs, and poverty; white-collar crime is committed by a professional against a corporation, agency, or other business; corporate crime is a type of white-collar crime committed by the officers or executives of a company.
• Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s differential opportunity theory states that in addition to the legitimate economic structure, there is an illegitimate opportunity structure that is unequally distributed across social classes. In order to reduce participation in that illegitimate economy, you have to raise the costs of participating in it. Two measures that do so are tougher sentencing laws and community policing.
• It can be difficult to measure crime rates over time for a variety of reasons, including changes in how crimes are defined, fluctuations in whether people report crimes, and even, in the case of murders, improvements in medical technology.

Crime Reduction

• Deterrence theory is a philosophy of criminal justice based on the notion that crime results from a rational calculation of its costs and benefits. According to this theory stiffer penalties, increased prison terms, and stricter parole guidelines should thus help reduce crime.
• There are numerous unintended consequences of deterrence theory that may ultimately result in increased recidivism. Recidivism occurs when a person who has been involved in the criminal justice system reverts back to criminal behavior.
• While commitment to a total institution such as a prison or mental health institution is supposed to help an individual learn to function as a productive member of society, there are many aspects of total institutions that lead to the opposite result.
• Michel Foucault argues that penal practices are indicative of how social control is exercised outside of prisons and that various modes of discipline are used in society at large to monitor, examine, and order our lives and behavior.
• Since the 1970s, the pendulum seems to have swung from a more rehabilitative sense of justice to a more punitive one in the United States, as evidenced by historically high rates of incarceration. The consequences of this mass incarceration include staggering costs, the disenfranchisement of millions of former felons, and a disproportionately high rate of imprisonment for black males, which has a ripple effect throughout black communities.