The decline of authority and the rise of managerialism

Abstract

Managerialism, as an ideology and management practice, is grounded on a theory of authority. Such grounding has been neglected in the relevant literature since scholars have generally treated authority as a form of power and have ignored the view that authority is also a source of power. Following a review of the construct of authority as it appears in the works of noted social psychologists and critical management authors, this essay argues that Carl Friedrich’s theory of authority as reasoned elaboration reveals two manifestations: authoritativeness and authoritarianism. It is argued here that managerialism draws on authoritarian ideas and practices, whereas management, as traditionally conceived, draws on authoritativeness. To promote authoritative management, therefore, is to resist (authoritarian) managerialism since authority redirects power to technical experts and professional colleagues and thereby limits managerial power.

Introduction

In his survey of the ideological context of employment relations, Godard (2011) identified five perspectives on management, which (taken together) have a left-right political character. On the left of the spectrum, he placed radical Marxism, then (moving incrementally to the right) liberal reformism, orthodox pluralism, managerialism and finally neoliberalism. What differentiates orthodox pluralists from managerialist scholars, according to Godard, is the way they conceive of conflict in the employment relationship. While orthodox pluralist scholars consider that conflict is legitimate and requires governance mechanisms, their managerialist counterparts hold it to be illegitimate. Specifically, managerialists regard overt manifestations of conflict in the employment relationship as the result of a misunderstanding on the part of employees or other organisational dysfunctions, including suboptimal management practices. Further (and still according to Godard), the former position characterises the ideology of industrial relations scholarship, the latter that of the human resources management literature. The success of human resources management, as a body of ideas and practices, and the progressive adoption by managers of the managerialist perspective throughout the second half of the 20th century (Clegg, 2014; Dobbin and Sutton, 1998; Doran, 2016; Klikauer, 2019; Shepherd, 2018; Weil, 2014) is compatible with Godard’s (2011) analysis.

Notwithstanding its current prevalence, managerialism is rarely promoted as such. To those who endorse it, managerialism is an effective and efficient approach for the reform and running of workplaces based on the principle that organisations pursue goals defined by managers on behalf of all corporate stakeholders (Halligan, 1991; Lee and Lawrence, 2015; Paterson, 1988). Further, managers are equipped with the sort of specialised knowledge and skill that enables them to devise and implement value-free means for achieving relevant objectives.

To critics, the self-referential aspect of a definition according to which managers know best how to achieve the goals they define reveals managerialism as a self-promoting ideology (Klikauer, 2013; Locke and Spender, 2011). To illustrate their criticism, these scholars point to the way managerialists have entrenched themselves in all corners of the power structure of firms, museums, government bodies, universities, hospitals and other public administrations (Baddeley, 2013; Gordon and Whitchurch, 2010; Overeem and Tholen, 2011; Rhodes, 1996; Stolz, 2017). So conceived, managerialism is encountered wherever ‘management, as a form and as a process, becomes an end in itself, a self-serving entity’ (Barberis, 2013: 327). Further, commentators have noted that although managers are purportedly working in a post-growth era (i.e. in a context of saturated markets, at least in developed economies), they continue to add layers of technocracy to their employing firms, thereby consolidating managerialism (Blühdorn, 2017; Meyer, 2020).

Beyond sprawling technocracy, one of the most notable manifestations of managerialism has been a progressive concentration of power in the hands of professional managers who move between industry sectors (Abbott, 2015; Barberis, 2013; Klikauer, 2013; Locke and Spender, 2011). As executives have secured ever more power and income, middle management has diminished in its relative size and power base (Ehrenreich, 2006; Thomas and Dunkerley, 1999; Wheatley, 1992). Simultaneously, the authority of experts and non-management professionals has eroded (Lynch, 2014; Shepherd, 2018; Smith and Hussey, 2010; Vincent, 2011; Ward, 2011). While these manifestations of managerialism have received sustained attention from researchers, no theory of managerialism, that is, no analysis of its underlying modus operandi, has been proposed to date.

Since managerialism entails, in addition to a possible ideological commitment, a form of management, analysing it requires a focus on management as a human encounter. Indeed, as an abstract noun, ‘management’ denotes a social relationship between managers and the individuals and resources they oversee. As such, analysing management requires a conceptual scheme in which the overseers and those they oversee are established as reference points between which ‘management’ finds its meaning. To that purpose, social psychologists have studied, theoretically and experimentally, such relational concepts as conformity, obedience, legitimacy, power, influence and authority. Yet, these elements can be present and management absent and none is essential for its presence (Spillane and Martin, 2005). The challenge for management theorists has been to agree on foundational components which, if correctly identified, provide substance for empirical inquiry. In the relevant literature, two popular research themes have been power and authority.

As Taylor and Van Every (2014: xiii–xvii) have noted, although authority is a concept central to organisational life, the management and organisational communication literature is uninformative. Specifically, Taylor and Van Every (2014: xviii) observe that when authors purport to analyse authority, they typically analyse power. In their works, the two notions are generally linked and not distinguished, resulting in a paucity of empirical studies of authority (as distinct from power) in the management literature. Management historian Kiechel (2012: 73) concurs, commenting that the question of the nature and source of authority, although typically present in the background of management theory, has not received much attention from researchers. Herbst (2006: 285) also noted this neglect when she commented that ‘On the nature of authority – what it actually is – we are fairly silent these days, typically unwilling to open what we suspect is a rather densely packed can of slippery worms’. It is patent, she added, that the study of authority in various academic disciplines has become ‘oddly unfashionable’.

If analysing management requires a theory of authority, so does studying managerialism since it is a particular form of management practice. Surprisingly, while early analysts of management from the 1930s to the 1960s considered authority in some detail (e.g. Barnard, 1938; Bendix, 1956; Follett, 1926), the role of authority in managerialism is not discussed or even recognised. For example, recent books on managerialism do not list ‘authority’ in their indexes (e.g. Considine and Painter, 1997; Enteman, 1993; Klikauer, 2013; Locke and Spender, 2011; Parker, 2002; Rees and Rodley, 1995). Treating managerialism as an ideal type, Barberis (2013) does not discuss whether or how managerialism reconciles with authority. Similarly silent is Klikauer, 2013, 2019: 2–3), who argues that managerialism is the (authoritarian) imposition of managerial techniques, thus implicitly equating authority with legitimate power. Rarely explicitly acknowledged, such a view of managerialism as resting on and manifesting in authoritarian practices is in fact widely accepted (e.g. Locke and Spender, 2011; Parker, 2002; Shepherd, 2018).

The central thesis of this essay is that the rise of managerialism is best analysed as a manifestation of the decline of managerial authority and the rise of managerial power within workplaces. This decline, it is argued, has remained largely unnoticed by scholars because of the widespread conflation of power and authority in the management literature. It follows from this thesis that resisting managerialism requires two undertakings. First, it necessitates re-establishing the conceptual distinction between power and authority. As will be explained, this distinction is not to be identified with that of Aristotelian origin and taken up notably (if in differing directions) by Grotius, Hobbes and Spinoza, between potentia and potestas. Indeed, speaking broadly, these thinkers saw potentia as power (capacity to act) and potestas as legitimised or lawful power, whether realised or not (Campos, 2012: 89–101). Second, resisting managerialism requires rehabilitating authoritative management as a protection against authoritarian practices. In other words, authoritative management is a defence against managerialism because authority redirects power to technical experts and professionals and thereby limits managerial power (Barley, 1996; Hirschhorn, 1998). Although he has been often misunderstood on this point, Drucker (1972, 1974) did not argue otherwise when he insisted that managerial authority emerges from argumentation and debate as opposed to coercion and authoritarian direction.

It is not a required undertaking of the present essay to ascertain why, from the mid-1970s, research into authority has been replaced by research into power. Nor is it necessary to inquire into the several ways in which power has been conceptualised in the management literature. Authors have already offered such ambitious reviews: notable examples are Anderson and Brion (2014), Fleming and Spicer (2014) and Sturm and Antonakis (2015). Rather, to advance this essay’s argument, a brief history of the concept of authority from ancient Greece to critical management authors, by way of Weber, Barnard, Simon, French and Raven and Arendt is offered. This history shows that authority has two faces: a form of power (as in ‘the authorities have decided to close borders’) and a source of power (as in ‘I do as she says because she is an authority in her field’). It is further argued that this dual nature has remained largely unrecognised in the recent literature, even in the works of noted authors.

One author who did recognise the dual nature of authority is German American political theorist Friedrich (1958, 1963, 1972). An exposition of Friedrich’s analysis of authority, implicitly accepted in public administration literature (Plant, 2011) but largely ignored in current management scholarship, is given after this article’s historical overview. This exposition shows that Friedrich’s perspective provides a parsimonious solution to the problem of disentangling power from authority, an exercise which, in turn, sheds light on the decline of authority and indicates why such decline accompanied the rise of managerialism. The conclusion summarises the overall argument and adumbrates its implications beyond the realm of work organisations.

The two faces of authority: A brief history

Management authors have generally conflated authority and power. Specifically, their standard approach has been to attribute indifferently to authority two meanings, one derived from Weber (1947) and based on legitimate domination, the other derived from Barnard (1938) and based on subordinate concession, or authorisation. Robbins et al. (2018: 656) offer an example of this equivocation when they define authority as ‘the rights inherent in a managerial position to tell people what to do and to expect them to do it’. Such a conflation of the two meanings is also frequent in social psychology, with Gilovitch et al. (2019: 428) holding that ‘authority is power that derives from institutionalised roles or arrangements’. In both cases, authority is equated with power; a management regime based on such an understanding of authority is ‘authoritarian’, in the sense that managers’ right to command is based on their role in a formal hierarchy.

In some cases, labelling management as authoritarian is noncontroversial, because some authoritarian managers perform effectively and thereby demonstrate their power without being authorised to act as they do. However, if they seek authority as authorisation, managers require reference to others, because they cannot authorise themselves. They must have authority conceded by colleagues and such concession entails considerations of what is acceptable to them. More generally, the exercise of power is bound to affect others who will assess its consequences and evaluate their desirability and acceptability. This evaluation establishes the inseparability, both theoretical and practical, of power and authority and their centrality in management and leadership relationships (Joullié et al., 2021; Spillane and Joullié, 2015). However, this inseparability does not imply that the two constructs should not, or cannot, be meaningfully distinguished. A historical perspective on the development of the two concepts assists in such a delineation effort.

Rome and ancient Greece

Most English political concepts are drawn from Latin, including ‘government’, ‘justice’ and ‘authority’. The Romans themselves imported these ideas from ancient Greece (Kristeller, 1979). However, in the transfer of abstractions from classical Greek to the more practical Latin, conceptual subtleties were often glossed over. It is fortunate, therefore, that ‘authority’ has similar derivations in both classical Greek and Latin.

The ancient Greeks thought of authority as the ability to start discussions and bring them to conclusion through argumentation. For example, whereas in Homer arché signifies ‘initiative’ which ‘gets things done’ and is manifested as a cause of activity in others, Aristotle wrote of the ‘double power’ of arché, that of initiating matters and bringing them to completion (Barker, 1968). In ancient Greek literature, arché is also frequently used to designate ‘rule’ or ‘government’, since the term archon refers to ruler or governor. This latter use implies that arché expresses both the exercise of initiative and the voluntary response to (and acceptance of) such initiatives. It is noteworthy that this habit of applying arché to those in positions of power amounts to conflating authority and power.

The translation of arché into Latin confirmed the conceptual link with initiative but was ambivalent about representing authority as power. This ambiguity set the pattern for authority to be regarded as a special form of power. Indeed, in most Roman writing, authority is firmly linked with command positions, reflecting the political authoritarianism of an era in which rulers held that might constitutes right. However, the Latin translators of arché emphasised initiative rather than power; the term they retained derives from auctor (originator, promoter, author) and auctoritas, which refers to producing, inventing or innovating in the public arena. This Roman fusion of authority and power illustrates the fact that auctoritas supplements an act of will by adding reasons to it. In Latin, authority is then more than advice, yet less than command. In this sense, it is advice which cannot be properly disregarded, such as when a doctor advises a patient (Friedrich, 1972: 219).

Following Roman practice, from the early 14th century, authority was associated with individuals who were recognised as possessing legitimate knowledge, especially of a religious kind (Hall, 1997). This use gave rise to the notion of an ‘authoritative viewpoint’. By the 19th century, this meaning was linked to that of ‘expert’, a person who is regarded as an authority in a certain field. However, Ginsberg (2016: 92) notes that ‘if authority weakened in relation to knowledge, it strengthened in relation to power and from the 16th century onwards it is a key political term in a sense that the [Oxford English Dictionary] defines it as “power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience”’. With this change of emphasis, the scene was set for enduring ambiguity about the two faces of authority: authoritativeness and authoritarian.

Max Weber and Chester Barnard

Weber (1947) argued that the concept of power is the fundamental construct in social sciences. However, he came to regard power as too protean a notion to be useful because all human encounters can be judged to put certain individuals in a position to impose their will on others. He therefore turned his attention to more specific relationships, notably domination, rulership and legitimacy. Weber’s focus is visible in his preference for Herrschaft over Autorität, which shows that his theory is a theory of (legitimate) rule rather than mere power. Weber’s preferred terminology also implies that to translate Herrschaft directly into authority is mistaken because it creates the (misleading) impression that to have a position of formal power is, ipso facto, to have authority. This conflation is far from Weber’s thought since he considered a power structure to be a system of rule that does not require the assent of those dominated (the confusion surrounding the meaning of Herrschaft diminishes if is translated as ‘rule’).

Weber (1947) conceived of legitimate rule as a relationship between two parties. In management, these parties are managers and subordinates and the central factor in the relationship is the meaning that the parties attribute to it. An essential component of that meaning is that managers not only issue commands, but they also claim the right to do so. Similarly, the obedience of subordinates obtains from their assessment that managers have a right to issue commands and control them within specified parameters. As such, for Weber, unlike the traditional and charismatic claims to legitimacy which are based on appeals to individuals, legal-rational legitimacy is embedded in the social order. It extends to individuals only insofar as they occupy legitimised roles and, even there, their powers are limited to a ‘sphere of competence’ which is defined within that social order.

Weber (1947) made rationality a basis for role legitimacy only and considered all personal legitimacy to be based on non-rational criteria. Further, he insisted that there is a fundamental difference between a claim to legitimacy based on technical competence and one based on personal qualities. He argued that charismatics derive their influence from exceptional personal characteristics of a non-rational nature (one can think of the Reverend Jim Jones and his suicide cult to illustrate Weber’s point). Yet it is apparent that some managers secure a sizeable following not because of charismatic qualities, but because they propose to solve problems with which others are grappling (such as a competent project manager would in a contemporary IT firm). In other words, Weber’s analysis does not easily account for managers who are followed because of their superior ability to address challenging problems. Following individuals because they can resolve dilemmas is rational; doing so does not automatically impose charismatic status upon them but simply indicates that they are authorities in relevant matters (Andreski, 1988).

Opposing Weber is Barnard (1938) who emphasised authority as the foundational concept in management. Authority, Barnard argued, has two aspects: a subjective element represented by the personal acceptance of a directive as authoritative, and an objective element embodied in the content of the communication by virtue of which that communication is accepted. To appreciate this distinction, consider the case of the rookie police officer listening to his sergeant whom he admires and respects and who is also convinced that the substance of what his superior is telling him (on this occasion) is justified. Hence, for Barnard, authority lies with those to whom it applies, because it represents the willingness and capacity of individuals to submit to the necessities of organisation. Accordingly, a manager does not have authority. Rather, authority rests with organisational communications and their assent from those to whom they are directed.

Barnard (1938) believed that assent is a necessary and sufficient condition for a management relationship to be classed as one of authority. This position is, however, untenable. A more accurate analysis reveals that if assent is indeed a necessary condition for the management relationship to be classed as one of authority (which, for Barnard, implies willingness), it is not a sufficient condition. For example, if a manager (A) threatens a colleague (B) with dismissal if B does not behave illegally as instructed, B may assent to A’s demands, but it cannot be claimed that A is exercising authority. The denial rests on the argument that B’s situation was created by A’s use of a form of power which runs counter to authority.

As a practicing manager, Barnard was struck by the frequency with which managerial directives are disobeyed. This observation led him to ask how it is possible for managers to secure consistent and sustained cooperation if the acceptance of authority rests with subordinate colleagues. His answer is that those who gain advantages from the organisation’s rewards actively support the maintenance of authority therein. That is, for Barnard (1938: 168–169), the informal shared view of the work community makes individuals reluctant to question authority that is within what he called their ‘zone of indifference’. In this zone, employees uncritically accept orders because such missives are deemed to be consistent with the tasks implicitly accepted when they became employees. The formal instantiation of this principle is the commonly accepted, but nonetheless mistaken, view that authority comes from above. Seen in this light, authority is another name for the willingness to submit to the necessities of organisations. Conversely, disobedience of an instruction by an employee to whom it is addressed is an effective denial of its authority and amounts to challenging the organisation’s structure, processes and objectives.

Weber (1947) acknowledged that assent is a factor in relationships of Herrschaft, even when it rests on coercion. On his view, such a situation is an outlier case, because he held that there is always an irreducible element of voluntary compliance in authoritarian relationships. However, what is an extreme case for Weber is the fundamental nature of authority for Barnard (1938: 164), for whom the army is the ‘greatest of all democracies’ because soldiers personally decide to follow orders. Barnard combined this position with his view of the ‘fiction of superior authority’ and thus rejected traditional models of authority based on (legitimate) power. As Perrow (1986: 81) noted though, the fiction of the superior authority is ‘hardly a fiction if one can be fired for disobeying orders or shot for not moving ahead on orders’.

In summary, while Weber was ambivalent about the power of bureaucracy, Barnard was optimistic because, for him, bureaucracy is essentially a cooperative, democratic and benign contribution to human progress. In Weber’s case, bureaucracies are power structures that are legitimated by rational values, run by technical experts and defined by the principle of hierarchy. In Barnard’s case, bureaucracies are communicative processes which apprise managers of relevant information and inform them of their responsibilities; in his analysis, neither legitimacy nor hierarchy plays a significant role. However, by making acceptance of managerial communications crucial, Barnard ignored the difference between ‘authority’ based on coercion and authority based on the rational evaluation of communications. There is no place in Barnard’s theory for rational argumentation.

Herbert Simon

Although there are similarities between Weber’s and Barnard’s theories of authority, the general tendency in the management literature is to see them as champions of incompatible perspectives. One exception to this observation is Simon (1976), who argued for a convergence of Weber’s and Barnard’s views. For Simon, such an attempt is possible because Weber’s and Barnard’s distinctions between power and authority are phenomenological. Indeed, for both authors, the reasons for obedience stem from subordinates’ perceptions of the managerial role as legitimate rather than coercive.

In line with his general commitment to logical positivism, Simon (1976) believed that authority should be defined objectively and assessed using behaviouristic protocols. Specifically, he argued that it is only when an unambiguously observable and codified interaction between a manager and subordinates occurs that authority exists: authority exists when managers command with the expectation that the command will be obeyed. Subordinates, in obeying the order, hold in abeyance their own critical judgements for evaluating it. Whilst Simon’s theory begs the question concerning the motivation behind the suspension of critical evaluation, his definition embraces the reality of organisational elements and corporate goals, in the name of which employees defer critical evaluation.

Authority, for Simon (1976: 151–152), is one of several forms of influence. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it does not necessarily seek to convince subordinates but gain their acquiescence. That is, when decisions and commands are questioned, it is the authority figure who has the last word in the disagreement. Elsewhere, Simon (1976: 125) indicated that authority is a kind of power, ‘the power to make decisions which guide the actions of another’.

In claiming that authority is a form of influence and power, Simon paradoxically drew attention to a deficiency in his own conception. Specifically, Simon’s view does not allow distinctions to be made between authority, power and influence. Yet not only are these distinctions desirable considering the use of these terms in everyday language, but they are also required. Indeed, rigorous analysis necessitates that categories be distinct, their population specifiable and their use consistent. Moreover, Simon’s conception does not account for the possibility of a gradation of acceptance. For example, if a kitchen hand is asked by his fast-food manager to precook thirty burgers even though no such customer order has been received, he may share her desire to anticipate the evening peak hour, but not to prepare so many meals in advance. In other words, it is possible (in fact commonplace) that employees only partially embrace the reasoning which underpins their managers’ directions. Yet Simon wanted to exclude from his notion of authority those situations where subordinates examine and evaluate the merits of a manager’s proposals and become convinced that the proposals should be carried out. If Simon were correct, circumstances where subordinates give independent evaluation of, and agreement with, a manager’s orders would not be instances of authority, even though subordinates would carry out those orders.

In his book, Simon (1976) adopted at least five definitions of authority (p. 11, 22, 125, 128, 151). Following Barnard, he ended up introducing in his model the subjective reactions of subordinates, implying that authority is present where obedience anticipates as well as follows commands (in which case, observed behaviour is not sufficient to demonstrate an authority relationship, contrary to Simon’s behaviouristic premises). Further, Simon followed Weber and Barnard in identifying confidence (technical skill) and legitimisation where authority is present, adding social approval together with sanctions and rewards. As with Barnard, these additions conflate authority with power.

Like Simon’s, attempts to define authority in purely objective terms inevitably lead to an overgeneralisation of the concept and gloss over explanatory distinctions in human behaviour. Nevertheless, Simon set a trend which most social psychologists have followed when they commenced their analyses with the inclusive notion of power and attempted to derive the concept of authority from it (Cartwright, 1959; French and Raven, 1959). Understandably so: as Cartwright (1959: 184) noted, ‘the general trend toward defining [power] so as to include many forms of social influence [including authority] ought to reduce substantially social psychologists’ reluctance to employ it in describing social interaction’. There are, however, risks in equating social power with authority. These risks are particularly visible in the well-known typology of French and Raven (1959).

French and Raven

According to French and Raven (1959), social power comes in five forms: referent (or attraction); reward; coercive; legitimate; expert. Although widely and uncritically quoted in management textbooks (e.g. Bolman and Deal, 2017; Robbins et al., 2018), this decomposition of power’s bases is not satisfactory. Indeed, to be independent, the five categories must be operationally defined narrowly and mutually exclusively. However, French and Raven did not respect this imperative. The lack of independence in their categories (bases) can be seen in the relationship between referent, expert and legitimate power in both the theoretical and empirical literature (e.g. Lyngstad, 2017). Further, reward and coercive power do not depend on the consent of the subordinate party, whereas legitimate, expert and referent power cannot operate without the active concurrence of subordinates. This difference shows that French and Raven’s five bases of social power reduce to two categories: ‘power’ (coercive and reward) and ‘authority’ (referent, expert and legitimate).

Furthermore, French and Raven’s (1959: 151) use of the term ‘legitimate’ is confusing. Indeed, legitimate power, for them, arises because one group of people believes that another party has a right to prescribe behaviour (in their words: ‘legitimate power is based on the perception by [person A] that [person B] has a legitimate right to prescribe behavior for him’). This definition implies a normative basis (typically moral) and thus allows for the term ‘right’ to be considered phenomenologically (i.e. subjectively): what is a ‘right’ prescription for one individual may not be so for another. However, French and Raven’s definition also allows ‘right’ to be received in a narrower, legalistic sense. Since French and Raven distinguished legitimate power from referent power (which includes subjective elements), it is safe to conclude that they employed the term ‘legitimate’ in its second, more exclusive sense. Given such context, to avoid confusion, a better expression would have perhaps been ‘legal power’. Whatever the case, French and Raven’s conceptual imprecision has resulted in theorists often defining authority as legitimate power and thus identifying authority with formal power. This identification in turn leads to the view that referent and expert power are somehow of a different order to the notion of authority, muddying further the conceptual waters. One author who sought to clarify them and distinguish authority from power is Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt

In a noted essay ‘What is Authority?’, Arendt (1961) discussed not what authority is but what it was. Indeed, on her view, 20th-century Western society is in the middle of a crisis triggered by the disappearance of authority. She argued that this vanishing is itself the consequence of the decline, almost to the point of extinction, of authority’s two historical sources: religion (which has been secularised) and tradition (which is seen as outdated). Manifestations of these phenomena include people losing their sense of life purpose and the pervasive impression that society is bereft of order and stability (Arendt, 1961: 95).

Contrasting authority with power, Arendt (1961: 93) noted that authority ‘precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed’. She (Arendt, 1961: 102–103) observed that ‘if violence fulfills the same function as authority – namely, makes people obey – then violence is authority’. Indeed, for her (Arendt, 1961: 106), ‘authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom’. However, Arendt (1961: 93) added that authority ‘is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance’. This dual incompatibility (with both power and reason) of authority allows Arendt to argue against a return to the ancient Greek conceptions of Plato and Aristotle.

For Plato, Arendt (1961: 107–110) explained, authority cannot come from persuasion and argument. Indeed, if persuasion and argument could establish authority, Socrates’ trial (which saw him receive the death penalty for allegedly corrupting Athens’ youth) would have consecrated him as an exemplary citizen. Rather, Platonic authority, in Arendt’s reading of The Republic, comes from truth, because the self-evident nature of truth compels the mind in ways that are stronger than persuasion and argument. However, only the few (the philosopher-kings) can know and thus be subject to the authority of the truth; the multitude, which is easily swayed by myths, cannot be trusted to do the same. Ultimately, Arendt concluded, the establishment of Platonic authority requires violence (the same conclusion obtains from Plato’s later attempts to ground authority on laws, which will inevitably have to be enforced).

Aristotle’s solution to the problem of establishing authority fares no better than Plato’s in Arendt’s (1961: 118–119) analysis. Indeed, just like Plato’s, Aristotelian authority assumes a division between rulers and the ruled, with educators (and by extension, experts and scientists) playing the role of the philosopher-kings by imposing knowledge on their students. The violence inherent in Greek authority, Arendt (1961: 120–123) held, is best understood when viewed against the Roman conception. Specifically, Roman authority did not require coercion because it was conceived of as flowing from the city’s sacralised ancestors (Romulus in particular) to its citizens by way of the Senate. That is, Rome was thought as not having been simply built but authored and this glorious foundation infused Roman life with a collective spirit that guided its development. Roman authority thus united past and future generations through the acceptance of, and commitment to, a mythical vision.

In summary, on Arendt’s account, authority has permanently died out. Further, neither truth, nor persuasion, nor argument, nor science will assist Western society in overcoming the existential crisis that the loss of authority triggered. Similarly, religion and tradition will not remedy the malaise since they are no longer authoritative. To alleviate the disappearance of authority, Arendt (1961: 136ff) placed her hopes in modern revolutions. Indeed, in the last pages of her essay, she argued that the American Revolution, with its ideals of freedom and justice enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, exemplifies the sort of political event capable of providing the foundations for society’s rejuvenation.

Irrespective of the merits of Arendt’s overall thesis, her conclusion underlines that her ‘authority’ only tangentially (i.e. terminologically) connects with ‘authority’ as understood by Weber, Simon and French and Raven. Indeed, her effort to distinguish authority from power lead her to divorce the two concepts entirely. Furthermore, she argued that authority is part foundational myth and part political vision but did not identify a psychological process (such as reason or persuasion) ensuring its acceptance. Arendt’s conception embeds ideals that bring citizens together and ultimately create social cohesion, but she did not explain why people should embrace them. However, and whatever Arendt’s authority is precisely, her (somewhat self-contradicting) argument to the effect that establishing authority by way of argument, reason and knowledge entails oppression has not been without legacy. It has notably survived in critical management studies.

Critical management studies

Since their inception in the early 1990s, critical management studies have produced a multifaceted body of scholarship that resists simple classification. Despite the diversity of the phenomena they research, critical scholars share a concern to reveal the noxious psychological, social and environmental consequences of firms, organisational life and economic systems. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, critical authors generally conceive of administrations, hospitals, prisons, universities and private corporations as not just institutions but structures sustained by the generation of power. From this perspective, such institutions are ideology driven. As such, they are oppressive and dehumanising in nature despite their purported contributions to society or the humane (and often team-based) processes they ostensibly adopt as alternatives to traditional command-and-control power structures (Barker, 1993; Grey and Willmott, 2005; Joullié and Gould, 2021).

Another precept shared by most critical management authors stems from the view, of poststructuralist origin, that language is itself a structure (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Green and Li, 2011). Accordingly, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, spelling and symbols do not liberate through the acts of the (self-)expression they make possible. Rather, these elements oppress and alienate, in that individuals must invoke language to reflect on themselves and other phenomena. Even logic and rationality, since they require and proceed through symbols, are suspected of being vehicles of domination and dehumanisation (Appelrouth and Edles, 2011). Applied to organisation studies, this reasoning reveals that management theories, concepts, processes, discourses and phrases (e.g. the expression ‘human resources’) are instruments of enslavement that turn organisations into psychic prisons (Barker, 1993; Morgan, 2006). Further, by way of ever more pervasive organisational communications, products and practices, managerial discourses creep out of corporations and colonise society. In so doing, they corrupt the educational system, invade stealthily people’s thinking and ultimately threaten democracy (Deetz, 1992). Managerial authority, since it is essentially discourse-based, belongs to the corporate-managerial arsenal and is not grounded in objective, value-free and rational knowledge. Rather, it is an auxiliary to power, one of the means through which managers dominate, manipulate and control employees. As Adler et al. (2007: 136) note, ‘Power within firms is not merely an overlay on a rational authority structure: the firm is essentially an exercise of coercive power’.

Scholars embracing the perspective advanced by the Montréal School of organisational communication have sought to complement the conception of authority as a purely managerial phenomenon (Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009; Taylor and Van Every, 2014). For such researchers, organisations are realised, experienced and identified primarily in, and thus constituted by, communicative events and processes (Kärreman, 2001). These events and processes entail such elements as conversations, symbols, metaphors, buildings and other artefacts, each considered as a ‘text’ that organisational members ‘read’ (Cooren et al., 2011; Putman and Nicotera, 2009). On these bases, authority is a process which authors organisational members’ legitimacy, identity and purpose (Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011; Taylor, 2011). Such outcomes are not fixed, however. For example, collaborative work is an organisational encounter in which authoring and de-authoring processes play out, creating and erasing lines of authority, defining and redefining how work is to be accomplished (Koschmann and Burk, 2016).

Further, scholars aligned with the Montréal School conceive of texts and communicative events as performative in the sense that their mere realisation and existence produce results independently of those who create, enact or read them. As such, and according to Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), agency is not exclusively a property of living systems but also a feature of texts and communicative events. This view implies that communications (broadly conceived), symbols, abstractions and material objects are all authoritative texts (Kuhn, 2008). They possess and exert authority, which is manifested when they are exhibited, referred to or invoked during conversations; Benoit-Barné and Cooren (2009) call such processes ‘presentification’. Authoritative texts also act through individuals, as is the case for example when an official speaks on behalf of ‘The White House’.

The view of authority as a bundle of (de)-authoring processes acting on and through organisational members is in keeping with the conception that language is itself an element of a broader power structure. Accepting the constitutive role of communications thus leads to viewing authority as producing, rather than being produced by, employees’ roles, identities and legitimacy. Despite their desire to advance novel conceptions of authority, scholars of the Montréal School have thus fallen back on the view shared by most critical management authors. They conceive of authority as being endowed with its own power and agency, the effects of which are practically and conceptually indistinguishable from those of the general power structure. Indeed, as Benoit-Barné and Cooren (2009: 9 and 28) assert, not only is ‘power (and, by implication, authority) [distributed] among organizational members’, but also ‘authority [. . .] consists of a specific way of exerting power’. ¹ Hence, for all intents and purposes, critical management scholars, whether affiliated with the Montréal School or not, do not propose a theory of authority differing substantially from that of mainstream management authors: they conceive of authority as a form of power.

Carl Friedrich: Authority as reasoned elaboration

One of the earliest critics of the conflation of power and authority is Friedrich (1958, 1963, 1972). Teaching full time at Harvard from 1926, then alternatively at Harvard and the University of Heidelberg from 1956 until his retirement in 1971, Friedrich wrote on public administration, political theory and totalitarianism. Noted for his knowledge of German constitutional history, he advised the US occupying forces during de-Nazification and participated in the drafting of West Germany’s post-war constitution (Berger, 1984). Friedrich’s lifelong concerns included the reconciliation of bureaucracy with personal and professional responsibility, the respective roles (and scope for decision-making) of policymakers and administrators, and the possibility for administrators to engage in public argument and debate (Plant, 2011). Uniting these concerns is his theory of authority.

Observing that authority has been juxtaposed to freedom, or to force, or to reason, Friedrich (1958: 29) lamented that ‘[authority] has been praised and condemned in all these contexts, and as a result, the word has been incorporated in a pejorative adjective, “authoritarian”, and linked as a general characteristic to “personality” as an objectionable and eradicable trait’. More specifically, Friedrich disagreed with the proposition that authority should be defined in terms of power, legitimate or otherwise. On his view, the true nature of authority has been obscured by the pejorative term ‘authoritarian’ which does not refer to someone possessing authority, but rather to someone pretending to do so. Further, Friedrich argued that while there are greater or lesser degrees of reasoning, and hence rationality, involved in authority relationships generally, attempts to identify authority with the irrational miss the fundamental point that authority is, by etymology and definition, related to reason. Largely overlooked by management scholars, Friedrich’s work deserves rescuing from oblivion (an effort to which Herbst, 2006; Plant, 2011; Spillane and Joullié, 2015 have contributed).

Like Barnard, Friedrich defined authority as a quality of communication rather than of a person. Unlike Barnard, however, Friedrich (1963: 224) conceived of authority as the quality of a communication that is capable of reasoned elaboration. This capacity for reasoned elaboration is in terms of ‘the opinions, values, beliefs, interests and needs of the community within which the authority operates’ (Friedrich, 1963: 226). In authority relationships, the communication requesting acceptance is recognised as being supported by reasons why the request is a desirable one. Such a requirement also applies to a power wielder. However, a crucial difference is that power wielders have the option to enforce obedience without engaging in reasoned elaboration. To put it differently, subordinates do not necessarily perceive the situation as indicating that reasoned elaboration will be forthcoming or even required.

For Friedrich (1963: 161), power is manifested in the context of relationships and is indexed through observing change in the behaviour of those to whom it is directed. Although conceptually independent, power and authority are therefore closely related. Further, they can both be analysed in terms of obedience. Indeed, as Friedrich noted, much institutionalised power is maintained without individuals elaborating or justifying their directions. However, a line of demarcation can still be drawn between them because, for Friedrich, authority is a source of power rather than a form of power. That is, authority is a quality of individuals that enhances their power but is not itself power. Hence, to be authoritative, a power wielder must offer convincing reasons for a proposed course of action, taking account of the interests, beliefs and values of those to whom the arguments are directed. In this sense, managers who have ‘lost their authority’ have lost a form of their power because their communications are degraded. Such situations arise when managers cease to engage in reasoned elaboration or because the values of the community have changed, making their arguments less convincing (Friedrich, 1963: 226–227).

Friedrich criticised Weber for equating authority (capacity for reasoned elaboration) with legitimacy. As he put it, ‘authority as the capacity for reasoned elaboration is capable of creating legitimacy wherever it provides good reasons for the title to rule’ (Friedrich, 1963: 236–237). Furthermore, authority helps to legitimise power because the capacity to issue communications, with an appropriate convincing rationale, embraces the right to rule. Authority thus buttresses legitimacy. Authority is not legitimate power as Weber would have it, for legitimate power exists in various forms without a capacity for reasoned elaboration. In workplaces, what is required is a rationale for following managers: a demonstration or a conviction that managers can provide guidance and successfully direct others towards group goals.

Friedrich (1963: 127) also criticised Barnard for unduly extending a theory of informal organisation to remedy the defects of his theory of formal organisation. This extension adversely affected his theory of authority because he had to make dubious assumptions. For example, Barnard broadened the concept of cooperation to cover all situations in which people work together, including those that involve coercion. Instead, Friedrich argued that a distinction should be made between ‘cooperative’ and ‘directive’ styles of managing. In the cooperative (or authoritative) organisation, the contributions of all relevant colleagues are elicited and voluntarily made; in the directive (or authoritarian) organisation, they are ordered and enforced. More generally, Friedrich held against Barnard that he glorified work organisations by claiming that authority is accepted willingly and does not exist at all unless it is so granted. In such an analysis, disruptive factors are either viewed in positive terms or minimised. The problem areas of organisational life – power, conflict, competing ideologies – are thus either ignored or left to be dealt with by authoritarian executives.

When considered in Friedrich’s sense, authority is distinct from the use of power and coercion that is typically implied in the notion of ‘authoritarian’. Indeed, for Friedrich (1972: 116), an ‘authoritarian’ (manager) is one who orders rather than argues, directs rather than advises, commands rather than suggests, to make colleagues conform and obey. In management, authority is enhanced if all parties have relevant knowledge and communicate it to each other. The crucial element is the perceived rationality of communications and their ability to solve problems. As such, the authority of managers increases when organisational solutions are offered through reasoned elaboration and acted upon. That is, ‘The fact that [a manager’s] decisions, commands or other communications could be reinforced by reasoned elaboration relating them to established values and beliefs will lend [the manager’s] acts that “authority” without which discretion becomes arbitrary abuse of power’ (Friedrich, 1958: 45). Authoritative managers, therefore, recognise their responsibility for discretionary acts as an obligation to retain their regard for reasoned elaboration. ‘Once this regard is lost – and it may be lost by [managers] at large no longer accepting reason as a guide – the night of meaningless violence is upon us’ (Friedrich, 1958: 48).

Friedrich extended his conception of authority to embrace situations where people (communication receivers) adopt a speaker’s belief without due justification. He quoted approvingly Lewis (1849: 6–7) definition of authority: ‘He who believes upon authority, entertains the opinion, simply because it is entertained by a person who appears to him likely to think correctly on the subject’. This definition extends the analysis of authority into the psychological arena and by so doing emphasises the concessional elements of an authority-based relationship. Friedrich’s insistence on such psychological aspects, when applied to Weber’s sociological analysis, raises anew the question of whether authority (in Friedrich’s sense of reasoned elaboration) can exist in legal-rational organisations (bureaucracies). Indeed, in bureaucracies, the informal authority of technical experts is bound to conflict with the more ensconced formal authority of managers. In practice, the effects technical experts have on managerial authority will differ in degree according to the matter being addressed. For example, the best way to achieve a group goal is more likely to be open to critical discussion than reflection on the relevance of the goal itself.

If workplaces are legal-rational entities (which admittedly is not always the case), the contribution of authority figures is essential to their survival and prosperity. Power, legitimate or otherwise, is thus an insufficient basis for organisational effectiveness because, to be effective, managers need to supplement their legitimate power with authority which is vested in communications that are capable of reasoned elaboration and persuasively disseminated. As work organisations are fundamentally dependent on the cumulation of knowledge, the contribution of authoritative individuals is indispensable. On this view, managerial authority is grounded on technical and persuasive skills.

Support for the view that managerial authority is underpinned by technical and persuasive skills comes from Popper (1962, 1996), for whom argument is the basis for personal and social development. As such, Popper would be critical of managers who ignore or reject argument in their work. Such rejection typically takes two forms. First, authoritarian managers eschew argument preferring to invoke orders or threats: ‘Do this, or else’. Second, some managers who do not embrace argument encourage colleagues to express their feelings. For Popper, each kind of argument-rejection tactic is disastrous. Indeed, if language is viewed merely as expression of directives or feelings, managers neglect the fact that through language they offer true or false statements and produce valid or invalid arguments. Besides, while management language is largely descriptive, descriptions are often ambiguous, biassed, incomplete or unduly laced with metaphors (Cohen, 2003). Managerial statements thus call for clarification, argument and criticism (understood here as a truth-finding process; cf. Popper, 1996: 91).

Managerialism and authority

In workplaces, a consequence of treating authority exclusively as a form of power is to confine its attribution to managers, as if only managers could have authority. Further, the neglect of authority as a source of power leads to the view that non-managerial technical experts are not authorities in their fields. However, while managerial power is concerned with the ability to rule, the recognition of individuals as authoritative owing to their special knowledge or skill does not imply a claim or ability to rule. A distinction needs to be made, therefore, between managers as formal authorities and (non-managerial) employees, experts and other professionals as informal authorities.

The basis of professional authority is technical knowledge and competence. As such, authoritative professionals act as a source of innovation by providing managers with effective ways of achieving organisational goals. As a matter of orthodoxy, managers are supposed to uphold the correct ways of doing things whilst also (paradoxically) scanning the environment for better ways. In these circumstances, the contributions of professionals, provided they accord with organisational aims, should receive managerial support. Such context sets the scene for a delicate act of managerial balancing. On the one hand, the expertise of professionals and the way it contributes to organisational performance consolidates managerial power. On the other hand, as a source of power, professional authority weakens managerial power. One way to eliminate such tension is to claim both expertise and ability to rule, that is, to claim both authority and power through resort to the notion of hierarchical position. Managerialism, the perspective of management which is grounded on the principle that managers simultaneously have the ability and right to rule owing to their role and superior knowledge, rests precisely on such claims.

The neglect of Friedrich’s analysis of authority and the widespread conflation of power and authority, reviewed earlier, have inhibited a scholarly analysis of managerialism as resting on a theory of authority. However, not all scholars have neglected to study the degree to which managerialism reconciles with, or at least makes room for, authoritative workplace relationships. Indeed, the question is implicit in MacIntyre’s (2007) well-known critique of bureaucratic management. According to MacIntyre (2007: 86), managerialists:

‘justify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of social change [and their] mode of justification [. . .] lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal law-like generalizations’.

For MacIntyre (2007), whatever bureaucratic managers have, they do not possess the keys to an imaginary kingdom. In other words, they do not have access to specialised knowledge and their attempts to present themselves as morally neutral guardians of effectiveness and efficiency are jejune. Managerialists have therefore a vested interest in concealing or diminishing the presence of institutional conflict and in avoiding rational argumentation and debate. Indeed, not only are such exchanges unpredictable and thus unmanageable, but they also risk damaging the image of the managerialist as an expert in human affairs, technical expert in business, social scientist and ‘leader’. One way for managerialists to protect themselves from such damage is to double down on their claim to authority as institutionalised power.

In addition to overt, if unsophisticated, assertions of power, insidious avenues exist for managerialists to (try to) control their colleagues. One such avenue obtains from the growing emphasis on emotive language and the corresponding decline of argument that have characterised the last decades (Joullié and Spillane, 2020; Palmer and Hardy, 2000). The opportunity therefore exists for managerialists to conduct meetings during which participants are encouraged to share their feelings, opinions and values with each other and engage in what amounts to group (pseudo) psychotherapeutic sessions. However, emotion-venting meetings of such kind vitiate decision-making because feelings are private and inscrutable and thus cannot be critically evaluated. Further, when emotional catharsis takes priority over rational deliberation, exchanges are not conducive to producing fact-based challenges to managerialist power. Besides, ‘expressive’ meetings facilitate the pursuit of Machiavellian, manipulative goals. Specifically, they are liable to being interpreted as evidence of the caring attentions of managerialists, or a sleight of hand in which employees are given the false impression that they are being consulted on consequential issues. By way of contrast, authoritative managers (in Friedrich’s and Popper’s sense) actively encourage and promote argument for including employees’ perspectives on mission-relevant matters and rational decision-making related thereto.

Often misunderstood on this point (e.g. Gantman, 2005), Drucker (1972, 1974) was critical of managerialism and advanced views compatible with those of Friedrich. For example, Drucker (1972) predicted that professional experts (or ‘knowledge workers’) would become major contributors to organisational effectiveness and managers would need to recognise and reward their authority. Further, he warned against the expanding power of cost centres relative to profit centres and the dangers of bureaucratic management and the centralisation of managerial power. Drucker also argued that managers should replace external control with internal control arguing, with existentialists, that managers should promote freedom and personal responsibility at work (Joullié and Spillane, 2020). On his view, granting employees responsibility for continuous improvement in their jobs enhances corporate performance. Finally, Drucker agreed indirectly with Friedrich (and Popper) that authoritative management requires a language that emphasises valid reasoning and culminates in authoritative advice.

The defence of authority offered in this article is not a naïve or thinly disguised endorsement of a pro-management position, itself stemming from an uncritical adherence to a unitarist perspective of the employment relationship (Godard, 2011). Indeed, promoting authority does not imply, as managerialists have it, that managers can be trusted to make decisions benefitting the entire workplace on the assumption that no fundamental divergence of interests exists within it. Rather, establishing authority as a bulwark against managerialism amounts to saying that workplace conflicts are temporarily and partially subsumable through negotiation and the finding of common ground. Such a context exists because, even where long-term interests diverge, reasoned elaboration (a process that entails argument and debate) allows employers and employees to find ad hoc utilitarian courses of action that each party accommodates (Joullié and Spillane, 2021). Expressed differently, authority as a source of power stemming from reasoned elaboration is not a managerial prerogative but exists at each level of a workplace hierarchy. What creates authority is a capacity and inclination for dialogue and critical evaluation, arising from circumstantial knowledge, expertise and the application of logical thinking. Those who aspire to authority expose their reasons, value critical exchanges and seek consent, a process which is conducive to professional development (Joullié et al., in press). Conversely, those, like managerialists, who habitually coerce or control others, content themselves with commands accompanied by threats.

In summary, managerialism as a management practice is characterised by authoritarian forms of control rather than workplace relationships based on authoritativeness. As management mutated into managerialism, senior managers secured more decision-making power, middle managers were eliminated and technical experts ignored. So long as authority is analysed as a form of power and the view that it is a source of power is neglected, those who lament the rise of managerialism will remain unable to interpret it as stemming from a decline of authority. In other words, resisting managerialism entails the restoration of authority as a source, and not a form, of power.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that management authors have generally considered managerial authority as a form of power. On their view, the two concepts are conflated because they conceive of the right to command as grounded on control and coercion. Authority, in this sense, merges with ‘authoritarian’. A second, overlooked view of managerial authority considers the realisation of organisational goals along with psychosocial factors. Such consideration requires a definition of authority which includes subjective and concessional aspects and links authority with authorisation, in turn pointing to an evaluative process. It is noteworthy that this second view of managerial authority is compatible with the first, insofar as imposing authority (by way of the exercise of power) on someone requires prior concession by others of the authorisation to do so.

The most influential proponent of the ‘concessional’ view is Barnard (1938) who argues that authority rests with those to whom it applies. Such a conception of authority requires assent and entails that the effects of authority are cancelled by dissent. Further, because power cannot be dissolved by mere dissent, Barnard’s view entails a conceptual separation of authority from power. Largely neglected by management authors, Friedrich (1963) proposes an analysis which expands on and refines Barnard’s concessional view of authority. Specifically, in keeping with the way the Romans and ancient Greeks understood the term, authority is for Friedrich a capacity for reasoned elaboration, that is, for a justification, through argument and debate, that is found to be rational, reasonable and convincing. Understood in this way, authority applies to communications, not to persons. It is notable that Popper’s (1962) view of personal and societal development by way of open, critical exchanges is compatible with and supports Friedrich’s thesis. So does Drucker’s (1972, 1974) promotion of decentralised decision-making, semi-autonomous work groups and workmanship expertise.

As it emerges from the work of Barnard, Friedrich and Popper, authority develops from cooperative exchanges between managers and colleagues. Authoritative management, therefore, requires valid reasoning and critical argument. Such initial commitments culminate naturally in authoritative advice. This conclusion holds to the extent that there is a general preference for truth over falsity, rationality over irrationality, authoritative advice over authoritarian commands and cooperation over coercion. In the age of managerialism, that is, of forceful implementation of (and allegiance to) managerial techniques, elimination of middle managers and silencing of technical expertise, such preferences cannot be taken for granted. It is, however, through the defence and revival of these preferences that the tide of managerialism can be reversed.

Multi-faceted consequences of managerialism have been observed in corporations, hospitals, museums, universities, government and other aspects of community life. Underpinning these well-documented phenomena is a neglect of authority as a source of power and a parallel decline of authoritative workplace relationships. However, the weakening of authority (and the accompanying growing disregard for argument) is noticeable in other, less researched, areas. For example, as debate about climate change and the current Covid-19 pandemic illustrates, the contemporary media and political landscape comes with a new breed of ideologue who, aided by public relations specialists, not only ignores but publicly ridicules expert voices. Authority as a source of power is thus not simply a scholarly theme, or a managerial preference. Indeed, as Popper argued, it is also a social and democratic concern. Therein lies a fertile research agenda.