The Legitimation of authority in the European Union

The founding Treaties of the European Union (EU) provide the Commission with bureaucratic structures and functions, and the authority to take a political leadership role in the integration process. However, the legitimacy of the Commission's authority to act either as a bureaucracy or as a political institution is periodically contested, as is the authority and leadership of its President. Max Weber's theory of the legitimation of authority suggests itself in this context as a working tool for assessing the nature of institutional and individual authority and leadership in the Commission and the broader EU context. Weber's typology of authority offers both an understanding of the changes in the Commission's fortunes within the 'would-be polity' of the European institutions, and an appraisal of claims to authority at the individual level by the Commission President. When applied to two contrasting moments in the Commission's life during the presidency of Jacques Delors (the generating of the White Papers of 1985 and 1993), Weber's typology provides an explanation for the evolution of the legitimation of these forms of authority in terms of, first, the Union's imperfect provisions for legitimate claims to leadership authority on 'charismatic' grounds and, second, the absence in the Union of resources for leadership legitimacy based on 'traditional'-type authority, such as explicit, popular, or party political European-wide support for the project of European union. These are resources which, if present in the EU, would legitimise calls to reform the EU's institutions in the direction of more integration and a more federal polity. The case studies offer an appraisal of the functioning and malfunctioning of authority within the Union, as well as a critical assessment of the applicability of the Weberian model to the legitimation of authority in the EU.

Regulation - the movie:a semiotic study of the periodic review of UK regulated industry

This paper explores the regulatory process of UK privatised utilities as manifest in the periodic review of prices. Two separate review processes are identified, operating concurrently - a covert dialogue between the regulator and the regulated and an overt dialogue taking place in the public arena. Using a semiotic analysis of the review the authors argue that the overt event is the real review. Furthermore they argue that the unfolding of each review is so similar that it can be likened to a film script which is constantly re-enacted. The purpose of the review as a legitimating vehicle for the regulator and regulated, who exist in a symbiotic relationship, is explored in terms of the semiotics involved and the myth creation role of legitimation in order to explain the significance of the regulatory process.

Market-level information and the diffusion of competing technologies:an exploratory analysis of the LAN industry

Market-level information diffused by print media may contribute to the legitimation of an emerging technology and thus influence the diffusion of competing technological standards. After analyzing more than 10,000 trade media abstracts from the Local Area Networks (LAN) industry published between 1981 and 2000, we found the presence of differential effects on the adoption of competing standards by two market-level information types: technology and product availability. The significance of these effects depends on the technology's order of entry and suggests that high-tech product managers should make strategic use of market-level information by appropriately focusing the content of their communications. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The dynamics of organizational change : an analysis of power, professions and new managerialism in the case of CoastElectric

It is widely accepted that the Thatcher years and their immediate aftermath were associated with substantive social and organizational change. The privatisation programme, 'the rolling back of the State', prosecuted by the successive Conservative Governments from 1979-1997 was a central pillar of Governmental policy. This thesis seeks to engage with privatization through the of CoastElectric, a newly privatised Regional Electricity Company. This thesis contributes to the extant understanding of the dynamics of organizational change in four major ways. Firstly, the study into CoastElectric addresses the senior management decision making within the organization: in particular, it will attempt to make sense of 'why' particular decisions were made. The theoretical backdrop to this concern will draw on the concepts of normalization, cultural capital and corporate fashion. The argument presented in this thesis is that the decision-making broadly corresponded with that which could be considered to be at the vanguard of mangerialist thought. However, a detailed analysis suggested that at different junctures in CoastElectric's history there were differences in the approach to decision making that warranted further analysis. The most notable finding was that the relative levels of new managerialist cultural capital possessed by the decision-making elite had an important bearing upon whether the decision was formulated either endogenously or exogenously, with the assistance of cultural intermediaries such as management consultants. The thesis demonstrates the importance of the broader discourse of new managerialism in terms of shaping what is considered to be a 'commonsensical, rational' strategy. The second concern of this thesis is that of the process of organizational change. The study of CoastElectric attempts to provide a rich account of the dynamics of organizational change. This is realized through, first, examining the pre-existing context of the organization; second, through analyzing the power politics of change interventions. The master concepts utilised in this endeavour are that of: dividing practices, the establishment of violent hierarchies between competing discourses; symbolic violence; critical turning points; recursiveness; creative destruction; legitimation strategies and the reconstitution of subjects in the workplace.

A sociological analysis of four police consultative committees in Birmingham

Consultation between the police and the community was a recommendation of Lord Scarman in his report into the Brixton riots in 1981. By 1982 the West Midlands Police Authority had established local consultative committees on each police sub-division. This thesis is a study of four Police Consultative Committees in Birmingham, using qualitative methods of attendance at committee meetings and interviews with committee members. The research was carried out between 1990 and 1992 - ten years after formal consultation was established, and aimed to examine the relationship between the micro social processes of the committees and key sociological theoretical concepts. The analysis of the four committees contextualises them within the social and political parameters of urban policing in the late 1980s. Each committee is taken as a case study to highlight the following aspects of consultation:- relations between the police and black communities; membership, representation and accountability; responding to community conflict; crime prevention agencies and networks of social control. The findings are then generalised to the sociological theoretical concepts of hegemony, legitimation, community conflict and social control. The central proposition of this thesis is that, whilst these committees are not fulfilling the role Lord Scarman envisaged for them (of involving local community representatives in policing strategies and policies), they do have important policing and political roles. It is argued that they offer a platform from which senior police officers can engage local people into supporting policing objectives without actually involving them in determining those objectives. Furthermore, such committees have political symbolism in that they enable the government to be seen to be responding to the issues of accountability and relations between the police and black communities following the urban disorders, without actually devolving any statutory powers to the community.

Top-down or bottom-up: the real choice for public services

This article considers two contrasting approaches to reforming public services in order to meet the needs of people living in poverty. The first approach is top-down, involves categorising individuals (as 'hard to help', 'at risk', etc) and invokes scientific backing for justification. The second approach is bottom-up, emancipatory, relates to people as individuals and treats people who have experience of poverty and social exclusion as experts. The article examines each approach through providing brief examples in the fields of unemployment and parenting policy - two fields that have been central to theories of 'cycles of deprivation'. It is suggested here that the two approaches differ in terms of their scale, type of user involvement and type of evidence that is used for their legitimation. While the article suggests that direct comparison between the two approaches is difficult, it highlights the prevalence of top-down approaches towards services for people living in poverty, despite increasing support for bottom-up approaches in other policy areas.

The role of government research establishments : a study of the concept of public patronage for applied research and development

This thesis follows the argument that, to fully understand the current position of national research laboratories in Great Britain one needs to study the historical development of the government research establishment as a specific social institution. A particular model is outlined in which it is argued that institutional characteristics evolve through the continual interplay between internal development and environmental factors within a changing political and economic context, and that the continuous development of an institution depends on its ability to adapt to changes in its operational environment. Within this framework important historical precedents for formal government institutional support for applied research are identified. and the transition from private to public patronage documented. The emergence and consolidation of government research laboratories in Britain is described in detail. The subsequent relative decline of public laboratories is interpreted in terms of the undermining of a traditional role resulting in legitimation crisis. It is concluded that it is no longer feasible to consider the public research laboratory as a coherent institutional form, and that the future of each individual laboratory can only be considered in relation to the institutional needs of its own sphere of operation. Nevertheless the laboratories have been forced into decline in an essentially unplanned way which may have serious consequences for the maintenance of the scientific and technical infrastructures, necessary for material progress in the national context.

Legitimacy building strategies in conditions of discretionary legal enforcement:a logic of social action approach

The present study explores strategies used to legitimize the transfer of organizational practices in a situation of institutional upheaval. We apply the logic of social action (Risse, 2000) to analyze the effectiveness of consequence-based action and communication-based action, in terms of higher coordination, lower conflict, and overall higher economic performance. Consequence-based legitimation is obtained by using a system of distributor incentives tied to performance of specific tasks, while communicative legitimation can be achieved by recommendations and warnings. Our setting is an export channel to European emerging economies. Our results indicate that in the absence of legitimacy, as manifested in discretionary legal enforcement, consequence-based legitimation is more effective than communicative legitimation in reducing conflict, increasing coordination, and ultimately in improving the performance of the export dyad. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.