Rationalized or legal authority can be found throughout history, but it has achieved the most widespread acceptance in the modern industrialized era. The most pure form of rationalized authority is the bureaucracy, one which Max Weber discussed at some length in his writings. It would be fair to say, in fact, that Weber considered the bureaucratic form of administration to be a symbol of the modern world.
Weber described rational or legal authority as a system that relies on people’s acceptance of a number of important factors. First, this type of authority is necessarily impersonal in nature. When people follow the commands of such an authority figure, it has nothing to do with personal relationships or traditional norms. Instead, allegiance is owed to the office that a person holds on the basis of (presumably) competence, training, or knowledge. Even those who are in charge and who exercise authority are subject to the same norms as everyone else — to quote a phrase, “no one is above the law.”
Second, the norms are codified and ideally based on expedience or rational values. In reality, tradition plays an important role here and much of what becomes codified has less to do with reason or expedience than with traditional customs. Ideally, though, the social structures are supposed to be dependent upon whatever is most effective at reaching the goals of the group.
Third and closely related is that rationalized authority tends to be closely circumscribed in its sphere of competence. What this means is that legal authorities are not absolute authorities — they do not have the power or legitimacy to regulate every aspect of a person’s behavior. Their authority is limited to only particular subjects — for example, in a rationalized system a religious authority figure has the legitimacy necessary to instruct a person on how to pray, but not also on how to vote.
The legitimacy of a person who holds their position of legal authority can be challenged when she presumes to exercise authority outside the area of her competency. It can be argued that part of what creates legitimacy is the willingness to understand one’s formal boundaries and not take action outside them — again, a sign that the impersonal regulations apply to everyone equally.
Some form of technical training is typically required of anyone filling an office in a system of rational authority. It doesn’t matter (ideally) what family someone was born into or how charismatic their behavior might be. Without at least the appearance of the appropriate training and education, that person’s authority is not regarded as legitimate. In most churches, for example, a person cannot become a priest or minister without having successfully completed a predetermined course of theological and ministerial training.
There are sociologists who argue that the increasing importance of this sort of training justifies the use of a fourth category of authority, usually called technical or professional authority. This sort of authority is dependent almost entirely upon a person’s technical skills and very little or even not at all upon holding some particular office.
For example, medical doctors are regarded as having considerable medical authority by virtue of the fact that they have successfully completed medical school, even if they have not been hired for a particular post at a hospital. At the same time, though, holding such a position also serves to increase a doctor’s authority, thus serving to demonstrate how different types of authority appear together and work to reinforce one another.
As stated before, however, no system of authority is “pure” — this means that rationalized systems also typically preserve within them traits of earlier types of authority, both traditional and charismatic. For example, many Christian churches today are “episcopal,” which means that the principle authority figures known as bishops control the functioning and direction of the churches. People become bishops through a formal process of training and working, allegiance to a bishop is allegiance to the office rather than to the person, and so on. In several very important ways, the position of bishop is enmeshed in a rational and legal system.
However, the very idea that there is a “bishop” who has legitimate religious authority over a Christian community is predicated upon the belief that the office can be traced back to Jesus Christ. They have inherited the charismatic authority Jesus is believed to have originally possessed in relation to his immediate followers. There are no formal or charismatic means to decide how and why a church’s bishops are part of a lineage going back to Jesus. This means that this inheritance is itself a function of tradition. Many of the characteristics of the office of bishop, such as the requirement to be male, are also dependent upon religious tradition.
