‘Weberian Traditional Authority: Does it Belong in the Modern Workplace?

Stylianos N. Zompanakis

UNIVERSITY OF READING

Henley Business School

I. Introduction
In one of his leading contributions to the scientific literature, Max Weber deals with
the concept of authority as this is expressed in its form of legitimate domination distinguishing
its nature between traditional, charismatic and legal (or rational) types.

This paper focuses at pointing out why authority in its traditional form is doomed to
fail when exercised in the context of a modern working environment. To do so, following a
brief literature review, one has to start with defining the concept of traditional authority
according to Weber, elaborating on the ways as well as the environment in which this is
exercised. The next issue to tackle will be an outline of the traditional workplace while, in
parallel, discussing its evolution to its modern version and emphasising on its differences
between the two. The paper will then demonstrate how and why the rules and concepts of
traditional authority cannot be applied in cases of a modern working environment. The
conclusions drawn on the basis of the above will be presented in the last part of the paper.

II. A Brief Literature Review

The pioneering work by Max Weber (1968) on the topic has become the source of a
wide variety of reactions that have contributed to the relevant literature, both early (e.g. Blau,
1963) and recent (Houghton, 2010) with overviews combined with critical analyses. It is
important to note though that the concept of “authority” must not be confused with that of
“power”, with the former representing an acceptance from the part of the governed society
while the latter being either endogenous or derived from external sources. In fact the latter tries
to assess the extent to which Weber’s concept of authority holds in the twenty-first century,
while other contributions such as Samier (2005) focus on “intended combinate use of the three
forms of authority” (p. 60) and their impact on mentality.

There is, in addition, a number of contributions that consider the Weberian analysis in
the context of country studies starting with Silberman (1966) until papers like Ansari (2013)
who deals with the case of Iran. The contribution by Aguilera (2008), despite the fact that it

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emphasises on legitimate rather than traditional authority can be considered very interesting, as
it touches upon ethical issues arising as a result of authority abuse.

Finally, papers like those of Lazarsfeld and Oberschall (1965), Vanagunas (1989) and
Zafirovski (2001) point to the permanent interdisciplinary interest in Weber’s theory, as this
may be applied facing problems from the scientific perspective of Psychology or Economics.

III. Defining Traditional Authority

The concept of traditional authority can be defined as “the type of authority where the
traditional rights of a dominant individual or group are accepted – or at least not challenged
– by subordinate individuals” (Ritzer 2011, p. 132). The actions of the dominant individual
according to Weber (1968) are considered to be legitimate when the subject accepts, obeys and
desires – at least to a bearable extent – the authority, without challenging the dominant (p.214).
In fact the definition refers to a form of authority which is imposed on subordinate individuals
or groups by an acknowledged leader. Following Gerth and Mills (1958), Weber points out that
this form of authority "rests upon a belief in the sanctity of everyday routines" (p. 297).

It appears, however, that a necessary and sufficient condition for this form of authority
involves a bilateral equilibrium, given that as Ritzer (2011) points out, that "traditional
authority is based on a claim by the leaders, and a belief on the part of the followers, that there
is virtue in the sanctity of age-old rules and powers" (p. 132).

The concept of traditional authority distinguishes four forms of such authority

depending on the way in which this has prevailed. In the case of gerontocracy, the rule is
exercised by elders while where patriarchalism prevails the position of a leader is inherited
(Gerth & Mills, p. 296). A modern version of this type of authority is patrimonialism which
operates as a rule by an administration or military force under the authority’s control, as in the
case of monarchs or military leaders. Weber (1968) points out that the chief difference between
these forms of rule is that the patriarch rules without a staff, while the patrimonial leader
requires a staff that obeys his authority by virtue of personal loyalty and tradition (p.227).
Finally, a fourth type of authority is feudalism, one that was important historically. This is a
more routinized form of rule, with "contractual relationships between leader and subordinate"
(Ritzer, p. 133).

For Weber, commonly accepted customs or religion constitute the underlying source
of traditional authority which, if not challenged is expected to remain dominant, thus preventing
the development of rational or legal forms of authority. In cases in which a regime has endorsed

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the leader for a long period of time then the leader acquires legitimacy often granted on the
basis of custom as it the case with monarchies.

Traditional authority in a business workplace could be manifested by the contractual,

agreed interaction of the employee with the appointed management. In this case, the
subordinate subject (employee) agrees to accept the authority of the dominant individual or
group (management) and obey its decision and directions. This is considered to be a structured
phenomenon which verifies the Weberian approach on the legitimacy of domination between
two groups. The difference in this case is that although in societies the legitimacy of domination
of traditional authority rests on the belief that there is virtue in the sanctity of age-old rules and
powers, there is a contractual agreement and a role in the workplace, freely agreed and accepted
by both parties before engaging in this relationship. Also, in most cases, this relationship can
be altered or terminated legally at any given point of time, by changing the position of the
dominated individual in the company or simply by leaving the company.

The next part of this paper presents how the circumstances allowing the traditional
interaction between the two groups have changed during the past decade, blurring the limits
between their roles and their relationship.

IV. Traditional versus Modern Workplace

Generally speaking, there is no textbook definition of what qualifies as a traditional
workplace. Depending on the time periods compared, one can arbitrarily define the older
workplace as the traditional one and thus move on to the planned comparison. At this point it
is very interesting to note that one has the liberty to perform a comparison on various levels
and aspects on each workplace, yet still having to recognise that there are some limitations to
that as working conditions not only differ through time, but also through cultures, counties and
industries. More specifically, “the differentiation in practice is linked with environmental and
organisational characteristics including size of organisation, industrial sector, economic
activity, managerial ideology, role of the state, national culture, business strategy,
organisational structure, organisational culture, the degree of centralisation or de-
centralisation, ownership and age of organisation” (Sisson, 1989).

The reasoning behind this limitation is that today, the force of globalisation has pushed
companies to compete at an international – and thus multicultural – level and come face to face
with more and fiercer competitors. Globalisation has been the main drive that has made these
companies share management practices in the workplace – and unavoidably – lead them to
standardise them, thus rendering them comparable (Ouye, 2011).

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 For the purposes of this paper we will be reviewing some basic features of a typical
international, competitive workplace of the previous decade and consider the trends that have
shaped their development to the status of a modern workplace. The selection of these features
as reference points regarding intertemporal workplace developments has been based on the fact
that they are most popularly recognised to have changed over the past decade as pinpointed by
the research done with the clients of the management consulting company Adecco, dealing with
which though lies beyond the scope of the present paper (Adecco UK, 2015). The features
selected, therefore, are:

1. Working hours
2. Cultural shift
3. Social networks
4. Wellness to work
5. Sustainability

The first characteristic which has undergone substantial changes through the years is
undoubtedly the one regarding time spent in the workplace. Given the fact that international
competition today requires a much stronger and higher level of commitment from the part of
the employees, they are inclined to devote more time to their professional obligations which, in
its turn, implies more working hours. The fact remains, however, that contemporary advances
in information technology have enabled employees to bargain their working hours spent in the
office, as the improved mobile technology has helped to redistribute the workload from the
workplace to home and thus improve their productive efficiency. The term productive
efficiency in this case is used in its Economics sense, expressing the strategy of making the
most out of the resources available. As a result, the traditional workplace has changed to a more
dynamic and flexible environment where employees may be given the liberty to schedule their
own workload and time in the office. The old, traditional notion which demanded the efficient
management to have all employees in the same place, at the same time, to exact authority,
control and directions is considered long outdated, with employees even having in some cases
the liberty of scheduling their own work and projects, even vacation time.

A direct consequence of the more relaxed time scheduling at work following the above
changes has influenced and changed the management culture as well. In fact, given time – and
along with it – the changes described above, the traditional management style based on a
hierarchy ordering that distinguishes superiors from inferiors has been replaced by a process in
which the performance of individuals is assessed via an individual valuing reasoning. It is
important to point out that in such cases the presence of the hierarchy ordering is discrete, with
the experienced workers pointing to how and why a specific task has to be performed instead

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of demanding its performance without providing the underlying reasoning. This shift in the
management style has greatly transformed the structure of the companies today, which adapt
thinner and more project - oriented structures. The benefit of this kind of change is that
traditional, rigid hierarchy has subsided to more flexible and performance - focused ones, where
employees are valued and evaluated by their input and output to the projects.

An immediate symptom of the absence of hierarchy ordering in the environment of a

modern workplace is the focus of modern businessmen to the staff interpersonal relations which
aims at maximising the wellbeing of the employees. Once again the progress of the information
technology – and especially of the social media – has allowed modern managers to encourage
socialisation between staff members, meaning that employees are given the chance to link the
dimension of their social life to the professional one and get to becoming acquainted with the
non-professional side of their professional colleagues.

Wellness to work has assumed considerable importance under the circumstances

outlined above. In addition to various studies proving that good performance is linked to good
mental and physical health (Adecco UK, 2015) and bearing in mind that the pressure imposed
on employees as a result of a considerable and sustained workload may eventually lead to
threatening personal wellness, modern businesses tend to provide for anything that is
considered as contributing to wellness, starting from company gym memberships and ending
to improved health care schemes. The major problem the wellness schemes try to tackle is the
office absenteeism due to health issues, which put in peril projects development and company’s
goals.

The fact that the concept of sustainability has only very recently been introduced in the
business management dictionary is alone by itself enough to account for the vast differences
between the traditional and the modern workplace. Building energy saving workplaces,
preserving a green environment and recycling used material have risen to be indispensable tasks
in a modern workplace in the context of the reasoning dictating that their benefits exceed by far
the costs they entail for both the individual firm and the society. Managing negative and positive
externalities of the company’s operations worldwide has been a major concern during the past
decade, not only from an efficiency wise perspective but also as a concern to how the brand
and the image of the company is perceived by the society and its stakeholders.

This section outlining the differences between a traditional and a modern workplace
could not be considered as serving its purpose before introducing the dimension of the trade
unions effect. In fact, according to research performed by Poole and Jenkins (1997), on
traditionally managed industry corporation based in England, trade unions used to influence the
management practices of these corporations on the aspects analysed earlier on this part quite a

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lot (p. 353). The reason accounting for such an influence in this case is that trade unions have
always been considered as the counterpart of the corporate, traditional authority, which
negotiated for the employees’ rights and benefits at an industry level. Today, the situation has
been altered in favour of the employees, as their empowerment has enabled them to take in turn
matters to their hands and negotiate not just at a corporate level, but even to a personal level,
their benefits and working conditions (Poole & Jenkins, p. 353).

V. An Impossible Task
The preceding analysis has set the background for a discussion as to the extent to which
traditional authority may fit in the business environment of the 21st century.

It seems that the fundamental changes that have been brought about in the business
environment and mentality hardly leave any room for exercising traditional authority in the
Weberian sense. This is due to the fact that traditional business authority used to rely heavily
on hierarchical management structures which operated by allocating specific roles to the firms’
employees, thus planning, organizing and controlling their work.

On this issue, Barley (1996) focuses in the case of technical and flexible expertise of
employees which is undermined by “an increasingly horizontal distribution of expertise”
which not only upsets the hierarchy prevailing in the company, but also undercuts
management's source of legitimacy. “When those in authority no longer comprehend the work
of their subordinates, hierarchical position alone is an insufficient justification for authority,
especially in technical matters” (p. 437).

Today, by contrast, management, is not just a manager’s function since the majority of
employees can manage their function in the firm without requiring the supervision of a boss in
the old-fashion sense. With aiming that way, the old, rigid hierarchical management structure
has been replaced with more a functional, flat linear management structure which emphasises
on the role of employees. The improved performance of the employees now days may be
attributed, among other things, to their easier and better access to educational opportunities
thanks to the progress done in the field of information technology. Thus, a modern successful
manager asks the employee his/her opinion on the task to be faced, rather than demanding it
done in a certain particular way. Such tactics can allow the employee to greatly contribute to
the performance of the firm by proposing innovative solutions (McCrimmon, 2010). In fact the
typical business personnel of today does not need guidance and instructions as to how the job
may be done and in certain cases they may just as well be able to it better than the boss, thanks
to the learning by doing every day. The more the employees are empowered to do contribute

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and manage their projects, the best chance they will have in enhancing their performance and
knowledge on their field.

It is interesting to note at this point that even in the decade of the sixties, “Historians
and sociologists of work have shown that authority of position and expertise were never as
seamlessly aligned as organizational or managerial theory has suggested” (Blau, 1964). One
would be tempted to argue, therefore that today’s empowered employees, as discussed in the
previous section, could cause problems in companies with hierarchical management structures
because they tend to bypass the authority of position through the use of the authority of
expertise, the main issue being that this knowledge was contextual and, thus, not easily
formalised into rules and textbooks.

The next question to answer, therefore, is what is there left for the modern business
authority (if one can think of such a concept any more) to do? Following McCrimmon (2010),
today’s “management can be defined as a way of achieving goals that add the most value” and
it is about “being sufficiently organised to identify the right goals and the best means for
achieving them”. This requires assigning priorities to one’s own work, a task which the author
considers as being an investment procedure “a process of allocating resources to obtain the
best return, even if those resources are just your own time, knowledge and experience”. Thus,
management simply involves goal achievement, preferably under a cost – minimisation
reasoning.

This description hardly fits the traditional management style which is being used to
express itself via Weber’s authority variations and which also required managers to do all the
thinking and planning. The fact remains, however, that – as previously stated – a typical 21st
century employee can manage his own priorities and work in such a way as to optimise goals
attainment. The danger lies according to Barley (1996) in “insisting on authority of position in
the absence of expertise” which is very likely to undermine the relationship between the
management of the company and its employees, “who are generally committed to the
organisation's well-being and recreates precisely the atmosphere of employment that many new
schemes of organizing intend to avoid” (p. 437). This means that the traditional authority which
according to Weber would distinguish the manager from the employee has not been replaced
by some modern form of relationship. Such a form may be possibly close to one between a
movie star and his/her agent. The latter knows how to deal with business issues by coordinating
and advising, yet still not controlling the actor. In this sense, the modern employer and
employee may be considered as being connected by some form of a partnership, both being
involved in achieving the same goals, both on the same boat and aiming at the same targets.

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 The way to achieve such a form of cooperation is much simpler however, certainly not
easier, compared to n traditional methods, by focusing on the successful cooperation of those
employees that can perform a certain task more efficiently and monitor the result of this
cooperation. This, of course, presupposes that the modern manager has the ability to look into
the personality and background of each and every employee and, by doing so, to be able to trace
the ones that can perform a certain task in a way that makes the best use of resources.

VI. Conclusions
Concluding this brief presentation of the concept of traditional authority one must
consider that for the purposes of this paper the analysis is two dimensional: Thus, the inability
of applying traditional authority in a modern workplace is not only due to the fact that the
modern environment is such that may not de facto accept traditional means of governance. One
must also acknowledge the fact that the modern business world is far too profit - oriented in
comparison to other forms of environment to overlook any possible costly mistakes for the sake
of adhering to a modern authority rule. This presupposes, therefore, that the contemporary
authority rule proposed and encouraged in a modern workplace is an efficiency - maximising
one – in the sense used by economists – compatible to cost minimisation and consequently,
preferable to that proposed by traditional authority means.

But then, again, one has to accept a ceteris paribus assumption for the revenue side
when comparing the traditional to the modern market environment. In this sense, the tendency
prevailing in the literature which attempts to outline the contemporary business environment as
a miniature of a society may raise certain questions that may provide room for further research
on the topic focusing on the concept of efficiency maximisation.

_______________________

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