Source Of Legitimate Authority Research Articles

Review: Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion, by Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Review: <i>Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion</i>, by Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Clientele, Power and Family Bonds in Ancient Egypt: Building Social Links, Promoting Individual Strategies, Facing Kin Conflicts

Abstract Ancient Egypt provides abundant evidence about family strategies used by the elite to assert their authority, enhance their power in competitive settings such as the royal court and to preserve their resources (economic, symbolic) in face of rivals and newcomers. However, when some individuals obtained particular benefits from their service to the state (land, rewards, high quality goods, prebends), they tried to preserve these gains within their nuclear family and to avoid any claim or interference from other members of their kin. Tensions rapidly erupted so kings made a selective use of rewards and honors to break the solidarity of potentially dangerous noble families, to induce rivalries between them and to keep his central role as mediator between factions and source of legitimate authority. Temples were ideal arenas in which such tensions and strategies manifested themselves, bringing thus the opportunity to analyze the actual construction of power in ancient Egypt beyond ideological expressions and rhetorical claims.

Constitutional Preambles as Narratives of Peoplehood

Abstract Most constitutions start with a preamble. A constitutional preamble is a text designed to introduce the rest of the constitution. Often, it is also meant to give a concise statement of the nature of the system that the constitution establishes. While they may differ in style and length, most preambles seem to perform two primary functions. First, they declare or identify the source of authority for the document. In most preambles, it is ‘we the people’ that is invoked as the legitimate source of authority. Second, most preambles engage in an explicit attempt to project an identity for ‘we the people.’ At times, the people is defined through an extended historical biography. At other times, it is the presumed common ethnic origin or religious membership that is said to establish the bond, whether the people is territorially bound or not. Still at other times, it is the existence of common political and moral principles that is thought to make up the core constitutive elements of who the people are. Whatever the strategy, preambles attempt to imagine a usable political identity for the people, its collective agency. ‘The people’ are viewed with sufficient agency capable of ‘ordaining’ or ‘granting’ the constitutional document to themselves. Of course, in many cases ‘we the people’ are the very creation of the document itself. Under this account, the ‘people’ are simultaneously the author and product of the constitution. In this sense, preambles are performative in nature: they constitute the people as they at the same time declare that the people are their authors. Through a close study of the constitutional preambles of all countries currently in existence, this article explores how preambles narrate a politically serviceable identity for ‘the people’. Whatever else they are meant to do, preambles are narratives of peoplehood. The formal legal status of preambles might be uncertain, but what is not in doubt and what has largely been neglected is the fact that preambles are also means through which a people attempts to imagine and solidify its identity. As Benedict Anderson long ago explained, an imagined identity is neither true nor false—it simply is. This article explores the processes by which this imagining takes place and the purposes for which it is adopted.

Autonomy and Authority in Public Research Organisations: Structure and Funding Factors

This paper establishes a structural typology of the organisational configurations of public research organisations which vary in their relative internal sharing of authority between researchers and managers; we distinguish between autonomous, heteronomous and managed research organisations. We assume that there are at least two sources of legitimate authority within research organisations, one derived from formal hierarchy (organisational leadership) and another derived from the research community (professional); the balance of authority between researchers and managers is essentially structural but is empirically mediated by the funding portfolio of organisations and the corresponding endowment of resources at the disposal of leaders or researchers. Changes in the level, sources and strings of organisational and individual research funding are expected to affect the balance of internal authority in different ways depending on the organisational configuration, and to open the door to the influence of external actors in the development of research agendas.

The Uninsured Drivers’ Agreement 2015 as a Legitimate Source of Authority

In the United Kingdom, motor vehicle insurance is governed by national and EU law. In respect of the EU requirement that member states establish a guarantee fund from which the victims of negligent uninsured or untraced drivers may obtain compensation, the United Kingdom entered into a series of agreements with the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB). In 2015, the MIB established the Uninsured Drivers’ Agreement (UDA). This agreement implements (with the Road Traffic Act 1988 and the Untraced Drivers’ Agreement 2003) aspects of the Motor Vehicle Insurance Directives (MVID). The UDA 2015 establishes clauses and procedural arrangements which, we argue, have largely removed legal certainty for policyholders and for the victims of negligent uninsured drivers. As such, the fundamental goals of the MVID and the free movement principles upon which they are based are undermined in the United Kingdom. This article offers a critique of the substantive breaches of the MVID through the UDA 2015’s exclusions and procedural arrangements and identifies the current state of unpredictability and uncertainty when the two sources of law are compared.

Court and Country

The Northern Song Empire (960–1127) was the most spatially integrated and bureaucratically centralized polity in the late medieval world, and its rulers articulated ideological claims to unitary and universal sovereignty. Both its monarchs and ministers shared a discourse of authority that postulated the throne as the only legitimate source of authority, which was not openly challenged by organized blocs of aristocratic, religious, or urban elites. Yet, the Northern Song Empire was much less autocratic in practice than in theory, since monarchs chose to delegate the making of state policy and the civil and military administration of the empire to a hierarchy of central, regional, and local officials, so that intra-bureaucratic dynamics limited arbitrary monarchical action. Using a micro-level case study of the abolition of the Green Sprouts rural credit policy (qingmiao fa 青苗法) in 1085–1086, this article analyzes the debates within the Northern Song imperial bureaucracy about the reach of state power. The court’s anti-reformist high officials were united in their opposition to the policy, and individual ministers used a court-centered discourse of authority to denounce it for undermining the public good of the polity. Yet, its abolition required mobilizing extensive bureaucratic support within the central government and in local administration. By paying closer attention to the contexts and generic constraints of political rhetoric, and the intricacies of bureaucratic dynamics, it is possible to demonstrate more subtle fluctuations within the force fields of socio-political authority at court and in the country.

Custom, Normativity and Authority in South Africa

In post-apartheid South Africa, debates about the future of the former homeland countrysides are dominated by questions about the sources of legitimate authority. Within these debates, the normative force of customary law is almost automatically paired with the institution of chiefly rule, and the two of these are usually contrasted – be it negatively or favourably – with the liberal provisions of the nation's democratic constitution. Here I contest this implicit conflation of customary order with chiefly power, whether that conflation be by advocates or critics of them both. I suggest that this unspoken identification of the normative domain with that of sovereign political power overlooks a point that is increasingly prominent in the literature on ‘living customary law’: the argument that customary law draws force from a multiplicity of authorities, through processes that are ultimately embedded in the everyday constitution of the social world itself. Based on ethnographic research in northern KwaZulu-Natal, I argue that the application of customary law by diviners, who mediate the authority of the dead in familial matters, is at least as, if not more, important than chiefship in the constitution of living customary practices.

Consent of the Governed in the Hebrew Bible

This article analyzes the concept of consent of the governed in the Hebrew Bible with special reference to the covenant on Mount Sinai. The author recognizes consent as a source of legitimate authority and deals in a sophisticated way with problems that have troubled later consent theories: whether parties actually consent; whether consent is voluntary; the information needed for informed consent; the issue of framing the issue so as to present the subjects with fair options; the problem of dissent; the impact of a social compact on non-participants and future generations; and the question of whether the compact is conditional or absolute. A remarkable feature of the Sinai episode is its similarity to the original position in Rawls’ Theory of Justice: the Israelites in the wilderness at Sinai, like Rawlsian subjects behind the veil of ignorance, make fundamental choices while shielded from knowledge as to their future positions or endowments.

Reflections on the Legitimacy of Regional Environmental Governance: Lessons from Australia's Experiment in Natural Resource Management

The regional arrangements emerging for environmental governance in Australia mark a substantial change in the relationship between the state and civil society. Central to these arrangements is a transfer of responsibilities for natural resource management to regional communities. Although partnerships and other collaborative approaches have been embraced as a more democratic and effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, the legitimacy of these arrangements has been given insufficient attention. In particular, as central governments have retained significant influence in the setting of regional priorities and the accreditation of regional plans, there is a need to examine the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of governing. This paper critically examines the sources of legitimacy that underpin these relationships by drawing on interviews with regional actors in Central Queensland. This analysis demonstrates the hybrid nature of legitimacy, justified via traditional sources of legitimate authority alongside participatory and deliberative norms. This hybridity underlines the importance of attending to all dimensions of legitimacy in the design of governance arrangements. Residual issues of exclusion, and the discounting of community members' substantive concerns, mean that harnessing the mutuality gains derived from local knowledge and experience remains a core challenge for the legitimacy of environmental governance.

ARTICLE 2 OF CONVENTION NO.87: PRECEPTS AND THEIR APPLICATION — A GLOBAL ASSESSMENT

It has been said of most instruments that attempt to guarantee basic rights that they usually give with one hand what they then retrieve with the other. Convention No.87 provides, in Article 2, the right for “workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever to establish and subject, only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation”. By Article 8 (1) however, the forces of freedom unleashed in Article 2 are bridled. “In exercising the rights provided for in this Convention, workers and employers and their respective organisations, like other persons or organised collectives, shall respect the law of the land”. And the provisions of Article 9(1) make it possible for the Police and the Army to forego that right: “The extent to which the guarantees provided for in this convention shall apply to the armed forces and the police shall be determined by national laws or regulations.” Such a situation creates a rife hotbed for claims and counter‐claims between any of the three main players in industrial relations, namely, the state, the employer, and the employee. Besides, Article 8 (1) makes very generous assumptions of national law. When read with the rest of this Convention, Article 8 seems to suggest that all States are in some way, oriented towards the pluralistic frame of reference in their labour law; recognising that in the employment relationship, there is not one, but several sources of authority. Pluralism holds that employers and employees interests are diametrically opposed to each other, and that they are held in the balance by the common need of keeping the enterprise alive. For pluralists, the trade union is a welcome vehicle for communication. But is such an assumption realistic? What becomes of workers and employers in State “X”, whose frame of reference in labour law is strictly unitary; holding that there is only one legitimate source of authority in the employment situation: the employer? The interests of the worker and the employer are said to be the same. The trade union is therefore an unnecessary and unwelcome threat to stability? Further, does Article 8 allow such a State to maintain its legislation over the minimum standards of the Convention as set in Articles 1 to 7?

Ekonomi, politik, civilitet: Ett handlingsteoretiskt bidrag till diskussionen om marknad, stat och civilsamhälle

Economics, politics and civility - towards an action-theoretical discourse on market, state and civil societyIn the recent Swedish debate on the welfare state a controversy has arisen over the potentials and pitfalls of the market, the state and civil society. It is argued that there is a tendency to hypostatize this triad. The article sets out to show that the difficulties this raises can be counteracted by inserting an action-theoretical frame of reference into the debate. Three main alternative frames of reference are considered: rational choice, Weberian sociology and Habermas’ communicative action. These are analyzed from the perspective oftheir contextualizing and autonomizing potentials, i.e . in terms of how they relate actorsto their social context, and how they handle the problem of voluntarism. It is shown that rational choice theories - basically relevant to the economics of scarce resources - face insurmountable difficulties when confronted by the utilitarian dilemma formulated by Parsons in the late 30s. Weber can be associated with an analytical approach to politics - focusing on binding decisions taken by legitimate source of authority - but his approach still fails to resolve the problem of human agency and autonomy. At this point, a crucial distinction is made between primary and secondary feedback in models of action. It is argued that Habermas/Schluchter, in their interpretation of Weber, implicitly make such a distinction. This opens up a socio-political dimension in models of action. Nevertheless, in the Weberian case, the agent is still regarded as a rule-follower, and the intersubjective foundations of value systems remain a puzzle. The significance of the theory of communicative action lies in its attempt to handle the problem of civility, as formulated by Ferguson and Tönnies; the human being is regarded as a rule-maker. It is misleading to regard the state, the market and civil society as alternative entities or arenas for social welfare activities. It is more fruitful to focus on the analytic concept of civility as a necessary precondition for political and economic measures designed to enhance autonomy.