Volume 31, Issue 4

How is legitimate authority constituted in everyday interactions involving hierarchical leadership? This paper deals with this question using an interactionist revision of Weber’s theory of authority and of neo-institutional organization theory. The dilemma of control and negotiation in hierarchical relationships in bureaucratic organizations involves the communicative problem of clarifying vested rights of control without impairing the requirements of negotiation. Various categories from Goffman’s theory of interaction are used to identify a ritualized interaction scheme that symbolizes rights of control by means of nonverbal communication. The “alternation scheme” between task delegation and task completion represents the hierarchical relationship in the form of an institutionalized interaction structure by means of which superiors and subordinates mutually signal the legitimacy of bureaucratic authority. Exemplary descriptions of leadership interaction illustrate how complementary gestures of dominance and submission realize this latent interaction structure.

This article focuses on research grants funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), i.e. the German National Science Foundation. It analyzes research grant applications in the field of sociology and their evaluations and is based on process-produced data on 761 grant applications submitted to the DFG from 1993 to 1999. While application conduct does not differ by gender, women have a smaller chance of receiving funding than men. This inequality results partly from individual, structural and contextual differences between men and women. The differences in opportunities between men and women are, to a large extent, explained by the gender-specific focus of the research proposals: Half of the applications submitted by women can be categorized as gender-oriented research. The establishment of the DFG-research area “Professionalization, Organization, Gender” is of major importance for the topic under investigation. In the years analyzed, significantly fewer grant proposals in the area of gender and women’s research were funded. This is a programmed, although unintentional and definitely avoidable side effect. At the same time, there is programmed equality inasmuch as this research area has reduced the differences in the funding opportunities of women and men.

The current trend towards “scientifically validated medicine”, as defined by “Evidence Based Medicine”, is discussed from the point of view of its implications for the medical profession. In a first step, its consequences for the relationships between the medical profession and the spheres of law, science, politics, and industry are considered. EBM provides opportunities for points of contact for different functional systems, allowing them to interact with the medical system in accordance with their own specific logic. In this sense medicine as a system may expect to be affected by intelligent interference from its environment and itself to react more intelligently, i.e. with an increase in complexity. The results of this analysis lead us to assume that EBM does not, in fact, simplify the conditions of medical science and practice as intended, but burdens it with increased complexity. In a second step, the dynamics of the profession are examined from the perspective of interaction theory. The standards expressed in evidence-based guidelines have legal standing and increase the demands placed on each individual physician, who can then respond either by increasing his or her autonomy or by resorting to a technocratic retreat. As shown in a third analytical step, the trend towards EBM can also be understood as a manner of staging knowledge. In this view, the above-mentioned conflicts would be defused, albeit in the long term at the expense of deconstructing the profession’s own aspirations to maintain its scientific basis. If the trend towards EBM becomes exaggerated and results in an ideology of rationality, paradoxical effects are to be expected which could even go so far as to include a deprofessionalization and functional dedifferentiation of the medical professions.

Although cultural and biological evolution show many similarities, many sociologists continue to reject evolutionary analyses of social behavior. One reason is that Darwin’s original ideas were subsequently replaced by a narrow genetic model of natural selection which tied cultural traits to reproductive success and gave the individual organism an entirely passive role in the evolutionary process. This model could neither explain the many non-adaptive traits in human social behavior, nor the intentional character of human culture. By contrast, Darwin saw organisms as active participants in natural selection. Their internally guided exploration and choice of strategies of behavior during their lifetime was just as important for evolution as the genetic inheritance of the result to future generations. Such internal selection includes both error and adaptively redundant traits. It provides a much more suitable model for the evolutionary analysis of human culture, especially innovation and creativity, values, and the organization of social systems.