The Power of Obedience

Nicole Woolsey Biggart and Gary G. Hamilton Organizational roles provide actors with moral constructs for the enactment of power. Indeed, actors evaluate each other's acts of power in part on the willingness to obey role prescriptions. For a person to sustain power in an organizational setting he or she must self-consciously exercise power so as to signify the awareness of role obligations. Organizational power, paradoxically, stems from obedience to roles. The authors illustrate these points with interview data from a study of the gubernatorial administrations of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown.