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Authority management concepts

Authority in management is the formal or legitimate authority specified in a charter gives a project manager the authority to act in the name of the sponsoring executive or on behalf on the organizationThere are different types here:
• Coercive authority : refers to motivating staff by punishment and is predicated on fear of losing status, positions, bonuses or jobs.
• Expert authority : is earned if the team respects one's skills as a project manager or subject-matter expert.
• Referent authority : refers to the ability to influence others through charisma, personality, and charm.
• Reward authority : refers to positive reinforcement and the ability to award something of value.

Authority control

In library and information science, authority control is the practice of creating and maintaining headings for bibliographic material in a catalog. Authority control fulfills two important functions. First, it enables catalogers to disambiguate items with similar or identical headings. For example, two authors who happen to have published under the same name can be distinguished from each other by adding middle initials, birth and/or death (or flourished, if these are unknown) dates, or a descriptive epithet to the heading of one (or both) authors. Second, authority control is used by catalogers to collocate materials that logically belong together, although they present themselves differently. For example, authority records are used to establish uniform titles, which can collocate all versions of a given work together even when they are issued under different titles.
Although theoretically, any piece of information on a given book is amenable to authority control, catalogers typically focus on authors and titles. Subject headings fulfill a function similar to authority records, although they are usually considered separately.

Authority records

The most common way of enforcing authority control in a bibliographic catalog is to set up a separate index of authority records, which relates to and governs the headings used in the main catalog. This separate index is often referred to as an "authority file." It contains an indexable record of all decisions made by catalogers in a given library (or -- as is increasingly the case -- cataloguing consortium), which catalogers consult when making, or revising, decisions about headings.
It is to be remembered that the function of authority files is essentially organizational, rather than informational. That is to say, they (ideally) contain a sufficient amount of information to establish a given author or title as unique, while excluding information that, while perhaps interesting to a reader, does not contribute to this goal.

Although practices certainly vary internationally, in the English-speaking world, it is generally the case that a valid authority record must contain:
• A heading
• Any cross references
• Statement(s) of justification
Heading refers to the form of name (or title) that the cataloguer has chosen as the authorized form.
Cross references are other forms of the name (or title) that might appear in the catalog. There are two types of cross-references: see references, which reference forms of the name (or title) that have been deprecated in favor of the authorized form; and see also references, which point to other forms of the name (or title) that are authorized. See also references are most commonly used to point to earlier or later forms of a name (or title).

Statement(s) of justification: In addition to providing a heading and applicable references, a valid authority record should also contain a reference to whatever sources of information the cataloguer used to determine both the authorized and any deprecated forms of the name. This is usually done by citing the title and publication date of the source, the location of the name (or title) on that source, and the form in which it appears on that source.

An example authority record, for author Flann O'Brien, taken from the United States Library of Congress authorities files, is reproduced below. (The original record has been abbreviated somewhat for clarity
This example contains all the elements of a valid authority record: the first heading is the form of the name that the Library of Congress has chosen to be authoritative. In theory, every record in the catalog that represents a work by this author should have this form of the name as its author heading. What follow immediately below is a set of see references. These forms of the author's name will appear in the catalog, but only as transcriptions, not as headings. If a user queries the catalog under one of these variant forms of the author's name, she would receive the response: "See O’Brien, Flann, 1911-1966." (See also references, which point from one authorized heading to another authorized heading, are exceedingly rare for personal name authority records, although they often appear in name authority records for corporate bodies.) The final four entries in this record constitute the justification for this particular form of the name: it appeared in this form on the 1939 edition of the author's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, whereas the author's other noms de plume appeared on later publications.

Access control

The act of choosing a single authorized heading to represent all forms of a name is often difficult, sometimes arbitrary and on occasion politically sensitive. An alternative is the idea of access control, where variant forms of a name are related without the endorsement of one particular form. See Linda Barnhart's Access Control Records: Prospects and Challenges from the 1996 OCLC conference 'Authority Control in the 21st Century'.
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by typically non-elected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom.[1] [
Characteristics

Theodore M. Vestal of Oklahoma State University–Stillwater has written that authoritarianism is characterized by:
• "Highly concentrated and centralized power structures," in which political power is generated and maintained by a "repressive system that excludes potential challengers" and uses political parties and mass organizations to "mobilize people around the goals of the government";[3]
• The following principles:
1) rule of men, not rule of law;
2) rigged elections;
3) all important political decisions made by unelected officials behind closed doors;
4) a bureaucracy operated quite independently of rules, the supervision of elected officials, or concerns of the constituencies they purportedly serve;


5) the informal and unregulated exercise of political power;
• Leadership that is "self-appointed and even if elected cannot be displaced by citizens' free choice among competitors"
• No guarantee of civil liberties or tolerance for meaningful opposition;[3]
• Weakening of civil society: "No freedom to create a broad range of groups, organizations, and political parties to compete for power or question the decisions of rulers," with instead an "attempt to impose controls on virtually all elements of society";and
• Political stability maintained by "control over and support of the military to provide security to the system and control of society; 2) a pervasive bureaucracy staffed by the regime; 3) control of internal opposition and dissent; 4) creation of allegiance through various means of socialization."
Authoritarian political systems may be weakened through "inadequate performance to demands of the people." Vestal writes that the tendency to respond to challenges to authoritarianism through tighter control instead of adaptation is a significant weakness, and that this overly rigid approach fails to "adapt to changes or to accommodate growing demands on the part of the populace or even groups within the system." Because the legitimacy of the state is dependent on performance, authoritarian states that fail to adapt may collapse.

Authoritarianism is marked by "indefinite political tenure" of the ruler or ruling party (often in a single-party state) or other authority.[3] The transition from an authoritarian system to a democratic one is referred to as democratization.[3]
John Duckitt of the University of the Witwatersrand suggests a link between authoritarianism and collectivism, asserting that both are in opposition to individualism. Duckitt writes that both authoritarianism and collectivism submerge individual rights and goals to group goals, expectations and conformities.[5] Others argue that collectivism, properly defined, is based on consensus decision-making, the opposite of authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism and totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is generally considered to be an extreme version of authoritarianism. Building on the work of Yale political scientist Juan Linz, Paul C. Sondrol of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has examined the characteristics of authoritarian and totalitarian dictators and organized them in a chart:

Totalitarianism Authoritarianism
Charisma
High Low
Role conception Leader as function Leader as individual
Ends of power Public Private
Corruption
Low High
Official ideology
Yes No
Limited pluralism
No Yes
Legitimacy Yes No

Sondrol argues that the while both authoritarians and totalitarianism are forms of autocracy, they differ in "key dichotomies":
(1) Unlike their bland and generally unpopular authoritarian brethren, totalitarian dictators develop a charismatic 'mystique' and a mass-based, pseudo-democratic interdependence with their followers via the conscious manipulation of a prophetic image.


(2) Concomitant role conceptions differentiate totalitarians from authoritatians. Authoritarians view themselves as indvidual beings, largely content to control; and maintain the status quo. Totalitarian self-conceptions are largely teleological. The tyrant is less a person than an indispensable 'function' to guide and reshape the universe. (3) Consequently, the utilisation of power for personal aggrandizement is more evidence among authoritarians than totalitarians. Lacking the binding appeal of ideology, authoritarians support their rule by a mixture of instilling fear and granting rewards to loyal collaborators, engendering a kleptocracy
Thus, compared to totalitarian systems, authoritarian systems may also leave a larger sphere for private life, lack a guiding ideology, tolerate some pluralism in social organization, lack the power to mobilize the whole population in pursuit of national goals, and exercise their power within relatively predictable limits.

Authoritarianism and democracy

While normally considered to be in opposition to one another, it is possible for democracies to be authoritarian. An illiberal democracy (or procedural democracy) is distinguished from liberal democracy (or substantive democracy) in that illiberal democracies lack some democratic features, such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a further distinction was that liberal democracies rarely made war with one another. More recent research has extended the theory and finds that democracies have few Militarized Interstate Disputes causing less battle deaths with one another, and that democracies have few civil wars.
• Poor liberal democracies tend to have better education, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, access to drinking water, and better health care than poor dictatorships. This is not due to higher levels of foreign assistance or spending a larger percentage of GDP on health and education. Instead, the available resources are more likely to be managed better.

• Studies suggest that several health indicators (life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality) has a stronger and more significant association with liberal democracy than they have with GDP per capita, size of the public sector, or income inequality.

• In the post-Communist nations, after an initial decline, those most democratic have achieved the greatest gains in life expectancy. Although it must be noted that most were also the most developed states from the ex USSR before its end.

• A prominent economist, Amartya Sen, has theorized that no functioning democracy has ever suffered a large scale famine.[12] This includes democracies that have not been very prosperous historically, like India, which had its last great famine in 1943 and many other large scale famines before that in the late nineteenth century, all under British rule. However, some others ascribe the Bengal famine of 1943 to the effects of World War II[citation needed]. The government of India had been becoming progressively more democratic for years. Provincial government had been entirely so since the Government of India Act of 1935.

• Refugee crises almost