Christianisme oriental et occidental

Authority is a fundamental characteristic of organized social interaction – so much so that it is rarely identified or discussed explicitly. In this thesis, I use the term authority relationship to refer to a power relationship in which one person or group attempts to control the actions of another person or group. Such relationships of authority and obedience are necessary in order to maintain or change group norms, making it essential to the existence of every social community (Passini and Morselli, 2009).

In order for an authority to exert its social influence, it must be obeyed. Tom Tyler (2001)

identifies two processes by which authorities can incite obedience. The first process is what he

calls command and control in which obedience is rewarded and disobedience is punished. These

strategies require large amounts of resources for both rewards and surveillance, making them

costly, inefficient, and ineffective. It is much more effective and efficient, he argues, to earn

the consent and cooperation of the people being regulated. In this second process, people

self-regulate because their morals tell them they

ought to follow social rules. Obedience, in this

case, is based on the perceived legitimacy of the authority.

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Legitimacy

People judge the legitimacy of institutions and authorities based on the

fairness

of their decision-making procedures. Tyler (1997) suggests the following four criteria by which people judge fairness in decision-making:

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Trustworthiness: the extent to which the authority cares about and is acting in the best interest of the people.

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Respect: the extent to which people are treated politely, with dignity and respect, and with consideration for their rights and status within society.

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Neutrality: the honesty, impartiality, and professionalism of the authority. Among other things, this might be evidenced by even-handed application of rules, lack of bias, and reliance on facts rather than opinions in decision-making.

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Voice: the extent to which people are allowed to participate in the decision-making process for problems or conflicts that concern them, by stating their case and expressing their opinions.

Persuasion, authority, and coercion

John Turner (2005) situates this concept of authority in a broader framework that describes the power that authorities wield through others by getting them to act on their behalf. In Turner’s theory, the basis for power – and thereby authority – is shared social identity, or the extent to which the target of a demand identifies with the maker of the demand. Turner suggests that such power relationships can play out in three ways: persuasion, authority, and coercion.

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Persuasion, is the process through which one tries to change people’s private attitudes, values, and beliefs to alight with their own. “If one can persuade others of the correctness of some belief or the rightness of some action, then they are likely to act on it as a matter of their own volition, as free, intrinsically motivated and willing agents”

(J. Turner, 2005: 6-8).

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Authority is the power that a social group accords to one or several of its members, to

control the rest of the group. A group confers authority upon someone they believe

embodies the norms, goals, and identity of the group. Obedience is voluntarily, not

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because the group is persuaded of the legitimacy of each individual command, but because they are persuaded of the authority’s legitimacy to make commands.

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Coercion, on the other hand, is controlling others against their will by restricting their freedom or manipulating their behaviour. It is a decidedly negative experience for the target, and fosters mistrust and resentment. .

Turner’s three processes are perhaps best understood through his graphical presentation of his theory, shown here in Figure 8.

As shown above, legitimate authority and coercion are two faces to the same coin: control. The difference between the authority and coercive control, Turner argues, has nothing to do with the command itself but rather how the target perceives the one controlling them – whether they embody the norms and “collective will” of the group, or not (J. Turner, 2005).

Morality and disobedience

Coercion, in Turner’s view, is a counter-productive means of control. It makes the target aware of the social distance between the authority and the group it means to represent, and provokes an inner rejection of the position advocated by the authority. The more coercion is used:

Figure 8 – Turner’s three-process theory of power

Source: (J. Turner, 2005: 7)

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the more it brings into being a countervailing source of power as the targets develop a collective identity defined by their rejection of coercion and the goal of defeating the coercive agents who threaten their freedom (J. Turner, 2005: 13).

According to Turner, the only way for an authority to maintain its power when employing coercive control against members of its own group, is to prevent other members of the group from

identifying with their victims “by negatively categorizing and stereotyping the target as

different from the group as a whole” (J. Turner, 2005: 17). In Albert Bandura’s (2002) view, this negative portrayal of the victim is only one of many “mechanisms for moral disengagement”.

Moral disengagement is a psychological process through which one might convince themselves that their immoral actions are justified. It includes mechanisms such as advantageous comparisons (ex: contrasting poor behaviour with horrible behaviour); distortion of consequences (ex: discrediting evidence of harm), and displacement of responsibility (ex: self-exonerating obedience) (Bandura, 2002). Bandura’s full presentation of mechanisms for moral engagement is shown in Figure 9.

Stefano Passini and Davide Morselli (2009) draw upon concepts from Bandura’s model to distinguish between constructive and destructive forms of obedience and disobedience. They warn that both obedience and disobedience can be destructive is the actor fails to consider alternatives, displaces responsibility for their actions, and considers only a narrow and exclusive understanding of their community when evaluating the impacts of their decision. Conversely, Figure 9 – Bandura’s mechanisms of moral disengagement

Source: (Bandura, 2002: 103)

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they argue that both obedience and disobedience can be constructive if the actor identifies and considers alternatives, takes personal responsibility for their actions, and adopts a wide and inclusive understanding of their “community” when evaluating the impacts of their actions.

Passini and Morselli (2009) explain that when people fail to take a critical and active role in controlling the actions of authorities, they make it easy for them to resort to coercive power.

Disobedience, then, can be seen as “an instrument for controlling the legitimacy of authority’s demands, becoming a protective factor against authoritarianism and the loss of democracy”

(Passini and Morselli, 2009: 99-100).

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2.4 Section summary

There has been plenty of research done on the potential environmental and economic impacts of the TMX, as well as the appropriateness of the regulatory framework and the implications of these projects and processes for Aboriginal rights. There nonetheless remains a considerable research gap in the area of people’s lived experiences of these issues, and how these experiences have affected them.

This research aims to fill this gap by using the TMX as a case study to explore people’s experiences with the project, as well as how these experiences have affected their understandings of their role as citizens in energy infrastructure projects. I sought to understand these experiences using three theoretical lenses: citizenship, public participation, and authority relationships.

Citizenship is often described as either a role or a status. This thesis defines citizenship as a relationship between the members of a political community. Fundamental to most theories of citizenship are public versus private spaces, and active versus passive parties.

While public participation can be very useful, it can also be harmful if executed poorly. The citizen’s experience is often determined by the amount and type of power they are afforded in decision-making, and the amount of social trust and learning present.

Authority relationships, in which one actor controls the actions of another, are fundamental to

the proper function of society. Both the extent to which an authority can control other actors,

and the way others perceive that control, depend on whether or not the authority is perceived to

embody values and goals of the group.

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3 Methods

The NEB hearing process is a social phenomenon, and therefore most appropriately studied using a naturalistic paradigm. According to Egon Guba (1981), the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries depends upon its credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirm-ability. Throughout this Methods section, I’ve taken care to identify the ways my research satisfies these criteria.

I start here by pointing to one thing all four criteria have in common: the need for a detailed description of the research design and methods. As a measure of trustworthiness, I have been as explicit and comprehensive as possible in the below descriptions of my research project.

I begin this Methods section by describing the research design I used, followed by an overview

of my sample and the methods I used to select my respondents. Next, I describe provide a

detailed description of how I collected, transcribed, coded, and analyzed my interview data. I

conclude this section with a discussion of the inherent limitations to this research, and finally

the measures I took to ensure it was conducted ethically.

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