Authority is narrower than power

Authority is the part of power that a position carries and that people recognise as legitimate. A programme director can change a deadline; that is authority. Whether the deadline is discussed at all, and whether an extension request is read as reasonable or as evasive, is not settled by authority, and this is why locating the person in charge tells you less about a conflict than it seems to.

Two practical consequences follow. First, people without authority are not without power: a group of students who decline to volunteer for something, an administrator who processes forms in the order she chooses, a colleague trusted by everyone have real capacities that appear nowhere in an organisational chart. Second, people with authority are often constrained in ways that are invisible from below, which is why an exchange can feel like a negotiation to one person and like a wall to the other.

Hierarchy organises attention, not only decisions

The obvious function of a hierarchy is to allocate decision rights. Its less obvious and often more consequential function is to allocate attention and credibility. In most institutions, a point made by a senior person is heard as a contribution while the same point made by a junior person is heard as a question. This is why the same content can enter a discussion twice with entirely different effects, and why the person who said it first frequently does not receive the credit.

Hierarchies also determine whose account of an event becomes the official one. When a tense exchange is later described, the description that circulates is normally the one produced by the person with more standing, and it is that description, not the event, that subsequent decisions are based on.

Norms are the rules nobody has to state

A norm is an expectation strong enough that violating it has consequences, but which is not written down anywhere. In a university setting, norms govern how quickly an email should be answered, whether disagreement in a meeting is acceptable and in what register, how much of one's personal circumstances it is appropriate to mention, whether asking for an extension marks you as organised or as unreliable.

Norms are learned rather than taught, which means they are learned unevenly. People who arrive already fluent in a setting's norms appear competent; people who do not appear careless, arrogant or naive, and the judgement attaches to them personally rather than to their unfamiliarity. This is one of the main mechanisms by which institutions reproduce advantage while applying their written rules identically to everyone.

Three questions make norms visible. What would happen to me if I did not do this? Who taught me that this was expected? Who arrives here already knowing it?

Institutional language and its uses

Institutions have registers that do specific work. Consider the difference between "I disagree with this decision" and "I would like to understand the rationale for this decision". The second is often the only version that can be said without cost, and learning it is a genuine skill. But the register has a second effect: it converts substantive disagreement into a request for information, which can be answered without anything changing.

Similar work is done by vocabulary that shifts attention from the issue to its expression. Comments on someone's tone, professionalism or approach can be honest observations. They can also be the means by which an issue is set aside without being addressed, and the two are not easy to distinguish from inside the exchange. Unit 2 looks at this directly.

A short worked example

A department requires research students to present at an internal colloquium twice a year. The rule is identical for everyone. One student cares for a relative in another city and travels at weekends; the colloquium is on Friday afternoons. She asks whether she might present online. The answer is that in-person attendance is the norm, and that exceptions would be unfair to others.

Read through hierarchy: the decision sits with the convenor, but the relevant question is whose circumstances the Friday slot was designed around, and that question was settled long ago by people who are not in the conversation. Read through norms: presence signals commitment in this department, so a request to appear online is heard not as a logistical question but as a statement about how serious she is. Read through language: fairness is being used to mean identical treatment, which is exactly the move that makes the unequal effects of an identical rule invisible.

None of this tells you what the convenor should decide. It tells you what the conflict is actually about, which is a prerequisite for deciding anything defensible.