The performance of authority in organizations: an example from management consulting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses how authority is concretely performed through interaction, and how this performance contributes to the constitution of organizational boundaries. Through the case of a six-month consultancy assignment at a large French energy group, we show how authority is established, challenged and reaffirmed as everyday work unfolds. Rather than viewing authority as decided once and for all when the engagement is negotiated, we show instead that mission involves a large share of ambiguity which, while being a source of uncertainty, also allows the consultant to position himself as acting on behalf of a variety of entities that lend weight to his actions and authorize them. It is the mobilization of some entities rather than others that situates the consultant as located within some organizational configurations rather than others. Rather than reducing this phenomenon to a strategic positioning on the part of the consultant, as either outsider or insider, we show that boundary negotiation is intrinsic to the consultant’s ability to assert his authority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".