Unelected officials with coercive powers (e.g., police, prosecutors, bureaucrats) vary markedly in the extent to which citizens view their actions as legitimate. We explore the institutional determinants of legitimate authority in the context of a public goods laboratory experiment. In the experiment, an “authority” can target one “citizen” for punishment following citizen contribution choices....

The reform of the centralized Jamaican regulatory landscape in the 1990s was promoted via the adoption of the independent regulatory model. The key driving force behind this model is that its decentralist configuration will negate undue political interference in regulatory affairs. So, the devolution of authority framework was encouraged as one of the institutional designs to facilitate separat...

In the WWW, people are engaging in interaction with more, and more diverse information than ever before, so there is an increasing need for information “filtering.” But because of the diversity of information resources, and the lack of traditional quality control on the WWW, the criteria of authority and quality of information that people have used for this purpose in past contexts may no longe...

Recently the medical profession has faced increased outside pressure to reform postgraduate medical training programs to better equip young doctors for changing health care needs and public expectations. In this article we explore the impact of reform on professional self-governance by conducting a comparative historical-institutional analysis of postgraduate medical training reform in the Unit...

Institutional authority is a factor that impacts adoption of IT. Institutional theory incorporates three different but complimentary perspectives and we used these to develop a layered analysis of IT adoption in organizations. We used a case study of State Government agencies in Australia to show how layers of authority influenced the adoption or rejection of technology and that such forces var...