Authority (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Authority may refer to:

[edit] Types of authority

• Authority in government generally refers to the ability to make laws or rules
  • democratic authority
  • monarchic authority
  • republican authority
• Authoritarianism describes a form of social control characterized by strict obedience to the authority of a state or organization
• Authoritarian personality describes individuals who seek to dominate those within their sphere of influence
• Authority (management) refers to the five recognized types of management authorities:
  • coercive authority
  • expert authority
  • formal authority, also known as legitimate authority
  • referent authority
  • reward authority
• Church authority, the authority (assumed or perceived) that a church has to decide what is orthodox and what is heresy
• Public Authority, a public benefit corporation chartered by a state government; most public authorities operate as for-profit corporations, with the ability to issue municipal bonds
  • New York State public benefit corporations
• In criticism of texts, the authority of a document means its reliability as a witness to the author's intentions.
• In scientific classification of living organisms, the Authority for a taxon is the name of the author who first published a valid description of it. Slightly different systems for specifying the authority are used in different branches of biology
  • author citation (botany)
  • author citation (zoology)

[edit] Other uses of the word

• Appeal to authority, a type of logical argument which is one method of obtaining propositional knowledge and is often a logical fallacy
• Authority control in library and information science (the practice of creating and maintaining headings for bibliographic material in a catalog)
• Police authority, in the United Kingdom, a body charged with securing an efficient and effective British police force for its area

[edit] In fiction

• The Authority, a Wildstorm superhero comic book series
• The Authority (RPG), a role-playing game set in superhero comic book universe of the same name, based on Guardians of Order's Silver Age Sentinels
• The Authority (His Dark Materials), a God-like character in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy of novels