bud selig, organizational rules, and authority

Last night the rules of Major League Baseball were put to the test and almost overturned by the commissioner himself. For those of you who weren’t watching game 5 between the Phillies and the Rays, the game was suspended in the 6th inning due to horrendous weather conditions that made play difficult.  To get an idea of just how sloppy play was getting, one of the best defensive shortstops in the game, Jimmy Rollins, dropped a fly ball in the fifth because the wind was blowing it all over and the rain reduced its visibility.  Everyone in the stadium knew the game would have to be suspended. The question was whether the game would end that night in the 6th with a Phillies victory.

The official rule is that after five innings, a game called due to weather is complete.  This rule meant that if the Rays didn’t score in the 6th, the game was technically over and the championship would go to the Phillies.  This outcome would have certainly been controversial. No World Series has ever been decided in a weather suspended game.  But the rules are the rules, right? Luckily, the Rays tied it with a B.J. Upton run in the 6th and the game was suspended in a tie and so by necessity the game had to be extended to a new day (which will happen whenever the weather in Philadelphia decides to cooperate).  But what if Upton hadn’t scored?

According to this ESPN article, Commissioner Bud Selig was prepared to suspend the game to be played another day regardless of whether the Rays scored in the 6th or not.

In that explanation, Selig revealed he had made an executive decision on the fly: In a news flash to the rule book Selig held under his left arm before speaking, he said he would not have allowed a World Series game to be decided in less than nine official innings. “Well, I guess putting everything else aside, it’s my judgment. I have to use my judgment. It’s not a way to end the World Series,” Selig said. “I have enough authority here so that I’m not only on solid ground, I’m on very solid ground … and I would not have allowed the World Series to end this way.”

Selig said he and the club executives knew they would not have allowed a game to be ended before completion. The Rays’ manager, Joe Maddon, said he was aware, as well. But nobody told the players. “I knew the rules, but I didn’t think they would actually end a World Series game after six innings,” Longoria said. “I mean, that just wouldn’t be right by any measure.”

In a game for which rules and tradition are sacrosanct, it’s surprising to see a rule so easily almost-overturned by the head honcho.  To me, what this situation illustrates is the sometimes conflicting nature of two kinds of organizational authority, both of which are important to the functioning of any organization.  We typically associate the first kind of authority, rational-legal authority, with Weber’s description of bureaucracy. Organizations are governed by clearly defined rules and roles that specify each individual’s relation to the larger structure.  In the case of baseball, the sport and the league are held together by a set of rules that make interaction between teams and play on the field predictable and comprehensible.  Any sport, in fact, depends on these sorts of rules to facilitate player interaction and to instill a sense of fairness to the whole project.

The other kind of authority, called cognitive authority by John Levi Martin or traditional authority by Weber, refers to the legitimacy of governance – the extent to which the governed “accept the rightness of alter’s influence” (Martin 2002, 873; alter being the person or party exercising power).  Cognitive authority, thus, rests on a subjective belief in the appropriateness of the power held by those wielding it and/or in the rule system that governs action in the organization.  It was this latter kind of authority that compelled Selig to do what he did (or what he might have done had Upton not scored).  He realized that ending a series in the 6th inning would have been technically correct and consistent with his bureaucratic duties but it would have done serious damage to his cognitive authority in the baseball public.  Losing this cognitive authority would have hampered his ability to govern in the future.

Weber, of course, was actually aware of the complementarity of rational-legal and traditional authority.  In The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Weber states:

In general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige. The composition of this belief is seldom altogether simple. In the case of ‘legal authority,’ it is never purely legal. The belief in legality comes to be established and habitual, and this means it is partly traditional. Violation of the tradition may even be fatal to it (pg. 382).

But I would argue that traditional authority is based on more than just habit.  It’s based on some deeper understanding of what the organization is meant to be – what its larger purpose is for the participants and for the community of which it is a part.  That purpose is often taken for granted and encoded at a highly abstract level.  It is this code that gives the organization its authenticity.  Thus, it is the belief that the organization is behaving in an authentic fashion that reproduces its traditional authority and causes people to continue to accept and abide by the rational-legal rules of the organization.  When the former is questioned, the latter has less sway and, perhaps, becomes more malleable (until traditional authority is reestablished).

Weber might be extended to mean that violation of the organization’s authenticity could cause a fatal blow to the traditional authority of the organization, which in turn could undermine the rational-legal authority of the organization.  When an organization violates the abstract code of its existence – e.g., baseball is a competitive sport in which winning demonstrates higher competence – the rules themselves are suddenly fair game.  This is what happened with the steroid issue.  It wasn’t that baseball players were actually violating specific rules of MLB when taking performance enhancing drugs, but the authenticity of fair and competitive play was questioned.  This breach of traditional authority ended up having repercussions for the more immediate rational-legal authority. The same would likely have occured had the game (and the season!) ended abruptly in the 6th last night.  Luckily, for this time at least, it appears that Selig was aware of the sudden threat the situation presented to his and the organization’s authority, and he was prepared to take action to avoid it, even if it meant violating the game’s time-honored rules.