ABSTRACT
Authority and power have a long history in philosophy and the social sciences. Any attempt to study these notions is enabled, but also burdened, by the weight of that heritage. Looking at the way authority and power have been conceptualized so far reveals that they have rarely been studied as such, which may explain the diversity of attempts to define the notions. However, some pioneering writings have offered hints towards an interactional study of authority and power. This introduction identifies these early contributions and suggests that it is possible to build on them to formulate a genuinely interactional approach to the empirical study of authority and power. It then introduces the chapters in this book. Each of them confronts perspectives around a specific issue in the interactional study of authority and power: the broader context of the interaction, formal authority, institutions and routines, materiality, immateriality and, finally, the authority of third parties.
