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[deleted] wrote

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db0 wrote

An expert has authority on their area of expertise. I.e. when building a house, the workers don't collectively decide how to build it. Instead they defer to the authority of their civil engineers during that task. They can collectively decide who is a civil engineer, but once it's decided, you have to defer to their authority.

This is not a conflation, this is how we understand this concept.

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[deleted] wrote

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db0 wrote (edited )

But they DO have coercive power to enforce their authority. They have coercive power based on the peer pressure the other workers would put on objecting workers to defer to the group decision already taken. They can of course just choose to oppose the peer pressure coercion for any number of reasons, but just because you oppose a form of coercion does not make it any less coercive.

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