Weber wrote, “The effectiveness of legal authority rests on the acceptance of the validity of the following mutually interdependent ideas:
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1. That any given legal norm may be established by agreement or by his position, on ground of expediency or rational values or both, with a claim to obedience at least on the part of the members of the corporate group.
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2. That every body of law consists essentially in a consistent system of abstract rules which have normally been dimensionally established administration of law is held to consist in the application of these rules particular cases.
3. That thus the typical person in authority occupies an “office”. In the action associated with his status, including the commands the issues to others, he is subject to an impersonal order to which his actions are oriented.
4. That the person who obeys authority does so as it is normally stated, only in his capacity as a “member” of the corporate group and what he ‘obeys’ is only the law.
5. In conformity with point it is held that members of the corporate group in so far as they obey a person is authority do not owe this obedience to him as an individual, but to the impersonal order.
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Hence, it follows that there is an obligation to obedience only within the sphere of the rationally distinctive authority which in terms of the order has been conferred upon him.
Weber’s analysis work deliberately confirmed to the concept of imperative co-ordination in the structure of the administrative staff. Weberian analysis consists in terms of ideal types of official law of bureaucracy.
The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff. Only the supreme chief of the organization occupies his position of authority by virtue of appropriation, of election, or of having been designated for the succession. But even his authority consists in a sphere of legal “competence”.