Power and Permission in Security Systems

It is a standard feature of all organisations that designated agents, usually when acting in specific roles, are empowered by the organisation to create specified kinds of states of affairs – as when, for instance, a priest declares a couple as married and thereby makes it so in the eye of the church, or when a head of department assigns one of his subordinates to a particular project, or when an owner transfers ownership, as opposed to mere physical possession, of an item to another entity. This feature of organisations is referred to variously as ‘(legal) power’, ‘(legal) competence‘, or ‘(legal) capacity’. Jones and Sergot [5] use the term institutionalised power to emphasise that this is not a feature of legal systems alone but commonplace in all organisations. The neutral term ‘institution’ is used by them, and other authors, for any kind of formal or informal organisation.