Authority, reputation, and leadership are respectively temporal, factual, and social generalizations of influence.

Evidence

In order to be able to label these types of generalization clearly we will call temporally generalized influence authority, circumstance-generalized influence reputation, and socially generalized leadership influence. While authority, reputation and leadership may differ in direction, they offer completely compatible generalized motives for the acceptance of influence. Authority, reputation and leadership are relatively ‘natural’ forms of motive generalization. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 734

Categorization

• DEFINE: Central taxonomy: authority = temporal generalization, reputation = factual/circumstance generalization, leadership = social generalization.
• XREF: This tripartite taxonomy of motive-generalization maps directly onto Giddens’s distinction between facework commitments (interpersonal trust) and faceless commitments (trust in abstract systems) — Stevens’s deference to Lord Darlington is authority (temporal), and could be analyzed as accepting influence because there is ‘a history whose continuation seems obvious.’
• SEED: Article angle: reading Ishiguro’s Stevens through Luhmann’s taxonomy — which generalization type (temporal authority vs. social leadership) actually dominates his deference, and how unmooring from Lord Darlington’s moral grounding collapses all three.