The British Colonial Office's postwar optimism about the end of indirect rule and the development of modern political institutions in Africa was echoed and amplified by the mainstream of professional political scientists across the Atlantic. Studies of transitional states and societies were very much in vogue for American political science departments during the 1950s and 1960s, as was the adoption of a neo-Weberian analytic framework– albeit one carefully expunged of all traces of hesitation about bureaucracy and rationalization. From Weber, American political scientists adopted both the concept of a historical transition from tradition to modernity and the notion of a corresponding shift in a society's form of legitimate authority.

As a result, modernization studies of sub-Saharan Africa tended to highlight transformations of the institution of chieftaincy. Where independent African states were emerging from colonial rule, the process of modernization was expected to involve the outright replacement of traditional authorities with modern bureaucratic administrators. Where a colonial power still remained, researchers seeking to apply the Weberian paradigm were faced with the apparent coexistence of both traditional and modern forms of authority. Studies such as Lloyd Fallers's Bantu Bureaucracy, A. K. H. Weinrich's Chiefs and Councils in Rhodesia, and J. F. Holleman's Chief, Council, and Commissioner accounted for indirect rule as the bureaucratization of traditional authority, envisioning chiefs as occupying a middling position between tradition and modernity. The resulting clashes between competing bases of legitimacy were referred to in these studies and others like them as episodes of “role conflict.”