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Organizational Legitimacy: Six Key Questions
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TL;DR: Deephouse and Suchman as discussed by the authors reviewed 1299 publications and conference papers that had the string "legitim" in the title, abstract, or keywords of a paper and identified six central questions around which this chapter is arranged: What is organizational legitimacy? Why does legitimacy matter? Who confers legitimacy, and how? What criteria are used (for making legitimacy evaluations)? How does legitimacy change over time?
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Abstract: Legitimacy is a fundamental concept of organizational institutionalism. It influences how organizations behave and has been shown to affect their performance and survival (Pollock & Rindova, 2003; Singh, Tucker, & House, 1986). As developed in organizational institutionalism the term has spread widely across the social sciences, and because of this, our current understandings of legitimacy and how it is managed are much more nuanced and elaborate than portrayed in early institutional accounts. In this chapter, we seek to bring greater clarity and order to the growing and sometimes confusing literature, focusing on the conceptualization of legitimacy itself and how it changes over time.This chapter builds from the previous edition (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008, available online at www.sage.org/organizational institutionalism/legitimacy). In updating that chapter we reviewed 1299 publications and conference papers that had the string “legitim” in the title, abstract, or keywords. Reflecting the reach and power of legitimacy, these publications included books and a wide range of journals and across a wide range of disciplines (e.g., communication, political science, public administration, and sociology -- not just management). Our goal was both to identify both broad trends in theory and research and possible theoretical innovations and also to highlight important applications for scholars in organizational institutionalism. From this review we identified six central questions around which this chapter is arranged: What is organizational legitimacy? Why does legitimacy matter? Who confers legitimacy, and how? What criteria are used (for making legitimacy evaluations)? How does legitimacy change over time? These questions are shown in Figure 1.1. Our final section asks “Where do we go from here?” and offers suggestions for future research.
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Citations
The discursive construction of organizational legitimacy in higher education: Multimodal discourse analysis on Chinese business schools
Zhang Xu,Liu Shubo +1 more
- 13 Oct 2023
TL;DR: The discursive construction of organizational legitimacy in higher education in China is complex and involves the use of visual and verbal discourses to legitimate two organizational identities: policy followers and product/service suppliers.
Advocacy Through Practices of Input and Throughput Legitimacy: Safe Spaces, Proximity, and Collectivizing Individual Needs
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examine how non-profit organizations that engage in advocacy gain their legitimacy in the eyes of their target group of vulnerable citizens, and they show that community workers engage in practices to enhance both the input and throughput legitimacy of their advocacy activities.
Peer-to-peer lending platforms’ legitimacy in the eyes of the general public and lenders
TL;DR: Perceptions and public attitudes about the perceived risks of lending money through the internet and using P2P lending platform, and differences between users based on their activity on the platform, gender, income and personality characteristics are found.
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