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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
Understanding Legitimacy and Social Entrepreneurship - A Structured Literature Review
Debaro Huyler,Craig M. McGill,Tonette S. Rocco +2 more
TL;DR: This structured literature review explores the intersection of human resource development (HRD) and social entrepreneurship in the US, finding social entrepreneurship lacks cognitive legitimacy but is framed as pragmatically legitimate, virtuous, and adaptive, with HRD contributing to its advancement.
Intellectual capital disclosure: evidence from UK accounting firms
TL;DR: This article examined the extent and quality of voluntary intellectual capital disclosures by professional accounting firms in the UK and found that the most frequently reported disclosure category is human capital, while the least reported category is internal capital.
The Language of Politics.
Murray Jacob Edelman
- 01 Apr 1974
TL;DR: For instance, this paper argued that politicians choose their words carefully, because they believe in the power of language to influence thought, and they believe implicitly in linguistic relativity, which is not always true.
The Perceived Differences: The Sector Stereotype of Social Service Providers:
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on nonprofitness as the basic assumption of the contract failure theory, and the sector difference perceives non-profitness is a fundamental question for nonprofit research.
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