Organizational Legitimacy: SixKey Questions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it