Legitimacy properties and their implications for institutional theory and strategic management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral thesis seeks to advance our understanding of organizational legitimacy through the analysis of types and properties of legitimacy and of its relation to the concepts of status and reputation. More specifically, this doctoral thesis seeks to contribute to organizational theory and strategic management by (1) reviewing and systematizing legitimacy types discerned in the literature and contrasting legitimacy with related concepts of reputation and status, (2) identifying the properties of legitimacy, and (3) exploring some of the implications of these properties for management practice and strategic management research. The doctoral research is presented in the form of a manuscript-based thesis consisting of three interrelated papers: 1. Organizational Legitimacy as a Form of Judgment. Through the analysis of legitimacy definitions, types and typologies, and operationalizations, this study first develops an enumerative definition of organizational legitimacy, maps different types of legitimacy discerned in the literature onto the process of legitimacy judgment formation and highlights the fundamental differences between cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy types. This paper then advances a conceptualization of cognitive and sociopolitical types of legitimacy, reputation and status as four different types of judgment that actors can render in respect to an organization and explores some implications of this approach for organizational research, namely the role of social judgments in exchange partner selection and the use of social judgments under conditions of uncertainty. 2. Legitimacy-Based Entry Deterrence in Inter-Population Competition. This paper develops a theory of competitive social norm manipulations and explores the strategies that well-established organizational populations use to build legitimacy-based barriers to entry into their domain. The study develops a typology of legitimacy manipulation strategies that established organizational populations use to prevent, eradicate or palliate the new entrants' impact by: (1) changing the relative importance of legitimacy dimensions, (2) raising the legitimacy threshold and (3) altering perceptions of competitors' performance. Successful legitimacy manipulations are shown to lead to institutional immunization of the incumbents against similar competitive challenges in the future. 3. Defensive Institutional Strategies in Emergent Industries. Through a comparative analysis of two emergent industries in Canada, this study advances a conceptualization of the process of emergence of a new industry from a successful innovative business model, focusing on sequential lines of institutional defense that are available to emergent industries that come under such attacks: (1) keep a low profile; (2) form a trade association; (3) develop an industry code to provide guidelines and member coordination; (4) enforce the code through self-policing; (5) if everything else fails to end the attack, invite the government to impose regulation. Illustrations of the application of these strategies are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".