How Change Recipients Become Rivals: Legitimacy Dynamics and ‘Cooptive Rejection’ in Organizational Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Our study challenges a commonly held assumption in the legitimacy and organizational change literatures: that the legitimacy of a change project is closely tied to, and dependent upon, the legitimacy of the change agent promoting it. Drawing on an in‐depth, three‐and‐a‐half‐year qualitative study of a major transformation within a French public organization, we identify a surprising dynamic – instances where a change initiative gains support and is judged as legitimate even as the legitimacy of the change agent deteriorates. To explain this dissociation, we develop a theory of cooptive rejection , a process through which change recipients appropriate and endorse the content of a change while actively distancing themselves from, or even undermining, its initiator. We unpack the mechanisms that enable this dissociation and highlight the crucial role of recipient agency. Our research contributes to legitimacy theory by revealing how multiple objects of legitimacy can evolve independently – and even in opposition – over time. We also advance organizational change scholarship by illuminating the competitive nature of transformation processes.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.071 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".