Legitimacy as a Social Process

To gain an in-depth understanding of legitimacy as a general social process, we review contemporary approaches to legitimacy within two areas of sociology: social psychology and organizations. A comparison of these distinct approaches allows us to explain the process, both in implicit and explicit ways at different levels of analysis, through which a social object is construed as legitimate. This comparison also suggests four stages in the process by which new social objects, both individual (worthy/unworthy individuals) and collective (organizational forms), gain legitimation: innovation, local validation, diffusion, and general validation. We then show how legitimation of the status quo—that is, the…