Legitimacy in Organizational Institutionalism

Legitimacy is a central concept in organizational institutionalism. The term ‘legitimacy’ dates back to the dawn of organization theory; however, for most of the past century, research on legitimacy emerged only slowly and was fragmented across several distinct social science literatures. Since 1995, however, the body of relevant scholarship has grown rapidly and in a variety of directions. Much of this new literature (like much of the literature that preceded it) has been highly theoretical, invoking legitimacy as an explanatory concept rather than examining it as an empirical property. Empirical accounts, to date, have focused on exploratory case studies of legitimacy being gained or lost, while only a…