Organizational Legitimacy: SixKey Questions

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…