This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6761018/Geels02technological.pdf

Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study

http://seg.fsu.edu/Library/From%20sectoral%20systems%20of%20innovation%20to%20socio-technical%20systems,%20Insights.pdf

From sectoral systems of innovation to socio-technical systems: Insights about dynamics and change from sociology and institutional theory

This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry--social construction of technology, or SCOT--that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume--collectively called SCOT (after the volume’s title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

/pdf/the-theory-of-industrial-organization-19bejph0ej.pdf

The Theory of Industrial Organization

The term “(social) mechanism” is frequently encountered in the social science literature, but there is considerable confusion about the exact meaning of the term The article begins by addressing t

/pdf/mechanisms-in-the-analysis-of-social-macro-phenomena-4srw4plx7r.pdf

Mechanisms in the Analysis of Social Macro-Phenomena

/pdf/der-ansatz-des-akteurzentrierten-institutionalismus-dfr7pqy2vl.pdf

Der Ansatz des akteurzentrierten Institutionalismus

/pdf/gesellschaftliche-selbstregelung-und-politische-steuerung-2wb8yoaqk4.pdf

Gesellschaftliche Selbstregelung und politische Steuerung

Part 1 Theoretical considerations: introduction - studying policy networks, Bernd Marin and Renate Mayntz policy networks and policy analysis - scrutinizing a new analytical toolbox, Patrick Kenis and Volker Schneider. Part 2 Policy networks in national policy domains: organizations in political action - representing interests in national policy making, Edward O. Laumann et al. policy networks and change - the case of high Tc superconductors, Dorothea Jansen. Part 3 Cross-national variations in policy networks: political exchange in the German and American labour policy domain, Franz Urban Pappi and David Knoke fencing off - central banks and networks in Canada and the United States, William D. Coleman policy networks, opportunity structures, and neo-conservative reform strategies in health policy, Marina Dohler the preconditions for policy networks - some findings from a three-country study on industrial restructuring, Patrick Kenis.

Renate Mayntz

Papers

Mechanisms in the Analysis of Social Macro-Phenomena

Der Ansatz des akteurzentrierten Institutionalismus

Gesellschaftliche Selbstregelung und politische Steuerung

Policy Networks: Empirical Evidence And Theoretical Considerations

New challenges to governance theory