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Journal ArticleDOI

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

Mark C. Suchman
- 01 Jul 1995 - 
- Vol. 20, Iss: 3, pp 571-610
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TLDR
This article synthesize the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches, and identify three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based upon normative approval; and cognitive, according to comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness.
Abstract
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.

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Journal ArticleDOI

The Harm of Symbolic Actions and Green-Washing: Corporate Actions and Communications on Environmental Performance and Their Financial Implications

TL;DR: The authors examine over 100 top performing Canadian firms in visibly polluting industries and find that substantive actions of environmental issues (green walk) neither harm nor benefit firms financially, but symbolic actions (green talk) are negatively related to financial performance.
Journal ArticleDOI

An Integrative Model of Legitimacy Judgments

TL;DR: This article developed a theoretical framework that specifies the content underlying legitimacy judgments and a model of the process by which these judgments develop and change, and argued that individual-level legitimacy judgments are based on evaluations that fall along three dimensions (instrumental, relational, and moral).
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Consumer Perceptions of the Antecedents and Consequences of Corporate Social Responsibility

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined corporate social responsibility from the consumer's perspective, focusing on antecedents and consequences of perceived CSR, and found that particular cues, namely perceived financial performance and perceived quality of ethics statements, influence perceived corporate CSR which in turn impacts perceptions of corporate reputation, consumer trust, and loyalty.
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International trends in public perceptions of climate change over the past quarter century

TL;DR: A recent systematic review as discussed by the authors considers previous empirical research that has addressed the temporal aspects to public perceptions of climate change, and concludes that the imbalance in the literature towards polling data, and toward studies of public perceptions in Western nations, particularly the United States, leaves much unknown about the progression of public understanding of global climate change worldwide.
Journal ArticleDOI

Learning from Multi-Stakeholder Networks: Issue-Focussed Stakeholder Management

TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that companies practice two different types of stakeholder management: they focus on their organization's welfare or on an issue that affects their relationship with other societal groups and organizations.
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Book ChapterDOI

The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
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