Legitimacy

About: Legitimacy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26153 publications have been published within this topic receiving 565921 citations.

‘Governance’ as a bridge between disciplines: Cross-disciplinary inspiration regarding shifts in governance and problems of governability, accountability and legitimacy

Abstract: Modern societies have in recent decades seen a destabilization of the traditional governing mechanisms and the advancement of new arrangements of governance. Con- spicuously, this has occurred in the private, semi-private and public spheres, and has involved local, regional, national, transnational and global levels within these spheres. We have wit- nessed changes in the forms and mechanisms of governance by which institutional and orga- nizational societal sectors and spheres are governed, as well as in the location of governance from where command, administration, management and control of societal institutions and spheres are conducted. We have also seen changes in governing capabilities (i.e., the extent to which societal institutions and spheres can, in fact, be steered), as well as in styles of gov- ernance (i.e., the processes of decision making and implementation, including the manner in which the organizations involved relate to each other). These shifts tend to have signifi- cant consequences for the governability, accountability, responsiveness and legitimacy of governance institutions. These developments have been generating a new and important research object for political science (including international relations). One of the crucial features of these developments is that they concern a diversity of sectors. In order to get a thorough understanding of 'shifts in governance', political science needs, and is also likely to adopt, a much stronger multidisciplinary orientation embracing politics, law, public admin- istration, economics and business administration, as well as sociology, geography and history.

The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions

Abstract: ‘Legitimacy’ has both a normative and a sociological meaning. To say that an institution is legitimate in the normative sense is to assert that it has the right to rule — where ruling is promulgating rules and attempting to secure compliance with them by attaching costs to noncompliance and/or benefits to compliance. Ruling in this broad sense does not require that the rules be backed by coercion, much less that the rulemaker claims a rightful monopoly on coercion within a jurisdiction, so it does not presuppose the state. Later we will see that the notion of the right to rule is subject to stronger and weaker interpretations, but for now it will suffice to say that an institution is legitimate in the sociological sense when it is widely believed to have the right to rule.1 When people disagree over whether the WTO is legitimate, they are not disagreeing about whether they or others believe that institution has the right to rule; they are disagreeing about whether it has the right to rule.

An Examination of Differences Between Organizational Legitimacy and Organizational Reputation

Abstract: Organizational legitimacy and organizational reputation have similar antecedents, social construction processes and consequences. Nonetheless, an improved understanding of relationships between legitimacy and reputation requires that differences between the two be specified and clarified. Our examination of past research indicates that legitimacy emphasizes the social acceptance resulting from adherence to social norms and expectations whereas reputation emphasizes comparisons among organizations. We empirically examine two antecedents of the financial, regulatory, and public dimensions of legitimacy and reputation in a population of US commercial banks. We find that isomorphism improves legitimacy, but its effects on reputation depend on the bank's reputation. Moreover, higher financial performance increases reputation, but does not increase the legitimacy of high performing banks.

Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Financial Performance: The Roles of Stakeholder Response and Political Access

Abstract: Corporate philanthropy is expected to positively affect firm financial performance because it helps firms gain sociopolitical legitimacy, which enables them to elicit positive stakeholder responses...

Corporate Legitimacy as Deliberation: A Communicative Framework

Abstract: Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-a-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy.