Legitimacy

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

Institutional Perspective on Policing

Abstract: This article suggests that American municipal police departments are highly institutionalized organizations and should be studied in terms of how their formal structure and activities are shaped by powerful myths in their institutional environment. The incorporation of powerful myths into the structure and activities of police departments enables them to attain legitimacy; with legitimacy comes stability and protection from outside interference by powerful sovereign actors who are present in the enveloping institutional environment. However, legitimacy problems arising from conflicting institutional myths may precipitate full-blown organizational crises. Such police department crises are resolved ceremonially through a ritual that combines the public degradation of the department and the removal and replacement of the disgraced police chief by a new chief with a "legitimating" mandate.

Toward CSR3: Why Ethical Analysis is Indispensable and Unavoidable in Corporate Affairs:

Abstract: Corporate managers and business-and-society scholars cannot escape the normative implications of their decisions or their research. "Value free" decisions or research that is "neutral" are a myth. Practitioners and academics need to measure the worth of their decisions and research studies in terms of the basic moral conceptions embedded in "the culture of ethics. "Doing so enhances the legitimacy of corporations and clarines the nature of business-and-society research.

Searching for New Forms of Legitimacy Through Corporate Responsibility Rhetoric

Abstract: This article looks into the process of searching for new forms of legitimacy among firms through corporate discourse. Through the analysis of annual sustainability reports, we have determined the existence of three types of rhetoric: (1) strategic (embedded in the scientific-economic paradigm); (2) institutional (based on the fundamental constructs of Corporate Social Responsibility theories); and (3) dialectic (which aims at improving the discursive quality between the corporations and their stakeholders). Each one of these refers to a different form of legitimacy and is based on distinct theories of the firm analyzed in this article. We claim that dialectic rhetoric seems to signal a new understanding of the firm’s role in society and a search for moral legitimation. However, this new form of rhetoric is still fairly uncommon although its use is growing. Combining theory and business examples, this article may help managers and researchers in the conceptualization of how firms make sense of their role in society and what forms of differentiation they strive for through their rhetoric strategies.

Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations

Abstract: As the United Nations has developed and as its role in world affairs has been adapted to the necessities and possibilities created and the limitations established by the changing realities of international politics, collective legitimization has emerged as one of its major political functions. By this I mean to suggest that the world organization has come to be regarded, and used, as a dispenser of politically significant approval and disapproval of the claims, policies, and actions of states, including, but going far beyond, their claims to status as independent members of the international system. In this essay I shall undertake to refine and elaborate this rough definition of collective legitimization and to discuss the performance of this role by the United Nations. It is essential in the beginning, however, to provide a foundation by offering some observations about the general problem of political legitimacy.