Institutional Legitimacy

Conceptual Overview

Legitimacy, in dealing with perceptions and assumptions of appropriateness, desirability, and validity, represents a necessary condition for organizations by enabling control internally and access to resources controlled by the organizational field externally. Internally, legitimacy justifies who (e.g., person, roles) has the power and authority that is a necessary condition for control and coordination. Externally, legitimacy is conferred on organizations, which allows them access to resources within their organizational field, which is particularly difficult for new organizations and accounts for the liability of newness identified by Arthur Stinchombe.

Both internal and external legitimacy have their roots in the work of Max Weber, who linked legitimated authority to rules that are rationally established by enactment, agreement, or imposition. These three aspects of authority foreshadow the multifaceted nature of legitimacy in both sociology and organization studies. Weber's influence is seen explicitly in the frameworks for and examination of legitimacy by Richard Scott, Robin Stryker, and Mark Suchman. Specifically, Weber's authority through imposition aligns with Scott's legal sanction as the basis for the regulative pillar, Stryker's behavior that undergirds instrumental mechanism of legitimacy by providing material benefits for compliance, and Suchman's pragmatic legitimacy based in both exchange and influence, to the extent that exchanges are transacted within the framework of behaviors that are legally sanctioned.

Weber's authority through agreement—what actors agree is appropriate—is the legitimating mechanism for Scott's normative pillar, encompasses Stryker's attitudinal orientation that underpins normative mechanism of legitimacy through internalizing rules of the game and creating loyalty and allegiance toward those rules, and Suchman's moral legitimacy concerned with appropriate ends, means, structures, and leadership.

Finally, Weber's legitimacy through enactment and what he terms traditionalism, or the belief in the everyday routine as a norm of conduct, aligns with Scott's cultural-cognitive pillar as the basis of legitimacy and shares the same label of cognitive dimension of legitimacy used in both Stryker and Suchman's typologies, all of which emphasize taken-for-grantedness and comprehensibility. These scholars use different labels and highlight distinct mechanisms and rationale; however, their underlying typologies are highly congruent.

Although research on legitimacy spans units of analysis from an individual act or position within an organization to the status structure of an entire organizational field, the source or sources of legitimacy invariably trace their roots back to Weber and to one or more of the three abstracted components identified by Scott, Stryker, and Suchman. In addition, as Cathryn Johnson in her introduction to legitimacy processes explains, despite the seemingly multiple definitions of legitimacy, they all share the same focus on legitimacy involving some consensus by a social audience.

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