Discursive Strategies and the Maintenance of Legitimacy

Abstract

Any organization, to fulfill its mandate from the society, needs to have the legitimacy to use collective resources. Conferred almost automatically at the birth of the organization, it has to be maintained and even repaired when necessary. Legitimacy appears then as a conversation between the organization and the general public. Noticeably, this continuous conversation is sustained through the media and also through documents issued by the firm, particularly the annual report. The firms use discursive strategies to entertain their legitimacy. Using semiotic analysis in the frame of a multiple cases study (6 firms over 5 years), this paper isolates the different stories in the annual reports, including the images that are integrated parts of these narrations. We apply the semiotic instrument to these stories to deconstruct the content and expose the actor filling actantial roles. We found a substantial amount of stories (187 in 30 reports) containing the categories developed by Greimas & Bremond from the work of Propp, implying an intensive use of the report in the conversation maintaining legitimacy.