MANAGING LEGITIMACY: STRATEGIC AND INSTITUTIONAL APPROACHES and other participants in a conference on organizational legitimacy and credibility

Abstract

This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organiza-tional legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identi-fies 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 le-gitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations. Early management theorists viewed organizations as "rational sys-tems" social machines designed for the efficient transformation of ma-terial inputs into material outputs (Scott, 1987: 31-50). In addition, theo-rists of the period often depicted organizations as tightly bounded entities clearly demarcated from the surrounding environment. Resources mate-rialized at factory gates, production technologies "revealed" themselves to engineers, and products evaporated off loading docks, all ex hypothesi. Since the late 1960s, however, this imagery has undergone a dramatic change. "Open system" theories (Scott, 1987: 78-92) have reconceptual-ized organizational boundaries as porous and problematic, and institu-tional theories (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991) have stressed that many dy-namics in the organizational environment stem not from technological or material imperatives, but rather from cultural norms, symbols, beliefs, and rituals. At the core of this intellectual transformation lies the concept of organizational legitimacy. Drawing from the foundational work of We-ber (1978) and Parsons (1960), researchers have made legitimacy into an anchor-point of a vastly expanded theoretical apparatus addressing the normative and cognitive forces that constrain, construct, and empower organizational actors. Despite its centrality, however, the literature on organizational The author would like to thank W.