(De)legitimation of COVID-19 vaccination narratives on Facebook comments in Romania: Beyond the co-occurrence patterns of discursive strategies

The postmodern medical paradigm has empowered online users in the (de)legitimating process of health-related topics. By employing a co-occurrence analysis, this study identifies the thematic patterns used by Romanian online users in their multimodal comments to the #storiesfromvaccination Facebook campaign run by the Romanian government. The findings show that the commenters assessed source credibility through two thematic patterns: 'source exemplarity' and 'source distrust'. Health experts were more legitimized than laypersons and role models as sources in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Two thematic patterns emerged in the assessment of vaccination, namely: 'immunization - past and present challenges' and 'vaccination supporter versus opponent cleavage'. In the discussion on immunization, a polarization between a nostalgic longing for the past and a present corrupted medical and political system prevailed, whereas the important feature of discursive antagonism could be observed in the latter thematic pattern. The co-occurrences of (de)legitimation strategies are explained with reference to the political and medical context, along with the challenges of social media usage in online vaccination communication campaigns.

The role of organizational language in gaining legitimacy from the perspective of new institutional theory

This research addresses the role of organizational language in the establishment of legitimacy from the perspective of New Institutional Theory. Several conceptual and methodical contributions have been made. First, by pairing cultural-cognitive legitimacy with phenomenological institutionalism and socio-political legitimacy with social organizational institutionalism, we have proposed a new way of classifying legitimacy. Second, we made connections between language strategies of organizations and cultural-cognitive and socio-political legitimacy. Finally, by re-categorizing language strategies aimed at legitimacy, we have provided a framework that is applicable in studying the relationship between different language strategies and legitimacy. Using this framework, we conducted an empirical study in which we analyzed the press releases of five major Turkish business groups. It was found that their language strategies were generally similar and mostly aimed at socio-political legitimacy.

From servant to survivor: multimodal public service media narratives and restaurant industry identity during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

Design/methodology/approach

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Findings

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

Originality/value

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

Space and the dynamic between openness and closure: Open strategizing in the TV series Borgen

In this paper we examine how the use of space shapes the dynamic between openness and closure in open strategizing. To do this, we draw from research that has defined organizational space as a process that is both a social product and produces social relations. We analyzed the use of space in open strategizing in the Danish TV series and political drama ‘Borgen’. In our analysis we focused on three building blocks of space: boundaries, distance, and movement that allowed us to elaborate how the dynamic between openness and closure is shaped. Drawing on our analysis, we revealed three spatial features – physical visibility, strategizing artefacts, discursive designation – that play a role in the dynamic between openness and closure in strategizing. We constructed a conceptual framework that shows how these spatial features, and their different combinations are associated with pivots between openness and closure. Thus, our findings advance prior open strategy research by providing potential explanations of why openness turns to closure, despite the attempts to keep the strategizing process open. We argue that taking space seriously provides a more nuanced understanding to some of the contingencies and possibilities related to the dynamics of openness and closure in strategizing.

Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

Headquarters Control and Its Legitimation in a Chinese Multinational Corporation: The Case of Huawei

Based on interviews and documentary analysis, we analyzed the mechanisms being adopted by the HQ of Huawei, a Chinese MNC, for controlling the outputs and processes of its foreign subsidiaries and social behaviours within them and how these controls were supported by corresponding strategies of legitimation. The controls comprise key performance indicators, standard operating procedures, divided subsidiary mandates, HQ-centric rotational expatriation, military-style induction, public oath-taking and self-criticism ceremonies, and training in and role-modelling of core values. The HQ provides comprehensive legitimation for each of these control mechanisms, drawing on five strategies of legitimation, which comprise espousals of organizational benefits, inducement, affirmation, moral exhortation, and narrativization. In many cases, the legitimizing statements have been provided by Mr. Ren, Huawei's founder and CEO, whose authority appears to have been important in conferring legitimacy to the HQ. The historical path of Huawei's development as an MNC has also been salient in conferring legitimacy to the HQ. Our findings suggest that interviewees regard the controls as legitimate, that the subsidiaries broadly comply with the controls, and that micro-political contestation is largely absent.

Critical positions: Situating critical perspectives in work and organizational psychology

This paper argues that critical perspectives have constituted a marginal yet continued presence in work and organizational (W-O) psychology and calls for a reflexive taking stock of these perspectives to ground a critical research agenda. We argue that critical W-O psychology has been positioned between a psychology literature with limited development of critical perspectives, and an emergent critical management literature that has allowed their selective development. This in-between position has allowed critical W-O psychology to persist, albeit in a fragmented form, while limiting its potential for theoretical and applied impact. We use this diagnosis to reflect on how critical perspectives can best develop from within W-O psychology. We end with a call for developing a critical movement unique to the current historical moment, drawing upon without repeating the experiences of its home disciplines, in a future oriented and reflexive psychology research agenda.

‘Civilized Dispossession’: Corporate accumulation at the dawn of modern capitalism

Critical scholarship views corporate accumulation – a fundamental driver of capitalism – as inherently dispossessive, involving violence and expropriation. However, dispossession also involves practices of legitimation that are related to coercive violence in complex ways. We examine the roles of dispossession and legitimation practices as constitutive of corporate accumulation. Specifically, we analyse how dispossession is connected to the appropriation of legitimacy as a symbolic resource which justifies and enables violence and expropriation. Taking an historical perspective, we examine a paradigmatic case of corporate accumulation: the Dutch East India Company’s monopolization of spices on the Banda Islands (1599–1621). In this process, the Dutch moved from (1) initial instances of legitimation to (2) legitimation to enforce Dutch–Bandanese agreements, to (3) legitimation to enable dispossession of the Bandanese, to finally (4) wholesale dispossession of the Bandanese. These four phases reflect a mechanism that we call ‘civilized dispossession’, which describes the escalating three-way interplay between Dutch practices of dispossession and legitimation and Bandanese resistance, and which was driven by institutional experimentation and multi-level institutional work. Integrating institutional and critical perspectives, the notion of ‘civilized dispossession’ provides a novel theorization of corporate accumulation, elucidating the mechanisms by which corporations promote the diffusion of capitalism.

Praised from birth: social approval assets in the creation of a new university

Purpose

The authors explore how social approval assets, namely status and reputation, are used to legitimate and categorise a new national university. They argue that in the course of the legitimation process, status and reputation work as stakeholder-oriented value-creating benefits. The authors specifically analyse the discursive constructions and labels used in the process and how the process enables nationwide university reform.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors’ longitudinal case study utilises critical discourse analysis and analyses media and policy discourses regarding the birth of Aalto University.

Findings

The findings suggest that the legitimation of the new university was accomplished through the use of two distinct discourses: one on higher education and another on the market economy. These discourses not only sought to legitimise the new university as categorically different from existing Finnish universities, but also rationalised the merger using the expected reputation and status benefits that were claimed would accrue for supporters.

Practical implications

This study elaborates on the role of various social approval assets and labels in legitimation processes and explores how policy enforcement can take place in arenas that are not necessarily perceived as policymaking. For managers, it is crucial to understand how a chosen label (name) can result in both stakeholder support and resistance, and how important it is to anticipate the changes a label can invoke.

Originality/value

The authors propose that the use of several labels regarding a new organisation is strategically beneficial to attracting multiple audiences who may hold conflicting interests in terms of what the organisation and its offerings should embody. They propose that even though status and reputation have traditionally been defined as possessions of an organisation, they should be further understood as concepts used to disseminate and justify the interests, norms, structures and values in a stakeholder network.

Organizational Guilt Management: A Paradox Perspective

Alleged organizational wrongdoings are often characterized by high levels of uncertainty about what happened, which can take years to be established judicially. In this study, we examine organizations’ efforts to manage their stakeholders’ impressions of their possible guilt in this period of uncertainty. The study examines the discursive guilt-management strategies organizations employ in such situations to embrace the paradoxical tensions that emerge between their routine, positive self-presentations as responsible organizations and their communication about their possible guilt. Taking departure in impression management and a paradox perspective, we conceptualize guilt management as a discursive practice enacted in times of uncertainty. Specifically, we conduct a microlevel discourse analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports published by large US banks after the financial crisis and analyze how these banks managed impressions of their possible guilt, before they eventually agreed to legal settlements. We identify amending, bracketing, shifting locus of control, implicating, as well as reattributing and extending moral agency as central guilt-management strategies that embrace the paradoxical tensions between the banks’ positive self-presentations and their communication about their possible guilt. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and methodological contributions to organization studies.

Biomateriality and Organizing: Towards an Organizational Perspective on Food

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and explore their intersection. We argue that the ‘biomateriality’ of food, i.e. its biomaterial qualities, plays a distinctive role in shaping and affecting organizing and organizations. To do so, we present a conceptual framework for analysing food organizing, which highlights the biomateriality of food and its agentic effects on organizational efforts. Thus, we provide researchers with an analytical toolkit to disentangle the different agents (people, organizations, food itself) and the associated processes and mechanisms that play a role in food organizing. We use this analytical toolkit to introduce the different articles in the special issue and put forward some lines of future research.

Legitimacy and Cosmopolitanism: Online Public Debates on (Corporate) Responsibility

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable 'ordinary citizens' to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy (Etter et al. in Bus Soc 57(1):60-97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate (ir)responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency.

Beyond the Tipping Point: The Role of Status in Organizations’ Public Narratives to Mobilize Support for Change

What status mechanisms underlie actors’ public narratives to mobilize change? This study examines the public narratives of a set of United States restaurant actors (2005–2016) that tried to eliminate tipping, a change which challenged a deeply ingrained social custom, took some power away from customers, and could potentially reduce servers’ income. Through a qualitative analysis of the narratives using a status lens, I reveal actors’ complex discursive status work to frame the elimination of tipping as a change that promotes compensation fairness, the professionalization of service work, cultural authenticity, and equality. This study delineates the recursive relationship between narrative and status: actors’ narratives are enabled by a rich repertoire of status hierarchies; narratives may also drive status in the sense that by organizing loose elements into coherent stories about status distinction or status problematization, narratives provide motivations for a change that may reinforce or challenge existing status hierarchies. I conclude by discussing this study’s implications for the literature on status, narrative, change, and legitimation.

Rhetoric and propriety judgments: reflections from bottled water

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies used by organizations in support of propriety judgments concerning their products.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach taken entails discourse and rhetorical analysis of texts produced by leading firms in the bottled water industry, and by the industry’s trade association, surrounding issues of sustainability.

Findings

The analysis reveals rhetorical strategies invoked by firms to legitimate their economic, environmental and social performance.

Research limitations/implications

This paper’s primary contribution is to research that informs the discursive aspects of legitimacy. As well, this study contributes to our nascent understanding of the microfoundations of sustainability.

Originality/value

Our knowledge of how organizations use different discursive strategies in support of legitimacy is relatively underdeveloped. By examining rhetorical strategies used in support of propriety judgments concerning organizations’ environmental, social and economic legitimacy, this study begins to fill gaps in our understanding.

Industrial espionage revisited: Host country–foreign multinational corporation legal disputes and the postcolonial imagery

In this article, we take a postcolonial management approach to exploring the lingering significance of postcolonial imagery in shaping legal disputes between host country and foreign multinational corporations. We apply a critical discourse analysis to the Korea versus Orbotech industrial espionage lawsuit, in which the Korean government accused a foreign multinational corporation of leaking its ‘national core technology’. Through this analysis we demonstrate how industrial espionage discourse was used to fight Korea’s negative reputation as a technological imitator, associate Korea with global technological leaders, and disassociate itself from other ‘imitators’. In response, Orbotech’s industrial espionage discourse has aimed to reproduce Korea’s imitator stigma. Our findings highlight the continual role of the imagined North/South and West/rest symbolic boundaries in constructing global business hierarchies even when the marginalized party—Korea—has already moved to the elite economies club. While international management studies rarely address industrial espionage beyond its technical meaning, we underline the embeddedness of industrial espionage as a discourse in maintaining and disrupting the geopolitical business landscape.

Mythologizing the Story of a Scientific Invention: Constructing the legitimacy of research commercialization

This paper explores the processes through which an organizational story acquires mythological status within an organizational field. To this end, I analyse a story of a successful case of academic technology transfer that gained mythological status in the field of higher education in Israel: the commercialization of the innovative pharmaceutical drug Copaxone. I identify three concurrent processes of mythologizing work: organizational storytelling, media diffusion and reconstruction, and field-level retelling and countering. I argue that myth-making is a collective work, in which an organizational story is shaped not only through the strategic rhetorical work of managers but also through interpretations and modifications by the media as well as other actors in the field. The myth of Copaxone, as it is currently told in the field of higher education in Israel, is a complex assemblage of the organizational story and various counter-narratives. I further suggest that this myth not only serves to naturalize and reinforce academic patenting, but also constitutes a discursive space for reflections about the ambiguities inherent in academic commercialization.

Legitimizing a practice across fields: microprocesses of theorization of Design Thinking

Legitimizing a practice is a challenging task because it has to be constantly made understandable and meaningful to prospective users. Garnering such legitimacy is critical for successful practice diffusion and potential institutionalization. The process of theorization—rendering of ideas into understandable and compelling formats—is considered central to legitimacy construction. However, we still have a limited understanding of the specific mechanisms through which theorization happens. In this article, we address this issue by examining the microprocesses through which the practice of Design Thinking (DT) was theorized by its proponents in the field of business management. We undertook qualitative analysis, using grounded theory, of archival data. Our analysis revealed three key microprocesses: appropriation (presenting DT as a solution to abstract field-level problems), assimilation (integrating DT with current vocabularies and legacy practices within user organizations), and adaptation (redefining DT in order to resolve contradictions with legacy practices within organizations). This study makes two contributions. First, to the literature on theorization by explicating key microprocesses underlying theorization and providing a nuanced understanding of how legitimacy and theorization may be linked. Second, to the literature on management knowledge production, by showing how management practices and concepts may be contextualized and interlinked.

Power in Sensemaking Processes

This article examines the effects of power on sensemaking processes, bridging two major, yet traditionally separate, literatures in organization studies. Dividing power into its systemic and episodic forms, we elaborate how power shapes not only the content of sensemaking, but also the form of sensemaking processes. We explicate the distinct ways in which power works in four archetypal sensemaking processes: automatic (preconscious and committed), improvisational (preconscious and provisional), algorithmic (conscious and committed) and reflective (conscious and provisional). These ideal-type processes help us theorize how influences related to systemic and episodic power induce more or less conscious and provisional forms of sensemaking. This refined understanding of sensemaking processes enables further explication of episodic power into distinctive kinds of sensegiving and sensebreaking activities.

“Giant Toxic Lakes You Can See from Space”: A Theory of Multimodal Messages and Emotion in Legitimacy Work

Organizations need to appear legitimate to access resources. Thus, actors often carry out legitimacy work to shape others’ evaluation of something as “desirable, proper or appropriate.” Such research has tended to focus on the cognitive appeal of words. Recently, research has also emerged on the persuasiveness of images, especially for creating emotional appeals. We develop a process model to explain the role of multimodal messages—combining words and images—in legitimacy work. With this model, we aim to answer: Why do certain combinations of multimodal messages (words and images) more forcefully evoke emotion and more reliably capture recipients’ attention, motivate them to process those messages, and (re)evaluate the legitimacy of an organization, its activities, and/or its industry? We conclude by discussing theoretical extensions and connections to other methods such as institutional work and values work.

Ideology and (de)legitimation: The Belgian public debate on corporate restructuring during the Great Recession

While scholars have examined how micro-textual argumentative strategies are used to (de)legitimize contested corporate practices, less attention has been given to the role of ideologies or broader belief systems, underlying discursive (de)legitimation. Analyzing newspaper articles published after the announcement of two highly debated corporate restructurings in Belgium during the Great Recession, we identify the ideologies underlying (de)legitimizing statements and examine the discursive strategies through which social actors reproduce elements of these ideologies in legitimacy struggles. We show how the ideologies of ‘neoliberal capitalism’ and ‘humanistic capitalism’ shape framings of the restructurings, identity constructions of actors involved and propositions for government measures to prevent future restructurings from happening. Apart from predictable patterns of reproduction, we discern four creative reproduction strategies: ‘refutation of elements of ideological representations’, ‘appropriation of key vocabularies’, ‘hybridization of ideological representations’, and ‘ideological pioneering’. Our study contributes by (1) providing novel insights into how ideologies function as discursive resources for (de)legitimation of contested corporate undertakings, (2) reconsidering the political nature of (de)legitimizing statements, and (3) reflecting on the (im)possibility of resistance against globalization-driven restructurings in multinational corporations and the neoliberal ideological project in general.

Metaphor, morality and legitimacy: A critical discourse analysis of the media framing of the payday loan industry

This study examines the metaphors used in the British press to characterize the payday loan industry in order to develop our understanding of organizational delegitimation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and theories of moral panic, we show how the metaphors used in the press framed the industry as a ‘moral problem’. The study identified four root metaphors that were used to undertake moral problematization: predators and parasites, orientation, warfare and pathology. We show how these metaphors played a key role in the construction of a moral panic through two framing functions: first by constructing images of the damage and danger caused by the firms and second by attributing agency in such a way that moral responsibility was assigned to the organizations. We also extend the discussion of our findings to explore the ideological dimensions of the moral panic. We develop a critical analysis that points to the potential scapegoating role of the discourse, which served as a convenient moral crusade for the government and other neo-liberal supporters to pursue, while detracting attention away from the underlying socio-economic context, including austerity policies, the decline in real wages and the deregulation of the finance sector. From this critical perspective, payday loan companies can be seen as a ‘folk devil’ through which society’s fears about finance capitalism are articulated, creating disproportionate exaggeration and alarm, while the system as a whole can remain intact.

Children’s Personal Data: Discursive Legitimation Strategies of Private Residential Care Institutions on the Kenyan Coast

This article looks at how charity organizations running private residential child care institutions on the Kenyan coast make use of the personal data of children in their care, as a means of securing and maintaining the support of donors from the global North. The strategy involves the online showcasing of children’s profiles—individual children’s photos, accompanied by their names, birth dates, annual development, and their emotion-inducing personal and/or family histories are posted on the respective organizations’ websites, making them accessible to the global public. I analyze and problematize this practice, positing that while it explicitly serves fund-raising purposes and is motivated by the search for cost-effective fund-raising-oriented communication, at a more implicit level, it is equally a strategy used to discursively legitimize the organizations and their child ‘rescue’ activities, within the contemporary climate of deinstitutionalization. This strategy results in a violation of children’s rights; has ethical implications; and is not without consequences for the concerned children’s well-being.

Information security policies and value conflict in multinational companies

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges multinational companies face during the diffusion of their information security policies. Parent companies use these policies as their discourse for legitimization of their practices in subsidiaries, which leads to value conflicts in subsidiaries. The authors postulate that, when properly crafted, information security policies can also be used to reduce the very conflicts they are creating.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed framework is conceptualized based on the review of literatures on multinational companies, information security policies and value conflict.

Findings

The authors identified three factors that may lead to value conflict in subsidiary companies: cultural distance, institutional distance and stickiness of knowledge. They offer three recommendations based on organizational discourse, ambidexterity and resource allocation to reduce value conflict.

Research limitations/implications

The authors postulate that information security policies are the sources of value conflict in subsidiary companies. Yet, when crafted properly, these policies can also offer solutions to minimize value conflict.

Practical implications

The proposed framework can be used to increase policy diffusion success, minimize value conflict and, in turn, decrease information security risk.

Originality/value

The growing literature on information security policy literature is yet to examine the diffusion of policies within multinational companies. The authors argue that information security policies are the source of, and solution to, value conflict in multinational companies.

‘A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words’: Multimodal Sensemaking of the Global Financial Crisis

Through its specific rhetorical potential that is distinct from verbal text, visual material facilitates and plays a pivotal role in linking novel phenomena to established and taken-for-granted social categories and discourses within the social stock of knowledge. Employing data from the worldwide news coverage of the global financial crisis in the Financial Times between 2008 and 2012, we analyse sensemaking and sensegiving efforts in the business media. We identify a set of specific multimodal compositions that construct and shape a limited number of narratives on the global financial crisis through distinct relationships between visual and verbal text. By outlining how multimodal compositions enhance representation, theorization, resonance, and perceived validity of narratives, we contribute to the phenomenological tradition in institutional organization theory and to research on multimodal meaning construction. We argue that elaborate multimodal compositions of verbal text, images, and other visual artifacts constitute a key resource for sensemaking and, consequently, sensegiving.

The Never-Ending Story: Discursive Legitimation in Social Media Dialogue

This paper explores the dialogical dimensions of discursive legitimation in social media sites to understand how organisations produce knowledge of legitimacy in concert with their stakeholders. Drawing on the dialogical theories of Bakhtin and Nikulin, we consider the potential for conceptualising discursive legitimation as a product of dissent: an ongoing ‘allosensual’ dialogue comprising different voices and competing knowledge claims. We explore this through a micro-level analysis of organisation-led social media sites, wherein organisational practices are increasingly subjected to public scrutiny and where knowledge of legitimacy can be significantly shaped. Our dialogical lens highlights three interrelated functions of discursive legitimation. Discursive authorisation represents attempts to assume a credible ‘voice’ in-relation-to ‘other’ voices, within the dialogue. Discursive validation represents attempts to subject truth claims about legitimacy to rational, normative and moral verification. Finally, discursive finalisation represents attempts to harmonise dissent, by either co-opting or antagonising stakeholders towards consensus. Primarily, this paper unpacks the role of social media in legitimation processes, while also elaborating on organisational attempts to control stakeholder dialogue in online contexts.

Legitimacy Under Institutional Change: How incumbents appropriate clean rhetoric for dirty technologies

How organizations legitimate their actions under conditions of institutional change is a central yet little understood question. To address this gap, this paper investigates how incumbent firms legitimate investments in both novel and conventional technologies during periods of institutional and technological transition. We examine the rhetorical strategies that energy incumbents employ to gain legitimacy for their investments in renewable (legitimacy-gaining or novel) and non-renewable (legitimacy-losing or conventional) technologies. Employing a mixed-method content analysis of 483 press releases on strategic energy investments, published by the world’s largest energy firms during the time period 2010 to 2015, we find that incumbents utilize two different types of hybrid rhetoric to justify their investments. For investments in non-renewables, incumbents use pragmatic blending, appropriating the clean rhetoric traditionally associated with challenger technologies and combining it with justifications highlighting performance-oriented outcomes. The rhetoric used for investments in renewables involves visionary blending, combining rhetoric related to corporate strategy with sustainability rhetoric. We furthermore argue that these hybrid rhetorical strategies are observed when the legitimacy trajectories of two technologies intersect. Our study contributes to the research on rhetorical institutionalism, incumbents’ role during institutional change, and technology legitimacy.

Recycling Problems and Modernizing the Solution: Doing Institutional Maintenance Work on Swedish Public Service Television

This article investigates the role of history and heritage in institutional maintenance work. Based on a study of collaborative production of public service TV programs in Sweden, I analyze the program makers’ rhetorical work to construct and justify meanings and interpretations. By drawing on the old but often overlooked understanding that institutions are “permanent” solutions to “permanent” problems, I discuss what problems the program makers argue that public service TV solves in contemporary Sweden, and the work of rhetorically constructing and justifying these problems in relation to everyday practices of making programs. This study adds to our understanding of how actors that inhabit and enact an institution can use its history and legacy as an interpretative resource in their work to maintain the institution, and how this process may affect the meanings ascribed to the institution.

Rhetoric and Authority in a Polarized Transition: The Case of China’s Stock Market

How do actors in positions of authority attempt to justify their right to rule while introducing controversial institutional practices that potentially delegitimate their authority? China’s reform leaders have found themselves in a legitimacy conundrum when they established and developed the stock market, yet have been able to assert a central role for the party-state in managing the stock market. Using a critical rhetorical perspective, we analyze how actors use “rhetorical genres,” that is, argumentation and narration with differing content and style, to construct new roles of the speaker and speaker–audience relationships that imply new bases of authority, and how these rhetorical genres can be conceptualized as “discursive spaces” that could accommodate contradictions in the rhetorical situations characterized by polarization in ideologies and interests.

Organizations, prizes and media

Purpose

This paper circulates around two major questions: what is the character of prizes as a media product? And how do the specifics of media prizes relate to the understanding of organizations with respect to a given aspect of their activities? The purpose of this paper is to bring forward theoretical arguments that show the significance of media preferences and values as central in how media prizes and awards are created and operated by discussing these questions.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on a variety of literature – mainly within management and media/communication studies – that is interested in the construction of different assessment tools such as prizes and rankings.

Findings

The paper addresses three particular characteristics of media prizes relevant for the understanding of how media evaluate organizations: the forming and spreading of stereotypical representative or behavior within a specific category or field; the simplification of status through the creation of “winners”; and the popularization of public measures for success in business life.

Research limitations/implications

This is a conceptual paper and as such it needs more systematic empirical testing to validate the findings.

Practical implications

The paper suggests three different roles media prizes have in evaluating organizations’ performance and their social status. The findings suggest that the qualities/aspects emphasized by the prizes are framed in such a way that they follow the rational or logic of media, and that they as such bear witness should be regarded with certain critical scrutiny.

Social implications

The paper discusses an expanding area of journalistic practice – i.e. production and proliferation of media prizes. These prizes have a significant effect on how the authors conceptualize and understand different aspects of the life – in the case business practices such as entrepreneurship. The authors suggest here how media prizes can come to shape the perceptions of reality through processes of simplification, stereotypification and popularization.

Originality/value

Up to now there are few studies focusing on media as a producer of assessments central for building normative and cognitive bases on which organizations are evaluated. The conceptual arguments in this paper highlight a number of areas that can serve as a starting point for future inquiry.

Motivational paradigms for the integration of a Belgian hospital network and merger presented in the printed press

Purpose

Legitimizing health-care networks over time is crucial to the survival of the networks, but studies providing insight into the motivational paradigms used to legitimize networks and mergers are missing. This study aims to contribute by analyzing which motivational paradigms, namely, transaction costs economics, resource dependency, stakeholder theory, organizational learning and institutional theory, are used over time to motivate the formation, integration and eventually merger of a health-care network.

Design/methodology/approach

The theoretical paradigms from the literature are matched with the motivational arguments that were found in the communication around the formation and evolution of a specific health-care network. Secondary data in the printed press were analyzed in three ways to obtain triangulation in method.

Findings

Five theoretical paradigms matched the communication during significant parts of the time-scope of the study, but not always equally strong. It, therefore, confirms the usefulness of an integrated and evolutionary perspective on the paradigms, not only during the formation but also during the life-span of the organization.

Originality/value

Insight into the motivational paradigms that dominate in the press during an integration and merger process allows for health-care managers and policy makers to manage the process of legitimizing. This might prevent network failure because of lack of legitimacy, misperceptions of the motivations, overemphasizing one motivation or inability to move to a next layer of motivation when the integration process evolves.

“Deregulation is so nineteen eighties, we’re into ‘better regulation’ now”

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations operate in the absence of a clear regulatory authority in a self-regulating environment. Significant moves towards self-regulation by various political administrations, together with successive waves of deregulation raise questions about the ability and effectiveness of industries and markets to regulate their own behaviour. This is a topical political and social concern with governments often appearing to favour self-regulation as opposed to the constitution of an official regulator. The absence of a regulator and the possibility of voluntary compliance raise a number of issues for the way in which organizations operate and the consequences, both intended and otherwise for organizations and society at large.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirically the authors explore the case of an industry leader within the Passive Fire Protection industry, as it adjusts to an increasingly self-regulated market environment. The authors document how organizational members make sense of the regulatory environment and the behaviour of actors within it.

Findings

The authors find that discourses of enterprise that underpin self-regulation permit actors a choice between compliance and non-compliance. Whilst also noting the prevalence of notions of morality in terms of how actors make sense of both compliant and non-compliant behaviour. Despite common sense notions that morality is seldom clear cut or unambiguous, the case study reveals that frameworks for understanding behaviour allow participants within the industry to make very clear demarcations between moral (compliant) and amoral (non-compliant) behaviour.

Originality/value

The authors learn how those that are compliant within the industry come to question the effectiveness of the regime to which they comply, thus ultimately undermining the integrity of the regime. In the absence of a strong regulatory regime, some agents draw upon notions of enterprise to justify an individualist, economic and pragmatic approach that makes non-compliance permissible. Thus the discourse of enterprise is present in the justification of both “moral” and “amoral” behaviour, this leads the authors to question the wisdom of policy that promotes the idea of enterprise as effectively ensuring compliance.

Identity formation and strategy development in overlapping institutional fields

Purpose

Care farming is an underexplored example of agricultural diversification. In their process of diversification, care farmers are newcomers to the healthcare sector, facing high entry barriers and lacking the skills required to build a solid and legitimate presence in this new domain. Changes in the care regime have provided opportunities for new players, like regional organizations of care farmers, to gain access to care budgets. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how strategies designed to establish regional organizations of care farms with similar access to institutional resources unfold and are translated into entrepreneurial behavior, organizational identity and legitimacy, and help provide access to care budgets.

Design/methodology/approach

Using entrepreneurship, identity formation and legitimacy building as guiding concepts, the authors interviewed stakeholders and analyzed activities and documents to gain a broad perspective with regard to the organizations, skills and activities.

Findings

The authors identified two types of regional care farm organizations: a cooperative and a corporate type. While the corporate type clearly exhibited entrepreneurial behavior, leading to a trustful and appealing organizational identity, substantial fund-raising and an early manifestation of institutional and innovative legitimacy in the care sector, the cooperative type initially lacked entrepreneurial agency, which in turn led to a lack of legitimacy and a slow development toward a more professional market-oriented organization. Manifesting entrepreneurial behavior and strategically aligning the healthcare and agricultural sectors, and building up both institutional and innovative legitimacy in the care sector proved to be crucial to the successful development of regional organizations of care farms. This study contributes to existing literature by exploring relationships between entrepreneurial and institutional strategies, legitimacy, organizational identity and logics.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the literature by exploring how in times with changes in institutional logics, strategies to establish new organizations unfold. The authors have shown how differences in strategy to establish new organizations with similar access to institutional resources unfold and are translated into diverging organizational identities and degrees of legitimacy. Entrepreneurial behavior is the key to create a trustful and appealing identity and innovative and institutional legitimacy which is important for providing access to an institutionalized sector.

Corporate political activity through constituency stitching: Intertextually aligning a phantom community

Corporations play an increasingly significant role in public policy and democratic politics. This article seeks to understand how corporate political activities gain political influence through intertextual strategies. The analysis is conducted on the texts produced by the Australian government in proposing a new tax as well as the texts produced by the mining industry in campaigning against the tax. We show how the government texts represent the proposed tax as a fair opportunity, while the mining industry texts represent the tax as an unfair threat. The findings attend to the processes of how the mining industry ‘stitched’ together constituencies in support of their representation. This article contributes to the existing literature on corporate political activity by showing how overt and indirect corporate activities and communications influence public policy agendas. It also contributes to critical studies of corporate political activity by theorizing how textual strategies can be used to align corporate interests in hegemonic political struggles through the creation of a phantom community. Finally, the article contributes to theories of intertextuality by developing a typology to analyse textual representation.

Discursive Legitimation of a Contested Actor Over Time: The Multinational Corporation as a Historical Case (1964–2012)

In this study, we explicitly engage with the historical dimension of discursive legitimation to understand how a sense of legitimacy is maintained for a controversial actor over a long period of time. Analyzing articles in The Economist that address opposition against multinational corporations during the current wave of globalization, we identify and situate the different multinational corporation-related controversies and discursive legitimation strategies in their specific historical context. Our historical interpretation suggests three phases, each representing the discursive creation of particular actor images that either legitimize multinational corporations or de-legitimize its opponents. From our findings, we propose that, over time, the nature of discursive legitimation changes and introduce ‘discursive antagonism’ and ‘discursive co-optation’ as two different forms of legitimation. We further reflect on our present understanding of multinational corporations, reinterpreting their current political role as a historical product of the legitimacy process over time.

Sensemaking, Sense-Censoring and Strategic Inaction: The Discursive Enactment of Power and Politics in a Multinational Corporation

In this paper we contribute to knowledge of power and politics in international business by developing the understanding of the role of discourse and sensemaking in the subsidiary–headquarters relationship. Based on an ethnographic action research study in a British subsidiary of an American multinational corporation, we conduct an ethnomethodologically informed discourse analysis of the accounts, stories and metaphors through which power and politics in the subsidiary–headquarters relationship were created as social facts. We then broaden the analytic frame to trace longitudinally how these facts led the subsidiary managers to hide, dilute or restrict their ‘local sense’ from the headquarters, including their knowledge of the local market and their preferred strategic direction for the firm: a process we term sense-censoring. We reveal how the subsidiary used power and politics as reasoning procedures to decide against pursuing a preferred course of action, despite a strongly held belief to the contrary, due to anticipated reactions or counter-actions, thereby transforming potential strategic action into inaction. Sense-censoring is significant for international business management, we propose, because it impacts upon knowledge flows, innovation diffusion and organizational learning. We conclude by outlining the implications of systems of sense-censoring and strategic inaction for the management of global–local relations in multinational corporations.

Responding from that Vantage Point: Field Position and Discursive Strategies of Legitimation in the U.S. Wireless Telegraphy Field

Our study explores the discursive strategies of legitimation that organizations employ as they occupy different positions in an emergent institutional field. By examining both the frame-alignment strategies and the frame targets of two organizations in the U.S. wireless telegraphy field, we show how an organization’s position – and its positional changes over time – affects the discursive strategies it uses to promote or protect its goals in the face of pressure from other field actors. Our results indicate that three distinct field positions – peripheral, central, and niche – are associated with three different legitimation strategies – which we label “robust,” “co-optive,” and “focused” – around which the discursive strategies coalesced. Organizations at the periphery attempt to break in to a field by employing a diverse range of frame-alignment strategies targeted toward a variety of relevant field actors. Those in a central position target fewer actors, but pursue a similar variety of frame-alignment strategies. Those in a niche position use fewer alignment strategies and target a smaller number of field-level actors. Our study enriches the literature on discursive strategies of legitimation by focusing on the ways in which central and non-central actors employ them, and the ways in which these strategies evolve alongside the field itself. More broadly, our work contributes to our understanding of discursive skills required to confront complex institutional pressures. These efforts depend on the interactive nature of discursive strategies from the vantage point of different field positions.

Ontario's Experience of Wind Energy Development as Seen through the Lens of Human Health and Environmental Justice

The province of Ontario has shown great commitment towards the development of renewable energy and, specifically, wind power. Fuelled by the Green Energy Act (GEA) of 2009, the Province has emerged as Canada's leader in wind energy development (WED). Nonetheless, Ontario's WED trajectory is characterized by social conflicts, particularly around environmental health. Utilizing the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, this paper presents an eight-year longitudinal media content analysis conducted to understand the role Ontario's media may be playing in both reflecting and shaping public perceptions of wind turbine health risks. We find that before and after the GEA, instances of health risk amplification were far greater than attenuations in both quantity and quality. Discourses that amplified turbine health risks often simultaneously highlighted injustices in the WED process, especially after the GEA. Based on these findings, we suggest that Ontario's media may be amplifying perceptions of wind turbine health risks within the public domain. We conclude with policy recommendations around public engagement for more just WED.

The Constitution of Organizational Legitimacy: A Narrative Perspective

This article recognizes a major dichotomy in the study of legitimacy construction at the organizational level. Scholars have either focused on agent-centred explanations of organizational legitimation, which favour its evaluative dimension, or on structural explanations, which highlight the isomorphic pressures imposed on individual organizations in order to become and remain intelligible to stakeholders. By applying a discursive methodology, we propose a new approach for the study of organizational legitimacy construction that incorporates both its evaluative and cognitive dimensions. Drawing on a structurational model of narrative recursivity, inspired by Greimas (1987), we argue that the construction of organizational legitimacy is dependent on both the persuasiveness of organizational storytelling and on the realization of a taken-for-granted narrative structure. We explicate the processes by which legitimacy is narratively constructed through empirical data associated with the founding of an HIV/AIDS organization.

Medium and Message: Globalization and innovation in the production field of Indian fashion

How do unconventional innovations become accepted in creative industries? To uncover the process by which conventions changed in the field of Indian fashion, we analysed the content of all 586 articles on fashion published in India’s leading fashion magazine during a 20-year period. The results of this exploratory analysis indicate that a regulatory change triggered economic liberalization in India, and the resultant globalizing forces facilitated interdiscursivity in the fashion media. As a result, the conventions of the global fashion paradigm permeated the Indian media discourse, gained acceptance, and came to co-exist with the previous “local” model of fashion and its conventions. This process increased the visibility of innovations that were previously peripheral in the field. The findings offer initial insights into the processes of change in creative industries, which are characterized as being relatively difficult to alter. The results have implications for organizational research in the areas of creative industries and innovation.

Contestation about Collaboration: Discursive Boundary Work among Professions

We examine how professions responded to a potential change in jurisdictional boundaries by analyzing the written submissions of five professional associations in reaction to a government proposal to strengthen interprofessional collaboration, relating these responses to the professions’ field positions. We identify four foci for framing used by the professions to discursively develop their boundary claims: (1) framing the issue of interprofessional collaboration (issue framing), (2) framing of justifications for favored solutions (justifying), (3) framing the profession’s own identity (self-casting), and (4) framing other professions’ identities (altercasting). We find that professions employed these foci differently depending on two dimensions of their field positions – status and centrality. Our study contributes to the literature by identifying distinctive ways through which the foci for framing may be mobilized in situations of boundary contestation, and by theorizing how field position in terms of status and centrality influences actors’ framing strategies.