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This paper aims to examine the relationships between the group affiliates’ dual legitimacy (membership legitimacy and societal legitimacy) and dual resource acquisition (intra-group and out-group), and the moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and munificence in the emerging economies.

This paper adopts hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses based on the unique data of 251 group affiliated firms in China and applies the alternative measurements and alternative methodology of structural equation modeling into robustness check to confirm the results.

The results show as follows: the group affiliates can benefit from membership legitimacy for intra-group resource acquisition and out-group resource acquisition through the mediations of societal legitimacy and intra-group resource acquisition. However, in the linkage between affiliates’ membership legitimacy and intra-group resource acquisition and the linkage between societal legitimacy and out-group resource acquisition, environmental uncertainty plays the positive moderating roles while environmental munificence plays the negative moderating roles. Under the condition of high environmental uncertainty and low environmental munificence, the linkage between membership legitimacy and intra-group resource acquisition, and the linkage between societal legitimacy and out-group resource acquisition reach the strongest level.

The findings highlight the importance of dual legitimacy building for group affiliates to acquire resources both inside and outside the business group when they operate in emerging economies characterized by high environmental uncertainty and low environmental munificence. However, it does not explore the contextual factors (e.g. institutional distance) affecting the relationship between the affiliate’s membership legitimacy and societal legitimacy. Then more group-level factors are expected to be included and explored with multi-level models in the future studies.

The findings reveal the mechanism of how group affiliates benefiting differently from dual legitimacy to acquire resources in the emerging economies, which also provide a new interpretation for the questions of who benefiting more from the group affiliation, how and why (Carney et al., 2009). This research also explores the moderating roles of task environmental characteristics (environmental uncertainty and environmental munificence) on the affiliate's dual legitimacy and dual resource acquisition, which helps understand why legitimacy building is more important in terms of resource acquisition in the emerging economy characterized by uncertainty and non-munificence.

Theoretically, the paper aims to provide locus of legitimacy as a framework to not only introduce a multidimensional perspective on legitimacy but also expand the understanding about resource acquisition strategies of social enterprises. Empirically, the authors test the theoretical predictions by using cases from South Korea and Taiwan. Practically, the authors intend to assist chief executive officers (CEOs) of social enterprises in their effort to secure valuable resources and provide policy implications so that both South Korea and Taiwan learn from each other.

The authors use case methods to find evidence of the proposed theoretical framework. The initial search for target companies showed that social enterprises in South Korea and Taiwan were ideal samples. In-person, email and phone interviews were conducted on CEOs, and archival data on institutional environments and various aspects of social enterprises were collected. Collected data were analyzed using the locus of legitimacy framework to find out how different emphasis on locus of legitimacy impacted critical decisions of social enterprise, such as human, financial and network resources.

As predicted in the locus of the legitimacy framework, the analyses confirmed that locus of legitimacy did explain critical decisions of social enterprises in South Korea and Taiwan. First, significant institutional forces existed, shaping social enterprises behavior. For example, Taiwanese Jinu showed that greater emphasis was given to internal legitimacy, while South Korean Sohwa was higher in external locus of legitimacy. Such differences systematically impacted choices made on resource acquisition strategies. Jinu showed a greater similarity to those of for-profit companies, aligning key decisions of resource acquisition strategies to achieve financial viability as a top priority. However, Sohwa, though financial performance was still important, put more emphasis on meeting institutional demands from South Korean Government.

This study is one of early studies that attempts to understand the structure of legitimacy faced by social enterprises. The authors argue that organizations can play a more proactive role in securing legitimacy. The authors believe that locus of legitimacy framework complements the existing understanding about legitimacy in institutional theory. By introducing a multidimensional perspective about legitimacy, the authors add additional explanations about how firms exposed to different institutional forces can have diverse alternatives in resource acquisition strategies.

This paper aims to explore the complete process and underlying mechanism that social enterprises obtain legitimacy during interactions with stakeholders from theoretical integration of institutional theory and organization ecology perspective.

Based on theoretical classification, this paper selects six typical Chinese social enterprises and conducts a multi-case analysis.

The study finds that social enterprises aim at legitimizing single entity or industry and shaping stakeholders’ cognitive boundary simultaneously. Therefore, by adopting constrained cooperation and competition activities, social enterprises use normative isomorphism to achieve personal legitimation and combining ecological niche construction, social enterprises achieve organizational legitimation. By adopting fragmented cooperation-dominant or competition-dominant activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism supplemented by competitive isomorphism or population structure creation to obtain industry legitimation. By adopting dynamically integrated coopetition activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism and reflexive isomorphism to reach field legitimation.

This paper proposes a mechanism model that the coopetition with stakeholders influences the legitimation process, identifies four stages of social enterprise’s legitimation process and the types of legitimacy obtained in each stage and fills the gap of Chinese indigenous social enterprise research.

The purpose of this paper is to review the growing emphasis on quantifiable performance measures such as social return on investment (SROI) in third sector organisations – specifically, social enterprise – through a legitimacy theory lens. It then examines what social enterprises value (i.e. consider important) in terms of performance evaluation, using a case study approach.

Case studies involving interviews, documentary analysis, and observation, of three social enterprises at different life-cycle stages with different funding structures, were constructed to consider “what measures matter” from a practitioner's perspective.

Findings highlight a priority on quality outcomes and impacts in primarily qualitative terms to evaluate performance. Further, there is a noticeable lack of emphasis on financial measures other than basic access to financial resources to continue pursuing social goals.

The practical challenges faced by social enterprises – many of which are small to medium sized – in evaluating performance and by implication organisational legitimacy are contrasted with measures such as SROI which are resource intensive and have inherent methodological limitations. Hence, findings suggest the limited and valuable resources of social enterprises would be better allocated towards documenting the actual outcomes and impacts as a first step, in order to evaluate social and financial performance in terms appropriate to each objective, in order to demonstrate organisational legitimacy.

Findings distinguish between processes which may hold symbolic legitimacy for select stakeholder groups, and processes which hold substantive, cognitive legitimacy for stakeholders more broadly, in the under-researched context of social enterprise.

The literature on foreignness has, to date, stressed the liability of foreignness (LOF) and the advantage of foreignness (AOF). Drawing on industrial organisation theory, institutional theory, the resource-based view of the firm and the literature on networking, the authors’ research develops an integrated framework to explore the impact of foreignness on internationalisation depth from the perspective of the duality of foreignness (LOF versus AOF) within multiple dimensions. These dimensions are isomorphism, home country of origin, institutional distance and dual embeddedness of multinational enterprises (MNEs).

In this study, the authors empirically test hypotheses arising from this new theoretical framework by examining the characteristics of a sample of 324 Chinese MNEs (CMNEs) that were operating in 63 countries from 1999 to 2018. Employing regression analysis on a panel of 9,410 observations, the results show that foreignness does exhibit multilevel complexity and duality.

The authors’ empirical results show that isomorphism pressures, country of origin and institutional distance have a negative effect on internationalisation depth (as an outcome of LOF) but that dual embeddedness, on the part of MNEs, exerts a positive impact on internationalisation depth (as an outcome of AOF). The implications for research on multilevel complexity and the duality of foreignness are discussed, and managerial implications are outlined.

The implications of the authors’ findings for MNEs should not be generalised to developed countries without examining the characteristics of both China as an emerging country and its MNEs. The second limit is regarding ownership; this framework has limitations due to choosing China and its OFDIs for testing internationalisation depth. Finally, for subsequent research, examining the dynamics of foreignness completes the nature of multicomplexity, defined by external and internal factors of foreignness changing over time and space.

CMNE managers are advised to actively scrutinise their behaviours in the local country to overcome the differences in routines, values and practices inherent in local institutions (Chen et al., 2019). The results imply that CMNEs should be careful not to overuse their home country image when penetrating a new market. Thus, a strategy to reduce a home government's hegemonic or otherwise negative image may be wise when operating abroad. Finally, the authors’ model suggests that CMNEs equipped with great RCN CIPs for identifying, scanning and interpreting local institutions can enhance internationalisation depth.

The authors’ research contributes to research on foreignness by emphasising foreignness as a construct of multilevel complexity. The authors argue that foreignness arises due to varying factors at the host, home, host-home levels and at the level of the organisational entity. The authors’ definition of foreignness and empirical results supports the notion that isomorphism pressures (host country-level factors), country-of-origin of home country (home country-level factors) and institutional distance (host-home country-level factors) are inextricably negatively linked with internationalisation depth (as effects of LOF). By contrast, the dual embeddedness of MNEs (the factor of organisational level) represents a positive relationship with internationalisation depth (as effects of AOF).

The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of how the regulatory foci of the multinational enterprises (MNE) headquarters and the subsidiary lead to internal legitimacy crises. This paper discusses how pragmatic and moral legitimacy crises affect relational social capital.

The paper is conceptual.

This paper highlights the importance of internal legitimacy as well as the motivational orientations of headquarters and subsidiaries for the functioning of MNEs. Internal legitimacy management is crucial for building relational social capital. This study proposes that legitimacy crises are particularly likely to occur in cases of goal incongruence between headquarters and subsidiaries. This study postulates that organizations with a promotion-oriented institutional logic are concerned by the absence of pragmatic legitimacy processes. In contrast, given their aim of protecting the status quo, prevention-oriented institutional logic MNEs are concerned about the absence of moral legitimacy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explore the relationship between regulatory focus, internal legitimacy and relational social capital.

The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-institutional environment. The findings suggest that these domains mediate the relationship between micro-level agency and macro-level institutions. The authors describe how macro-level consensus about the category legitimacy emerges through a competition between judgments embedded in different discourses and how a particular discourse attains validity, forcing other actors to change their initial unfavorable legitimacy judgments and recognize the category’s legitimacy.

Research, spanning half a century, points to the critical role of school administration and to the successful implementation of US government policies and programs. In part these findings reflect the times and a US educational governance system characterized by local control, a constitutionally‐constrained federal government, resource‐poor state governments, and an overall system of segment arrangements for governing education. However, the US education policy environment has changed dramatically over the past several decades, with standards and high stakes accountability becoming commonplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the entailments of shifts in the policy environment for school administrative practice, focusing on how school leaders manage in the middle between this shifting external policy environment and classroom teachers.

The paper's focus is on how school administration manages the dual organizational imperatives of legitimacy and integrity in a changing institutional environment. This paper is an essay in which the authors reflect on the entailments of shifts in the education sector for school administration over the past quarter century in the USA.

While considerable change for school administrative practice is suggested, the authors argue that organizational legitimacy and organizational integrity are still central concerns for school leaders.

Although the paper's account is based entirely on the US education sector, several aspects of the framing may be relevant in other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the dilemma of institutional duality (ID) confronting multinational corporations and to propose a workable solution for this problem.

The author has searched the literature using several terms directly related to the dilemma of ID and multinational firms.

The findings reveal that to attain “legitimacy”, subsidiaries strive to balance institutional pressures stemming from external environments in the host country and their parent organizations. Understanding institutional theories of multinational corporations enables the subsidiaries to manage external pressures. ID impact varies among subsidiaries, depending on institutional contexts and internal strategies of subsidiaries.

An “institutional duality incidence model” portraying how dual institutions make “legitimacy” problematic for subsidiaries is proposed. A framework for identifying factors generating ID dilemma and their management approach is also proposed. It is concluded that a multinational corporation that recognizes ID as a central concern is more likely to achieve and maintain a higher level of harmony with its subsidiaries and host countries.