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The purpose of this paper is to propose a model in which work centrality, locus of control, polychronicity, preference for gender‐role differentiation, and perceived social support were expected to vary between nations and to be associated with general perceptions of absence legitimacy and self‐reported absenteeism.

Data were collected from 1,535 employees working in ten large multinationals organizations, mostly in the consumer products and technology sectors located in nine countries.

The explanatory variables differed significantly across countries, as did perceived legitimacy, responses to absence scenarios, and self‐reported absence. The variables of interest, as a package, partially mediated the association between country and one dimension of legitimacy and country and the scenario responses.

Although absenteeism from work is a universal phenomenon, there is very little cross‐cultural research on the subject. This study has implications for filling this critical research gap. Limitations of this research are the use of convenience sampling and self‐reported absence data.

From a practical standpoint, this study demonstrates that organizations which attempt to develop corporate‐wide attendance policies that span national borders should take indigenous norms and expectations concerning absenteeism into consideration. Additionally, in an increasingly mobile global workforce, how does an individual who has been socialized in a nation where absence is generally viewed as a more legitimate behavior behave in a nation where it is viewed as less so?

This study illustrates the value of the legitimacy construct for studying absenteeism, both within and between nations. It also illustrates the value of building models incorporating variables that accommodate both cross‐national variation and individual differences within nations.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between job satisfaction and distributive justice on employee perceptions of absence legitimacy. This paper also examined the moderating effects of turnover intentions on the relevant relationships.

The authors used convenience sampling to collect data from 298 employees working in private and public sector organizations in the manufacturing and service sectors in Ghana. Drawing on institutional theory, this study investigates the effects of employee perceptions of the legitimacy of absenteeism on their attitudes toward their job and pay. Structural equation modeling was used to test the direct and moderation effects.

Job satisfaction and perceived distributive justice were found to be significantly related to the absence of legitimacy. Additionally, turnover intentions moderated the relationship between job satisfaction and absence legitimacy; however, unexpectedly, this was associated only marginally with distributive justice.

The main limitation of this study was that it was cross-sectional, but the analysis did not show a common method bias. This study was conducted in a developing country where valid and accurate absence data are non-existent. The hypotheses were supported. When employees felt a sense of inequity and were dissatisfied with their jobs, they were likely to perceive absenteeism as legitimate behavior. These relationships were more pronounced when employees intended to leave their organizations.

From a practical standpoint, as employees are likely to engage in absenteeism as a means to reduce their perceptions of imbalance and because absenteeism is a costly behavior, it would be in the employer’s best interest to mitigate these high costs. It behooves employers to comprehend the factors that lead to the legitimization of absences. Doing so, they would be able to implement attendance management systems and strategies that would delegitimize some of these factors, thus improving attendance and potentially increasing productivity and job satisfaction and reducing turnover intentions.

This study contributes to absenteeism research because, unlike most studies in the area, it examined employee cognitions of the behavior. Such cognitions should provide insights into how employee perceptions of the legitimacy of absences would affect attitudinal variables such as job satisfaction, feelings of equity and turnover intentions. Moreover, even though the study was conducted in Ghana, absence legitimacy can be investigated in different settings at different levels of analysis. This is because it is free from contamination such as, dissimilar absence reporting systems within and across organizations and nations that affect the validity and accuracy of absence data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine possible causes of failure of the commercialization of a high technology innovation, in order to explain the relationship between resource‐based view and institution‐based view as a contributing factor.

The research is based on a case study in a high technology sector. Qualitative evidence and analysis are used to draw some conclusions related to the causes of the failure of the commercialization process.

The main limitation is that the findings cannot be generalized. Moreover, the analysis is based on the author's individual interpretation and biases.

The case provides guidelines to innovators and entrepreneurs to develop new technologies and their businesses.

The article is based on a real case and it can be used as a base for future research and as teaching material.

Country of origin (COO) is well established as an extrinsic product cue that influences buyer behavior in the business-to-business (B2B) context. However, non-product-specific attitudes to a COO, including the notion of animosity, have received rather less attention. This paper aims to investigate COO as a multi-dimensional construct and animosity as a normative dimension of buyers’ attitudes and intentions.

The work is based on data collected from industrial buyers in Egypt and Canada to enable a comparative perspective between developing and developed countries. Structural equation modeling was used to test the study’s hypotheses.

Country of manufacture was an antecedent of perceived quality and a determinant of brand evaluation in both countries. Price was an antecedent of perceived risk and value in Egypt, while its impact on perceived risk was less pronounced in Canada. Perceived value was the strongest determinant of willingness to buy, while animosity played a significant role in this respect in Canada but not in Egypt.

Country of brand was not included as a dimension to be investigated; industry type was not controlled and may confound the results; and generalization of the results is limited given the cross-sectional approach.

The study’s contribution lies in four main elements, viewed individually and in combination: investigating a large number of COO constructs that have not been studied within a single research context in B2B before; including the animosity construct in a B2B setting; contrasting “benefit received” and “sacrifice given” constructs that help to shape industrial buyers’ purchase decisions; and carrying out the research in two very different countries to help improve the generalizability of results.

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.

This paper intends to explore the localist perspectives concerning Hong Kong’s political development. The persistent growth of localists in the polity of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has not only challenged the current political order but also aroused Beijing’s national security considerations. The oath-taking controversies of 2016 demonstrated the strife that now exists between Beijing and the localists in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the localists’ perceptions of the political decay, legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization in HKSAR to illuminate further their perceptions of Hong Kong’s political development.

This paper uses the theoretical discussion of the relations between political decay, legitimacy, the legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization as the key analytical framework to understand the localists’ perspective concerning Hong Kong’s political development. Based on an analysis of the localists’ discourse, the implication for the HKSAR regime’s legitimacy and for reverse democratization will be discussed.

The emergence of the new localists leads to the belief that Hong Kong’s political development is experiencing the reverse of democratization as the government cannot fully absorb the demands made by the general public. The reverse democratization is directly impacting the regime’s legitimacy, but in the HKSAR’s case, the new localists see the root of the problem as stemming from Beijing, that is that the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy problem is due to its underdevelopment in the legal, political and cultural spheres. This underdevelopment has weakened the legitimacy of the HKSAR’s administration, especially with regard to political reform, the legal interpretation of the Basic Law, and the influx of immigrants and tourists from the Mainland into the Hong Kong’s society. The China factor, from the Localists’ viewpoint, is at the root of the political decay and the legitimacy crisis in Hong Kong. More significantly, the localists regard the involvement of Beijing in Hong Kong’s affairs as its way to disrupt the autonomous status of the HKSAR. As a result, public discontent has further intensified and created the legitimacy crisis for the HKSAR Government.

This paper is the first academic paper to provide a critical analysis of Hong Kong’s localists’ views regarding Hong Kong’s political development since becoming the HKSAR. In contrast with the existing literature about Hong Kong’s democratization and political development, this paper introduces localists’ views and advocates the idea of “reverse democratization” to explain their perceptions concerning Hong Kong’s political development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of legitimation of international new ventures (INVs) from an emerging economy and the effect such ventures have on the process of creation and legitimation of a new industry in that economy.

It is a longitudinal ethnographic case study. Following an inductive theory building approach, data were collected over an 11-year period via in-depth interviews, participant observations and unobtrusive data.

Data reveal three different contexts in which legitimation takes place: legitimation of the new industry and of the new venture domestically and internationally. A new venture drives the process of industry legitimation by achieving legitimacy threshold first nationally at meso and micro levels as well as internationally. The challenge therefore for such a venture is to establish legitimacy in the absence of any precedents at the organization, industry or international levels. Unless at least one new venture achieves legitimacy threshold in a new industry there is no possibility for that industry to become institutionalized.

The authors advocate for further research at the intersection between legitimation, international entrepreneurship and emerging markets in order to further advance the emergent theory.

The data suggest that in order for an INV to achieve cognitive legitimacy and socio-political legitimacy in an emerging industry located in an emerging economy, and successfully internationalize, it shall design a robust business model targeting both internal and external stakeholders; engage in persuasive argumentation invoking familiar cues and scripts; engage in political negotiations promoting and defending incentive and operating mechanisms; and overcome the country-of-origin effect by pursuing technology legitimation strategy.

Governments and NGOs may wish to see new industries emerge but they lack the means and mandate to establish and lead them themselves, instead rely on enabling actions, such as investment in capacity building. However, building capacity for an as-yet non-existent industry in an emerging economy may prove to be counter-productive, driving a brain drain of qualified workers who are forced to migrate to find suitable work. The work leads the authors to speculate about whether there may be a role for investment in programs of industry legitimacy building in pursuit of public policy objectives.

The study puts forward a process model of new industry legitimation. The model theorizes the process of change from an initial condition in which an industry does not exist to a final condition in which it is institutionalized. The model addresses the case where the initial catalyst is the formation of an INV that is the seed for the birth of the industry. Since both the new venture and the new industry lack cognitive and socio-political legitimacies, the model theorizes temporal emergence of these at organizational and industry levels, leading ultimately to institutionalization.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on conceptualizing the origin of legitimacy, the legitimation process and its trustworthiness toward the people, regulators, society and stakeholders. In achieving the purpose of the study, an inclusive research gap concerning the roles of the Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) as a Shariah regulatory authority or an internal mechanism of Shariah Governance Framework (SGF) in the development and formation of Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) would also be addressed.

The paper implements an analytical approach to investigate the legitimation process of SSB, and its presence, significance, as well as credibility to the stakeholders.

This study proposes an additional authority of legitimacy, namely, SSB/Shariah regulatory authority, along with regulators, professionals and people. These could be derived from the internal mechanism of Shariah Governance (SG) practices of IFIs. The study also proposes another type of legitimacy (ethical/Shariah legitimacy) that derives from the organizational SG practices through its internal mechanisms. The formation of SSB is mandatory and more significant for the isomorphic identification of IFIs, SG system, legitimacy and broader acceptance to stakeholders.

The rational argument shows that SSB legitimates the overall functions of IFIs, SG practices, processes and structures. It is more apposite because it has substantial validity, dominance, recognition and acceptability along with three external bodies. Besides, IFIs and their SG do not have the proper value to the general people, society, regulators and other stakeholders without the legitimization of SSB. Thus, theorists and academicians may consider SSB as the fourth party of legitimacy along with three legitimacy providing authorities (regulators, professionals and people).

The paper focuses on illustrating and extending the border knowledge concerning the legitimacy from SG and how do SSBs legitimize IFIs and enhance their credibility to the general people, government, society and other stakeholders. The paper first clarified the internal legitimacy concerning SGF and contributed to the area of Islamic finance, legitimacy, institutional theory, legitimacy theory and internal legitimacy.

Research suggests that context matters for MNEs’ international business strategy. MNEs’ strategies vary when different intertwined contexts interact with each other. While International Business scholars understand well the influence of the institutional environments on firms’ international strategies and operations, some contextual differences are less understood as is the case involving African countries and firms. In this study we investigate how different institutional contexts and legitimacy challenges combine to impact ownership strategic choices of African firms in their cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we study the influence of the host country institutional development and two institutional dimension distances: administrative distance and knowledge distance. Methodologically, we use a sample of 314 CBAs made by acquirers from 24 African countries in 71 host countries worldwide to test a number of theoretically driven hypotheses. This study contributes to our understanding of how foreign investors from less institutionally developed countries that are more likely to face higher legitimacy barriers use ownership strategies to achieve legitimacy abroad.

A centuries-long history of theory and research shows that every authority system tries to cultivate a belief in its legitimacy. This paper focuses on the legitimation of regimes – social relationships and the rules that govern them. We use existing theory and research to identify a basic legitimation assumption that includes four conditions necessary to establish legitimacy. We also identify four corollaries of the assumption and use our own published and unpublished laboratory research to show (1) how successful experimental procedures satisfy the assumption’s conditions, and (2) how the failure of experimental procedures to establish legitimacy violate the assumption and its corollaries.