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Despite increased research attention to management innovation, the literature offers conflicting explanations of how it affects firm performance. The rational perspective emphasises the role of management innovation for organisational routine updating. The fashion perspective views management innovation as a symbolic activity to foster legitimacy. The purpose of this study is to integrate the two perspectives and explore both the mediating effects of organisational efficiency and business legitimacy and the moderating effect of CEO shareholding.

Based on empirical data from 238 Chinese firms, this study conducts stepwise regression to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that management innovation positively affects both organisational efficiency and business legitimacy and then firm performance. However, the promotion effect of organisational efficiency is stronger than that of business legitimacy on firm performance. The results further indicate that CEO shareholding strengthens the effect of management innovation on organisational efficiency but weakens it for business legitimacy.

This study presents a complete explanation of the effect of management innovation on firm performance by exploring the mediating effect of both organisational efficiency and business legitimacy. Further, it compares the effects of organisational efficiency and business legitimacy on firm performance. Finally, it resolves the conflict between the rational and fashion perspectives by involving the moderating effect of CEO shareholding.

The authors report a field study examining the perceptions of Kenyan host-country stakeholders toward activities of Chinese businesses in their country, and the consequences of this on the legitimacy that they bestow on pertinent entities.

Interviews and observations across an eight-week period of field research revealed generally negative attitudes toward Chinese businesses, with issues pertinent to moral legitimacy prominent, notably, perceptions of corrupt practices, environmental neglect and profit expatriation.

The authors also find evidence that these negative attitudes spilled over to contaminate Kenyans’ perceptions of their own government, which respondents associated closely with the activities of Chinese entities.

The authors extend understanding of legitimacy theory and the implications of foreign business activity by highlighting that businesses may be mistaken to believe that their international business activities are politically neutral, and while host governments may believe that the economic benefits arising from attracting foreign business activity can buttress their legitimacy, the perceived activities of these businesses, in the absence of supporting institutional frameworks, may render this counterproductive.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of the accreditation path toward legitimacy in business schools from an isomorphic and a social responsibility perspective.

A qualitative method is used to analyze the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation process in three Lebanese business schools aiming at revealing a new role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in this process.

Accreditation in business schools is a “temporary isomorphic legitimacy tool” enhanced by CSR in a continuum that may lead to sustain legitimacy in higher education once accreditation is attained.

This research has its limitations around the external validity of the qualitative methods. In fact, the authors’ results depend on the context of the three studied business schools, and the generalization of the results was never the authors’ primary objective. Further research must be done to build and elaborate on the authors’ findings, either within the authors’ sample or within other business schools in Lebanon.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can play a major role in guaranteeing and sustaining legitimacy in the phase after accreditation. May be this was the philosophy behind the proposition of the AACSB of the new standard regarding CSR in 2013 highlighting the importance of ethics, CSR, and sustainability education in business schools.

Accreditation in business schools is a “temporary isomorphic legitimacy tool” enhanced by CSR in a continuum that may lead to sustain legitimacy in higher education once accreditation is attained.

Business incubators are advantageous to new venture legitimacy because they provide rich access to entrepreneurial resources, and their incubation networks can offer endorsement to incubatees. However, empirical evidence on this topic is limited, and the existing literature relies predominantly on the Western context. Given that not all developing country incubators have resourceful and reputable external entrepreneurial networks as in the industrialized countries, and that new ventures need to build legitimacy along cognitive and socio-political dimensions that require different actions to influence different stakeholders, this study investigates empirically how business incubators facilitate their incubatees to build legitimacy in a context where resource and reputation conditions are weak. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how business incubators perform legitimacy-building roles effectively.

A multiple case study of business incubators in Chongqing, a second-tier Chinese city, is presented. Using grounded theory, this paper draws its findings from a synthesis of interviews and secondary data of seven incubators and their ten incubatees.

The legitimacy-building role of business incubators is performed well in this research context. Evidence is presented that incubators play different roles in building different dimensions of incubatees’ legitimacy. Government-associated incubators play a salient role in building incubatees’ socio-political legitimacy whilst non-government related incubators shape their incubatees’ cognitive legitimacy.

This study contributes to the business incubators literature by revealing how incubators perform the legitimacy-building role when their resource endorsement is weak. The results suggest that incubators need to strengthen their ties with external stakeholders and that new ventures need to take key stakeholders into consideration when they select incubators to enter.

Rapid urbanization and the influx of rural residents to urban cities has led to the growth of informal settlements globally. Drawing on institutional theory, this paper aims to examine institutional actors’ legitimacy seeking behaviour to housing issues and their responses to regulative, normative and cultural pressures.

The qualitative case-study research approach is adopted by conducting 25 in-depth interviews that involved purposefully chosen institutional actors in the housing sector. Online observations and documents are used to support the interview data.

Thematic analysis of data gathered suggests that these actors, guided by sensemaking, invest in relationship-building to attain market, social, relational and political legitimacy. The relationship-building also leads to the legitimation of institutional actors’ existence via an eclectic mix of economic, social and political actions.

The results not only guide policymakers faced with potentially conflicting demands to legitimize sustainable housing developments policy that could benefit the urban poor’s shelter needs but also to consider the interactive and dynamic processes of stakeholders’ pressures, in a highly regulated housing environment.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how senior managers in a transitional economy context deal with the challenge of handling competing institutional logics through legitimacy work.

The paper draws on the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 34 senior managers in Ethiopia in matched pairs of four commercial organisations in private and state sectors and secondary sources.

The research reveals how the erstwhile protected state-owned organisations responded to institutional complexity, by seeking to extend their legitimacy claims whereas the emergent private sector organisations sought to construct a new legitimacy, in part by adopting some of the logics used by state-firms.

Extending this study with longitudinal comparative case studies across other emerging market economies could cast light on the varied ways in which organisations manage institutional complexities.

It is imperative that the government and policy makers have clarity in issuing directives and other signals about valued objectives to be pursued by enterprises. Otherwise, the organisational level actors may remain uncertain about the acceptable behaviours and responses and are likely to waste time and resources in trying to anticipate an unclear sense of direction.

This is a novel study which examines how organisational actors manage institutional complexity in a transitional economy context by undertaking legitimacy building work and appearing to meet state-public expectations.

Social enterprises pursue growth through business model innovation, and acquiring legitimacy is critical to ensuring such innovation. The purpose of this paper is to examine how business model innovation and legitimacy affect the performance of new social enterprises during different development stages.

This paper uses the hierarchical regression analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine social enterprise performance and constructs and verifies a moderated mediation effect of business model innovation, based on a survey of 183 new social enterprises in China.

This paper finds that business model innovation has a positive effect on social enterprise performance and an organization's legitimacy, acting as the partial mediator between them. The mediating effect of legitimacy is more positive when social enterprises are in the early growth stage. A more detailed analysis of fsQCA explores the necessary and sufficient conditions for the growth of social enterprise performance across different stages and reveals five configurations that improve the performance of social enterprises.

This study explores the role of business model innovation and legitimacy in social enterprise growth and provides empirical evidence about the causal configuration of high-performing social enterprises.

This research clarifies two antecedents of social enterprise performance and proposes a more inclusive framework that addresses the factor of dynamic development stages. This paper deepens the understanding of social enterprise performance in China.

The paper focuses on legitimation and legitimation strategies applied by companies. Following the process of systematic review, we analyse empirical studies exploring legitimation and legitimation strategies from different theoretical perspectives. Using the key findings by reconnoitering and comparing the theoretical background, approaches, methodologies and findings of these empirical studies, we outline potential directions for research in the legitimation strategies of firms engaged in international business operations.

This paper aims to examine how a combination of legitimacy needs and actions (LNAs) can shed light on the legitimacy behaviour of private higher education institutions (PHEIs) operating in an institutional business environment that is witnessing significant public–private sector role reversal. The legitimacy process is promoted as an exemplar to inform the increasing number of public–private sector role reversals in the utility, transportation, health and telecommunication sectors.

Based on empirical evidence, this paper triangulates data from archival policy announcements, retrospective case studies and face-to-face interviews. A replication logic methodology was used to establish LNAs and categorized themes.

The findings show that market, relational, investment, alliance and social legitimacy needs are crucial drivers for PHEIs when hybridizing their legitimacy practices, especially during critical phases of institutional reform. The proposed conceptual framework demonstrates how the legitimacy construction process is the result of internal development and external validation.

In providing some empirical descriptions and generalizations, the model makes limited attempt to determine with any specificity how PHEIs interact with their institutional environment, beyond a process of data triangulation.

The proposed LNA framework is especially relevant in industries where the government has historically been a major institutional stakeholder, but where market liberalization is leading to increasingly active participation by the private sector. Findings can help PHEIs deal with reform policies by establishing deep and varied expertise inside their organizations and through links with international universities, industries and government agencies enable knowledge exchange, transfer, partnerships and the development of alliance capitalism.

This study provides a more comprehensive approach for theorizing the interrelatedness and embeddedness of organizations with common business and institutional demand factors and linkages and their changing roles, particularly the multi-scale impacts of LNAs on legitimacy sustainability.