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The purpose of this study is to examine the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB)’s response to criticism and political pressure at the time of the global financial crisis through the lens of legitimacy theory.

This study constructs a thick description about a causal mechanism between social crisis and organizational change using a process-tracing approach that combines a historical narrative and a theoretical consideration.

The IASB faced criticism of its accounting standards for financial instruments and its governance structure during the financial crisis. This criticism represented the crises of pragmatic and cultural legitimacy. Facing these legitimacy crises, the IASB adopted such legitimation strategies as normalization and restructuring to repair its legitimacy. Additionally, in these repairing processes, the IASB, as a bonus, became institutionally embedded itself in the global political arena and succeeded to strengthen its legitimacy.

The study suggests that the financial crisis had a significant impact on the standardization of transnational accounting. Indeed, the crisis was an important turning point of the IASB’s work on revising its accounting standards to reduce complexity and altering its Constitution. Moreover, the authors bridge the gaps in the literature on accounting and legitimacy by examining how the IASB used particular legitimacy repair strategies when facing its legitimacy crises

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 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 purpose of this Australian case study, set in the 1960s, is to comprehensively examine the responses of the two major professional accounting bodies to a financial/corporate/regulatory crisis necessitating the defence of the profession's legitimacy.

This historical paper draws on surviving primary records and secondary sources and applies the perspectives on the dynamics of occupational groups and the legitimacy typology of Suchman.

While the history of the accounting profession has been characterized by intra‐professional rivalries, this case study illustrates how such rivalries were put aside on recognising the power of collectivizing in defending the profession's legitimacy. Based on the available evidence, pragmatic legitimacy is shown to have been a key focus of attention by the major accounting bodies involved.

The paper may motivate similar studies in Australia and elsewhere, thus potentially contributing to developing a literature on comparative international accounting history. The evidence for this historical investigation is largely restricted to surviving documents, making it necessary to rely on assessments of the key sources.

In addressing responses to crises in defending the legitimacy of the profession as a whole, the paper makes an original contribution in exploring the relationship between literature on the dynamics of occupational groups and on legitimacy management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the communication behaviour on Twitter during the rise of a preventable corporate crisis. It aims to contribute to situational crisis response strategies, and to broaden the authors’ understanding of legitimacy management. In September 2015, Volkswagen’s (VW) emission scandal became public and caused debates also in social media. By applying complementing tools of data analysis to the Twitter communication around the “Dieselgate” crisis, this study unfolds a field of tension between corporate strategy and public perception.

The authors collected Twitter data and analysed approximately 2.1m tweets relevant to the VW crisis. The authors approached the data by separating the overall communication in peak and quiet phases; analysing the peaks with social network analysis techniques; studying sentiments and the differences in each phase; and specifically examining tweets from VW’s corporate accounts with regard to the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and legitimacy.

VW’s very few tweets were not able to reduce the emotionality and sentiment of the ongoing Twitter discussion. Instead, even during quiet phases, the communication remained rather negative. The analysis suggests that VW followed a strategy not covered by SCCT, i.e. keeping silent.

The discovered strategy of keeping silent extends the SCCT and is linked to legitimacy management. Learnings from this study help decision makers to put social media response strategies into practice to swiftly recover from crises or refrain from certain strategies to avoid further reputational damage.

Examining the underlying communication patterns of a crisis case with societal magnitude such as “Dieselgate” helps sensitising customers and executives to utilise social media channels more comprehensible in future crises.

The study uncovers the unconventional and yet barely addressed crisis response strategy of a global enterprise while devising unique realisations for practitioners and communication researchers. It contributes to existing knowledge about situational crisis response strategies, and broadens the authors’ understanding of legitimacy management in times of social media ubiquity.

The aim of this paper is to understand discursive strategies used by organizations to restore their fading legitimacy. This longitudinal case study is built around two events representing a threat to the legitimacy of the pharmaceutical industry. This study describes some subtle techniques employed to restore legitimacy during those difficult periods.

This research analyzes the president's letter of the annual report using semiotic tools designed to catch the essence and goals of the narrative sections. This case study covers 20 of Pfizer most recent annual reports (1988‐2007).

The paper suggests that some narrative sections are built to protect legitimacy on two fronts. Most of the time, the discourse maintains legitimacy in front of the salient stakeholder by presenting the firm's main “object of desire” as the enhancement of shareholder's value. In a period of crisis, the narratives are built to restore legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. To do so, they substitute a screen object (related to the theme of the crisis) as the goal of the companies' action.

The annual report appears as a selling document, discussing “political issues” rather than economic rendition of accounts. However, it is impossible to expose the controversies here, and it is not the purpose of the paper.

The paper brings together multiple elements of narrative sections to show how pharmaceutical firms built their discourse to restore legitimacy by adapting their defensive texts to specific screen objects as a response to a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of action visibility in moderating the relationship between firm response and individual legitimacy judgment. Since a firm may decouple its public commitment from its actual practice to cope with conflicting stakeholder interests, visibility is important for consumers to make judgment because it is difficult for them to observe a firm’s actual fulfillment of its public commitment to quality assurance after a product-harm crisis.

Scenario-based mixed design experiments were employed and 718 valid responses were collected.

The results indicated that, while acknowledging responsibility produced more favorable legitimacy judgment than denial, decoupling produced no better judgment than denial. However, higher visibility significantly amplified the effect size. Specifically, under the condition of high visibility, not only did acknowledging responsibility produce much more favorable judgment than denial, but so did decoupling.

This study provided empirical evidence that action visibility moderated the relationship between firm response and individual legitimacy judgment, thus complementing the literature on crisis management.

This study provided executives or managers with optimal, suboptimal and least optimal response strategies under different levels of action visibility.

Much of the extant research on response strategy for organizations to deal with product-harm crisis ignored the moderating role of action visibility. Past research on legitimacy judgment focused on organization. This paper combined firm response, action visibility and individual-level legitimacy judgment.

Underpinned by institutional legitimacy, this study explores how South African public university senior managers struggled to maintain legitimacy during an unplanned radical change process.

Gioia's grounded theory analysis approach is employed to analyse interviews with 37 senior managers of public-funded universities in South Africa.

This study's findings show that a change without proper planning severely damages institutions in all aspects of leadership's normative, empirical, moral and pragmatic legitimacy.

This study contributes to the literature on legitimacy by illustrating the importance of institutional legitimacy during unplanned social change and the factors that negate legitimacy.

Though other legitimacy models have been well developed, they do not apply to such unplanned social change in organisations. This study shows a different angle of the legitimacy crisis under unplanned social change conditions.

Using legitimacy and impression management theories, this study examines whether there is evidence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) decoupling by critically analysing the cases of three Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 airline companies (British Airways, WizAir, and Easyjet). The study focusses on three CSR aspects: community, customer, and employee support.

Using the case study method, the authors critically analysed the content of the three companies' websites and verified Twitter accounts between March 2020 and August 2020. The authors also reviewed news media sources tied explicitly to COVID-19 and the airline industry.

The study finds evidence of CSR decoupling due to inconsistencies between the three airline companies' communication about the companies' commitment to customers' health and safety and their actions. The study also uncovers that the three airline companies have violated employee rights by imposing unjustifiable and excessive redundancies and pay cuts, freezing planned pay rises, forcing unpaid leaves, and in some cases, suspending free meals during the crew shifts and exploiting the financial pressure and lack of jobs resulting from the pandemic by offering employees inferior contracts.

This paper responds to He and Harris's (2020) call for research to explore the impact of the global pandemic on CSR practices and Crane and Matten's (2020) call for research investigating how specific stakeholders get unvalued during the pandemic. The authors' study argues that the social responsibility of organisations, especially during crises, should not only focus on voluntary and charitable deeds but also on supporting employees, putting employees' well-being at the forefront of employees' operations, and maintaining credibility and sincerity in employees' communication and actions.

The findings in this paper provide insights and policy implications for managers, stakeholders, and regulators. The paper sheds light on violations of employee rights, indicating that employees in the airline sector are amongst the under-appreciated stakeholders during the pandemic. Such knowledge is essential for practitioners and policymakers who are charting paths forward to address the needs of vulnerable categories of employees. The paper also elucidates the impact of CSR decoupling on an organisation's legitimacy and the significance of maintaining credibility in CSR communications and actions, especially during a crisis.

Although exploring and analysing CSR practices in organisations has already attracted considerable interest in recent years, there is minimal knowledge about organisations' genuine commitment to CSR during the pandemic, and there is a dearth of relevant studies in the aviation industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study addresses this gap by exploring the CSR practices of three airline companies and the companies' genuine commitment to CSR during the pandemic.

This paper aims to commentate on the roles of sustainability reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) framework, designed as a guide for best-practice in sustainability reporting, for its applicability to cover COVID-19 issues and, more generally, issues arising in crisis conditions.

The GRI’s COVID-19 communications and the GRI framework are reviewed using three common theories of reporting, namely, institutional, stakeholder and legitimacy theory. For each theory, the authors contrast expectations under business-as-usual conditions against crisis conditions to identify gaps and avenues to guide COVID-19 responses.

This commentary opines the GRI framework risks perpetuating incremental change towards the “new normal”, rather than motivating the urgent responses needed in a crisis. The GRI can play a significant normative role to guide immediate and short-term best practice in COVID-19 reporting. Findings motivate the need to report for vulnerable rather than powerful stakeholders and to recognise and celebrate proactive change.

This paper commentates on the suitability of a major sustainability reporting framework and its role in improving responses to the current COVID-19 crisis. Findings propose challenges to the GRI and GRI framework to motivate urgent responses and communication for the pandemic.