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Circular economy advocates innovations that upcycle wastes in the food supply chain to generate high added-value materials. These innovations are not only disruptive and green but also they are often initiated by startups, leading to the emergence of novel open-loop supply chains connecting actors in food and non-food sectors. While earlier research has highlighted the need to seek legitimacy for disruptive innovations to survive and grow, little is known about how these innovations occur and evolve across sectors. This paper aims to elaborate on this mechanism by exploring the function of the circular economy as a boundary object to facilitate legitimacy-seeking strategies.

An exploratory multiple-case research design is adopted and features food waste innovation projects with multi-tier supply chains consisting of a food producer, a startup and a buying firm. The study is investigated from the legitimacy and boundary object lenses.

The findings proposed a framework for the role of a boundary object in enabling legitimacy-seeking strategies for novel food waste innovations. First, the interpretative flexibility of the circular economy affords actors symbolic resources to conduct manipulation strategy to achieve cognitive legitimacy. Second, small-scale work arrangements enable creation strategy for the new supply chain to harness moral legitimacy. Finally, pragmatic legitimacy is granted via diffusion strategy enabled by scalable work arrangements.

This paper provides novel insights into the emergence of food waste innovation from a multi-tier supply chain perspective. It also highlights the key role of the boundary object in the legitimacy-seeking process.

The purpose of this research is to explore how one unsanctioned community sport organization (CSO), AM Hockey, sought to acquire legitimacy in a highly institutionalized minor hockey marketplace at various points in its organizational life cycle.

This study was guided by instrumental case study methodology. Twenty (20) AM Hockey stakeholders from a variety of roles (e.g. executives, program directors and coaches) were interviewed. Document analysis was also utilized to supplement the interviewees. Internal and public documents reflective of the CSO's creation and growth were obtained.

Findings revealed that the CSO had to navigate distinct phases of evolution including the Building, Growth, Competition and Stabilization phases. Although the four life cycle phases identified in this study share similarities with the phases identified by Lester et al. (2003), findings indicated that institutional work mechanisms must be understood in their context as they can vary over the life cycle of an organization. Therefore, start-up sports organizations must approach the pursuit of legitimacy as a continual process rather than something acquired and defended through maintenance work.

Developing legitimacy remains a central challenge for CSOs that seek to deliver alternative sport programming, yet it continues to be understudied. Ultimately, the long-term viability of an unsanctioned CSO in a federated sports system relies, in part, on its ability to continually determine the actions needed to achieve legitimacy within its environment.

The user-centered approach to understanding information use and users has shaped research in library and information science (LIS). In a user-centered environment, catalogers are told to focus on users and adapt standards to meet users’ needs while following standards in order to be efficient in their jobs. This study describes three academic cataloging units as they negotiate both the demands to follow and adapt these standards to meet users’ needs. New institutional theory served as a framework for the study. The results suggest that standards and users are pressures that cataloging units negotiate in their jobs, along with demands for work efficiency and professional legitimacy. While negotiating these pressures, catalogers and cataloging units redefine their work jurisdiction and maintain legitimacy to remain relevant in a complex work environment. Understanding how catalogers negotiate the normative institutional pressures of standards and users leads to an understanding of the complex nature of work in areas that deal with issues of standards and users, shows how an area within a profession maintains legitimacy when the profession no longer values that work, and, finally, shows the limits of the user-centered focus in LIS practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public (i.e. culture, state, paid work) and private (i.e. household) patriarchal structures work to shape a woman’s own legitimacy judgments concerning not engaging in paid work. The authors trace the intersection and interaction of legitimacy logics at both the collective (i.e. validity) and individual (i.e. propriety) levels, thereby gaining a better contextual understanding of each woman’s perception of career opportunities and limitations.

Qualitative methodology drawing from 35 semi-structured interviews with Lebanese women. A multilevel analytic framework combining the institutional structures of private and public patriarchy with the micro-processes of institutional logics is used.

Legitimization of (not) engaging in paid work is often tied to patriarchal logics that favor private sphere responsibilities for women, particularly related to the relational and instrumental logics of childrearing and husband-oriented responsibilities. Women’s legitimacy judgment formation seems to be based on multilevel cues and on differential instances of evaluative vs passive judgment formation. Some appear to passively assume the legitimacy of the logics; while others more actively question these logics. The findings suggest that active questioning is often overwhelmed by the negative and harsh realities making the woman succumb to passivity and choosing not to engage in paid work.

This study provides: a better mapping of the individual woman’s daily cognitions concerning the legitimacy of (not) engaging in paid work; and a unique multilevel analytic framework that can serve as a useful example of contextualizing career research.

The authors examine predictors of self-legitimacy for police officers belonging to the Military Police force of São Paulo (Brazil). Considering the variables mobilized by the literature on self-legitimacy, the authors seek to identify what explains the self-legitimacy of militarized police officers.

A survey was applied to 298 frontline police officers in the city of São Paulo, analyzing indicators separated into two groups: relationship dimension and organizational dimension. An ordinary least square model is used to test the “relationship” and “organizational” variables on police officers' self-legitimacy.

Effectiveness is the strongest predictor for self-legitimacy. Organizational justice and distributive justice also present important effects, as the perception of citizens' attitudes toward police reinforces the conception of self-legitimacy as a dialogical construct, comprising here the public's expectations of police work as well as the police officers' perceptions that they are respected and considered important by the public.

There are no other studies on self-legitimacy related to Brazilian police officers or exploring these aspects among police officers submitted to a militarized structure. These results contribute to the ongoing debate on the militarization of police activities and their possible effects on police legitimacy.

Processes of legitimacy and justice pervade work organizations. Here we focus on how legitimacy (collective sources of support for an authority) and procedural justice (use of fair procedures) affect how individuals interpret and respond to situations involving unfair outcomes such as underpayment. We draw upon the legitimacy perspective of Walker and Zelditch and the procedural justice approach of Tyler to develop two new models, one in which the two factors constitute objective and independent contextual elements and one in which perceptions of legitimacy and procedural justice are reciprocal. Both models have implications for understanding fairness and compliance in organizations.

The purpose of this research is to study how communication executives perceive their internal and external legitimacy, how they reflect on recent developments in their work, and which future challenges they perceive as being important.

The approach takes the form of in‐depth interviews with communication executives.

Communication executives have a distinct strategic managerial role within their organizations. The executive role involves three different performances: the organizational leader; the communication leader; and the communication manager. Executives perceived high external legitimacy, whereas internal legitimacy varied between organizations, and status and formal position were both dynamic and subject to negotiation. The communication technology development, termed as a “revolution”, has considerably affected executives' work. Future communication challenges such as globalization and organizational change were discussed.

Recent changes have strengthened the roles of the communication executives. Internal status and legitimacy appear to be dependent on the attitudes of the other executives. These relationships and the emerging executive roles will be an important basis for study in future research.

Internal legitimacy was clearly an issue of negotiation, which is important for practitioners to consider. Acting out the educational role, working with communication support and the coaching of managers, and initiating and pursuing strategic organizational issues may be means by which communication executives are further able to enhance their internal legitimacy.

New insights with regard to the legitimacy, practice and self‐perceptions of communication executives are provided. This is the first study of Swedish communication executives, adding to the knowledge base derived from studies from The Netherlands, UK and USA.

Previous research suggests that teams pace their change either internally to coincide with the midpoint, deadline, or task phases, or externally by entraining to exogenous pacers. Other research suggests that teams adapt to random environmental shocks. This paper investigates if, how, and when endogenous, exogenous, and random pacers affect the patterns of change in groups. We studied five software development teams during a turbulent two-year period. Our case studies and supporting analyses suggest that teams perform a “dance of entrainment”—simultaneously creating multiple rhythms and choreographing their activities to mesh with different pacers at different times.

Our prior work has identified a trade-off that new entrants face in obtaining favorable market reception, whereby initial entrants suffer from a deficit of legitimacy whereas later entrants suffer from a deficit of authenticity. This research has also proposed that a single mechanism is responsible for this trade-off: the tendency for customers and other stakeholders to assess the entrant's claim to originality based on the visible work that it has done to legitimate the new product or organizational form. This chapter extends and deepens our understanding of such “legitimation work” by showing how it can illuminate cases that seem in the first instance to defy this trade-off. In particular, we focus on two “off-diagonal” cases: (a) when, as in the case of “patent trolls” and fraudulent innovators, early entrants are viewed as inauthentic despite having a credible claim to originality; (b) when late entrants, as in the case of Dell Computers, mechanical watches and baseball ballparks, are viewed as authentic despite obviously not being the originators. We clarify how each off-diagonal case represents an ‘exception that proves the rule’ whereby audiences attribute authenticity on the basis of legitimation work rather than on the order of entry per se. The last case also leads to an opportunity to clarify why “cultural appropriation” can sometimes project authenticity and sometimes inauthenticity, why audiences bother to make inferences about a producer's authenticity on the basis of visible legitimation work, and why legitimacy is a universal goal of early movers whereas authenticity varies in its importance.

The processes of legitimation and institutionalization are difficult to study because they are hard to measure. Instead, theories of legitimacy use its elements to explain various effects. We propose that these effects are due to the trust-building aspects of legitimation and institutionalization. If research can establish the trust-building nature of legitimation, then theoretical research programs in the area may progress more rapidly. Research on leadership in groups can be used to assess fundamental questions of legitimacy and trust because group leadership represents an interface between research on organizations and basic group processes. We describe an experimental setting to investigate legitimation, institutionalization, and trust.