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This study describes how a multinational enterprise (MNE) gains acceptance after rebranding acquired brands from different countries among its internal and external stakeholders and identifies factors that influence this process.

The study employed a single case-study approach, including 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with employees of a firm involved in the rebranding process in six countries. The countries are Sweden, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

The findings reveal how the MNE integrated brands it acquired in different international markets into one overarching corporate brand. The study shows that in emerging countries, external legitimation (external implementation process, country profiles and customer buy-in) constitutes the most significant challenge. By contrast, in developed countries, internal legitimation (employee buy-in and internal implementation process) is more challenging.

The study contributes to and extends the rebranding literature by using a legitimation lens to analyze the rebranding process. This lens shows how internal and external stakeholders are both crucial to successful rebranding. The study provides a comprehensive perspective of the process, identifies challenging factors and differentiates between their importance in emerging and developed countries.

To address the dearth of research on how firms legitimize a new brand in different national contexts, the study compares the rebranding process in multiple countries and discusses the factors influencing the rebranding process.

New ventures often encounter legitimation challenges due to their liability of newness and foreignness. This particularly applies to the legitimacy beyond the local entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). The present study examines how new ventures’ local legitimacy influences legitimacy diffusion beyond the local EEs. It considers both the direct relationship between new venture local legitimacy and its diffusion beyond the EE and the moderating effects of legitimacy brokerage and network activities on this relationship.

A hierarchical multiple linear regression is employed to test a series of hypotheses using the data of 228 Finnish firms which was collected with an online survey.

Firms that garner active local legitimacy have a greater chance to diffuse that legitimacy beyond an existing ecosystem. Results also reveal that network activities and legitimacy brokerage enhance (positively moderate) the association between (passive and active) local legitimacy and its diffusion.

The present study contributes to and extends the literature at the intersection of new venture legitimacy and legitimacy diffusion beyond the existing EE – an aspect which has not been sufficiently studied.

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual citizens to take more responsibility for their security.

A multimodal discursive approach drawing on multimodal narrative analysis of video clips and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is used to examine how the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated in video material published on Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency's (MSB’s) YouTube channel.

The study finds that the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated through an ongoing but evolving normalization of threat. The findings also show how responsibilization is legitimated in moralizing terms of individual contribution to society, which may indicate a return from neo-liberal values to more traditional Swedish collectivist values.

The study shows how communication around preparedness and responsibilization is discursively constructed and legitimated through multimodal features, while previous research has mainly focused on verbal or written communication.

This work aims to analyse the relationship between public health efficiency and well-being considering a panel of 102 Italian provinces from 2000 to 2016 and evaluates if there are omitted variable biases and endogeneity biases and also evaluates if there are heterogeneous effects among provinces with different income levels.

We use a multi-input and output bootstrap data envelopment analysis to assess public health efficiency. Then, we measure well-being indices using the min-max linear scaling transformation technique. A two-stage least squares model is used to identify the causal effect of improving public health efficiency on well-being to account for time-invariant heterogeneity, omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias.

After controlling for important economic factors, the results show a significant effect of an accountable and efficient public health system on well-being. Those effects are concentrated in the North, the most economically, geographically and environmentally advantageous areas.

The use of the sample mean, probably the oldest and most used method for aggregating the indicators, could be affected by variable compensation, with consequent misleading results in the process of constructing the well-being index. Another limitation is the use of lagged values of the main predictor as an instrument in the instrumental variables setting because it could lead to information loss. Finally, the availability of data over a long period of time.

The findings could help policymakers adopt measures to strengthen the public health system, encourage private providers and inspire countries worldwide.

These results draw the attention of local authorities, who play an important role in designing and implementing policies to stimulate local public health efficiency, which puts individuals in the conditions of achieving overall well-being in their communities.

For the first time in Italy, a panel of well-being indices was constructed by developing new methodologies based on microeconomic theory. Furthermore, for the first time, the assessment of the relationship between public health efficiency and well-being is carried out using a panel of 102 Italian provinces.

This study aims to understand why some social and environmental reporting (SER) regulations are more successful than others in modifying collective corporate reporting behaviour and expectations. More specifically, it presents a qualitative and historically informed exploration of the construction of the enabling conditions for corporate adoption of SER regulation in a national context.

Drawing on insights from structuration theory and the sociological approach to legal studies, the authors examined the normative persuasion of the first regulation in Spain requiring firms to disclose social and environmental information in a stand-alone report: Article 39 of the Spanish Sustainable Economy Law. The case study is based primarily on 38 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors involved in this SER regulation from 2008 to 2014. Other sources such as legal and policy documents, historical documents, books, press reports and field notes from attendance at technical meetings related to the phenomenon under study help inform and complement the analysis of the interviews.

The analysis reveals that the agency of regulators, regulatees and other relevant actors involved in the SER regulation led to the law becoming a dead letter. However, only by examining the structural circumstances, shaped by history and socio-economic context, can the authors understand how the normative persuasion of law is constructed or undermined.

The study underscores the importance of the national context in developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulation and the crucial role of history. The results of this research also suggest that significant progress towards a more transformative CSR regulation cannot be achieved without the support of enabling structures/

Recent SER regulations (European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and IFRS sustainability standards, to mention those that are gaining most traction) may not achieve sufficient compliance if those responsible for drafting them do not ensure that the conditions for the emergence of regulatory persuasion are met. Regulators must therefore have a profound understanding of how these conditions are constructed as part of a historical process inextricably linked to the social structures of the environment in which the law is to be applied.

The study reveals the changing landscape of corporate social responsibility, where scientists, academics, NGO activists and civil society organisations struggle to gain some agency in a field populated by actors, such as trade unions or employers, who were constitutive of Western industrial liberal democracies.

This study presents an in-depth and historically grounded analysis of the dynamics involved in creating the conditions that lead to successful SER legislation in a national context.

This study aims to explore how managers exercise agency in strategic investment decisions (SIDs) by drawing on their knowledgeability of the strategic context. Specifically, the authors address the role of position–practice relations and irresistible causal forces in this conduct.

The authors examine SID-making (SIDM) practices in four case organisations operating in highly competitive markets, conducting interviews with managers at various levels and analysing company documents. Drawing on strong structuration theory, the authors show how managerial decision makers draw upon their knowledge of organisational context when exercising agency in SIDs.

The authors provide insights into how SIDM behaviour, specifically agents’ conduct, is shaped by a combination of position–practice relations and the agents’ comprehension of their organisation’s context.

The authors extend the SIDM literature by surfacing the issue of how actors’ conjuncturally-specific knowledge of external structures shapes the general dispositions they draw on in exercising agency in practice.

The authors extend the SIDM literature by surfacing the issue of how actors’ conjuncturally-specific knowledge of external structures shapes the general dispositions they draw on in exercising agency in practice. Particularly, the authors contribute to this literature by identifying irresistible causal forces and illuminating why actors might not resist in SIDM processes, despite having the potential to do so.

The purpose of this research is to comprehensively describe the legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century.

The research involved a comprehensive literature review using the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database with keywords “Library” and “Legitimacy”, combined with citation searches and additional collections. In total, we analysed 159 research articles primarily from the 21st century, with some comparative analysis of pre-2,000 works. The final phase of the research investigated libraries’ legitimisation efforts across various dimensions, examining how they employ rhetoric and theories to maintain legitimacy amidst challenging circumstances.

Through this research process, five dimensions of public library legitimacy emerged; (1) Democracy, (2) Culture and History, (3) Communication and Education, (4) Economy and (5) Librarianship, with the most diverse literature being related to democracy, and its subsections intellectual freedom, neutrality, the public sphere, social justice and social capital.

The outcome of our results indicates that the evolving legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century has become multifaceted, compared to the elements of legitimacy in the 20th century. Contemporary public libraries can continue to utilise the dimensions of legitimacy identified in this study and can reconstruct their legitimacy accordingly.

This study aims to investigate why and how shared service centres (SSCs) are implemented as well as how they affect audit firm practice and audit quality.

In this qualitative study guided by the theoretical framework of institutional theory, the authors conducted 25 semi-structured interviews in seven European countries, including 16 interviews with audit partners from Big 4 firms, 6 with audit team members, 2 with interviewees from second-tier audit firms and 1 with a member of an oversight body.

The authors show that the central rationale for audit firms to implement SSCs is economic rather than external legitimacy. The authors find that SSC implementation has substantial effects on audit practices, particularly those related to standardisation, coordination and monitoring activities. The authors also highlight the potential impacts on audit quality.

By exploring the motivation for and effects of SSC implementation amongst audit firms, the authors offer insights into the best practices related to subsequent change processes and audit quality.