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Private firms in China are like the third child in a family, constantly struggling to establish their position in an environment favoring their state-owned and collective siblings. The purpose of this paper is to discover some long-term-oriented legitimacy building strategies for private firms in China.

This paper examines the effect of both internal and external institutional factors on long-term legitimacy for private enterprises. The authors integrate stakeholder perspective and institutional theory to provide a framework of building sustainable legitimacy.

The authors’ framework delineates that a private company can build sustainable legitimacy through catering long-term legitimacy conferring to constituents such as customers, social responsibility and patriotism in the external institutional environment.

The authors’ framework further indicates how private firms could leverage internal institutional environment through developing appropriate mission, culture, leadership and human resources practices in conformity to the demands of constituents for gaining long-term legitimacy.

This paper is the first to address the short-term nature of legitimacy building strategies proposed in the past literature. In addition, it is also the first attempt to explore the multiplicity in legitimacy in China in search of long-term legitimacy building approaches.

It is unattainable that entrepreneurs engage equivalent resources in public and private morality because of the limitation of resources. This study aims to conduct experiments to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

This study conducted secondary data analysis and experiment to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

The experimental results show that entrepreneurial deviation in morality negatively affects legitimacy perceptions of consumers to entrepreneurs. Specifically, when public moral is higher than private moral, consumers have negative perceptions of pragmatic legitimacy to entrepreneurs, because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Li”. However, entrepreneurial private morality excels public morality, consumers have negative perceptions of social legitimacy to entrepreneurs because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Qing”. Moreover, the authors examined entrepreneurial values moderate the effects of moral deviation and legitimacy perceptions.

This study expands the ethical marketing of entrepreneurs from the perspective of the deviation between public morality and private morality.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how Chinese private entrepreneurs behaved in a transition economy with a weak institutional environment to obtain organizational legitimacy.

Drawing on five consecutive nation‐wide surveys from 1997 to 2006 in China, the study provides empirical evidence and theoretical explanation on private entrepreneurs' behaviors in obtaining organizational legitimacy in China's transition economy.

The paper finds that the institutional environment in China's transition economy for private firms was weak. Specifically, weak property protection and Three Payouts showed a high risk of property confiscation for private firms; an under‐developed (discriminatory) financial system and a weak credit system had been big obstacles for the development of private firms, which resulted in debt chain among firms, a substitution for the weak financial system. Under such a hostile institutional environment where firms have been facing a high risk of organizational legitimacy, private entrepreneurs have great willingness to connect with government officers, participate in PC or CPPCC which are likely be politically connected, employ isomorphism in organizational structure, apply government‐oriented corporate social responsibility behaviors, on which they depend to obtain organizational legitimacy in transitional economy.

The paper exhibits the institutional environment in the past ten years in China's transition economy, and proposes the likely ways in which private entrepreneurs choose to establish legitimacy under a weak institutional environment.

The UK private finance initiative (PFI) public policy is heavily criticised. PFI contracts are highly profitable leading to incentives for PFI private-sector companies to support PFI public policy. This contested nature of PFIs requires legitimation by PFI private-sector companies, by means of impression management, in terms of the attention to and framing of PFI in PFI private-sector company annual reports. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

PFI-related annual report narratives of three UK PFI private-sector companies, over seven years and across two periods of significant change in the development of the PFI public policy, are analysed using manual content analysis.

Results suggest that PFI private-sector companies use impression management to legitimise during periods of uncertainty for PFI public policy, to alleviate concerns, to provide credibility for the policy and to legitimise the private sector’s own involvement in PFI.

While based on a sizeable database, the research is limited to the study of three PFI private-sector companies.

The portrayal of public policy in annual report narratives has not been subject to prior research. The research demonstrates how managers of PFI private-sector companies present PFI narratives in support of public policy direction that, in turn, benefits PFI private-sector companies.

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.

The purpose of this chapter is to question the degree and the nature of legitimacy and force held by private security, and how this can affect the role private actors are playing in the field of policing and in the governance of security.

We draw mainly on existing academic literature on private policing, as well as our own qualitative research conducted in Canada.

If private security personnel have undeniably less legitimacy and force than their public counterpart, two nuances should be brought: (1) there is a tendency toward a shrinking of the gap between both sectors; and (2) these shortcomings do not represent such a problem, considering that, first, private security actors are usually given specific legal powers (e.g., the landlord’s), and, second, they do not rely on legitimacy as much as the police do in order to do their job. That being said, as private security officers and companies are likely to become increasingly involved in traditional police functions (most notably patrolling the public space), their lack of legitimacy and legal powers could significantly impede their actions in the future.

This chapter brings nuances to the supposed lack of force and legitimacy that plague the private security industry. It also sheds light on some of the inner rationales that characterize the dynamics within public and private policing.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the legitimacy of private policing of financial crime by fraud examiners.

The literature on fraud examiners is interpreted in the legitimacy context.

A number of critical issues based on the institutional theory and social psychology issues are discussed that question the legitimacy of private policing of financial crime.

There is a need for regulation of the private fraud examination industry.

A number of legitimacy issues should be addressed by financial crime specialists.

Victims of private investigations require regulation of the investigation industry.

Criteria for police legitimacy are applied to the private sector.

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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legitimacy of the Equator Principles as a form of private governance of the investment banking industry.

The project finance industry is first described, followed by a consideration of the theories of private governance and legitimacy. The governance of project finance by the Equator Principles is then examined against the backdrop of private governance and legitimacy theory. Cases regarding project finance and the Equator Principles are discussed.

The moral legitimacy of the governance of the Equator Principles is highly questionable, a serious issue for private governance schemes. There are large gaps in the governance structure, and the processes and content of much of the Principles are left to each bank, with little mandated transparency or accountability, particularly at the level of individual deals.

The Equator Principles have legitimacy problems arising from their governance structure. These issues are examined at some length, and specific suggestions are offered for repairing certain of the flaws in the system.

Private governance is increasingly important in international arenas, attempting to enforce standards that individual governments often leave to the private sector. This paper examines the legitimacy and governance issues in one system, and makes recommendations to increase the value and structure of the Equator Principles.