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The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) recently proposed a global consulting credential involving a diverse set of professions including accountancy, business law, and information technology. The proposal was widely debated in the professional literature, and was a divisive issue among CPAs. In late 2001, the AICPA membership voted against any further commitment to the credential. The purpose of this paper is to examine the global credential initiative in an effort to understand why professional jurisdictional claims may fail at the theorization stage.

The paper relies primarily on a qualitative review and analysis of archival materials and published articles and commentaries relating to the global credential project.

The analysis indicates that the AICPA failed to establish either the pragmatic or moral legitimacy of the proposed credential in the eyes of the audiences. This failure appears to be attributable to the sociopolitical environment in which the credential was promoted, and to flaws in the rhetoric used by the AICPA to articulate its jurisdictional claim.

The paper demonstrates the importance of legitimacy to the ability to successfully theorize institutional changes.

This paper investigates how the AICPA theorized the global credential knowledge claim, and how theorization failed to persuade the audiences to support the credential.

Building strong human brands inscribed in social and symbolic recognition is a strategic issue for branded individuals. In the context of film director human brands, this study aims to examine the respective influences of the economic and critical performance of films, on the one hand, and the professional legitimacy bestowed by internal stakeholders, on the other, on changes in human brand identity. Contrary to what is generally believed, it shows that the specific legitimacy bestowed by producers and the institutional legitimacy bestowed by elite peers mediate the effects of performance on changes in human brand identity. Brand extension (i.e. new films) incongruence and initial human brand identity moderate the effect of performance on legitimacy.

This study is applied to film director human brands and to their extensions through the films they make. Data were collected for 81 films, including information before and after the brand extension occurs, to capture changes in human brand identity and extension effects.

The results show that economic performance influences both specific and institutional legitimacy, whereas critical performance only impacts institutional legitimacy. These relationships are moderated by initial human brand identity and congruence. Both types of professional legitimacies also help reinforce human brand identity.

The study challenges the role of performance on the building of human brand identity and shows that the latter is co-constructed by the branded individual and internal stakeholders. It also enhances the key roles of global incongruence and genre incongruence in the model.

This study aims to examine how the legitimacy of internal auditing is reconstructed during enterprise resource planning (ERP)-driven technological change.

The study is based on the comparative analysis of internal auditing and its transformation due to ERP implementations at two case firms operating in the food sector in Egypt – one a major Egyptian multinational corporation (MNC) and the other a major domestic company (DC).

Internal auditors (IAs) at MNC saw ERP implementation as an opportunity to reconstruct the legitimacy of internal auditing work by engaging and partnering with actors involved with the ERP change. In doing so, the IAs acquired system certifications and provided line functions and external auditors with data-driven business insights. The “practical coping mechanism” adopted by the IAs led to the acceptance (and legitimacy) of their work. In contrast, IAs at DC adopted a purposeful strategy of disengaging, blaming and rejecting since they were skeptical of the top management team's (TMT's) sincerity. The “disinterestedness” led to the loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders.

The article offers two contributions. First, it extends the literature by highlighting a spectrum of behavior displayed by IAs (coping with impending issues vs strategic purposefulness) during ERP-driven technological change. Second, the article contributes to the literature on legitimacy by highlighting four intertwined micro-processes – participating, socializing, learning and role-forging – that contribute to reconstructing the legitimacy of internal auditing.

From a historical perspective, the purpose of this paper is to show how the current New Zealand Accountants' Code of Ethics (COE) differs from the first 1927 COE. The lengthy, current COE comprises strands of thought drawn from three different philosophical positions. By contrast, New Zealand's first COE was relatively short and reflected legitimacy by character employing the concepts of virtue ethics. The concepts of virtue ethics have now largely disappeared from the latest much longer code. The current code is more legalistic and technical, implying a concern for public relations. At the same time, the current COE has become a legitimising tool for the profession to emphasise image and quality.

To illustrate the shift in practice of ethical position, the paper is informed by a recent New Zealand case of a collapsed finance company as well as some further illustrations of a failure to discharge a duty of care to the public from the United Kingdom.

The shift in the COE coupled with a shift in underlying social values contributes to what the Economist Journal describes as a steady decline in professional ethics. There has been a shift from legitimising the character of an accountant to legitimising the character of accounting. This arguable conclusion is supported by a case study in New Zealand and cites the shift in combinations of cognitive, moral and pragmatic legitimacy as drivers employed by accounting firms.

The paper uses secondary and documentary data and is informed by conceptual analysis which necessarily in the realm of ethics may be contentious.

The paper seeks to link the changing social values with changes in legitimisation and the COE to show shifts in accounting practices like the recent practice of issuing disclaimers.

Critical and justice-oriented approaches to leadership are incomplete without attention to racism and racialization. This study employed basic qualitative inquiry to examine racialized legitimation within student affairs leadership education through lenses of whiteness as property and legitimacy. Findings detail how leadership educators sought to gain and/or maintain legitimacy and the ways racialization is embedded in these processes through professional experiences, leadership knowledge, and identity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how early career professionals “do gender” in their new professional context. Specifically, it explores how two groups of graduates, psychologists and political scientists, “do gender” as early career professionals with a particular emphasis on how they acquire legitimacy in relation to their colleagues and clients.

Drawing on a qualitative research methodology, graduates from two Master's programmes in Sweden were interviewed after 30‐34 months of professional work. Analysis of the interview data is located within a “doing gender” perspective with special reference to Acker's conception of employment and organizations as gendered processes influencing individual action.

The paper identifies two different ways in which participants “do gender” in their professional practice in order to acquire legitimacy: “self‐presentation” and “strategy”. This finding suggests that female and male early career professionals acquire different kinds of legitimacy, which could, in turn, be derived from the gendered processes that exist in contemporary organizations. The paper will also report that when they “do gender” participants also produce and reproduce a gendered notion of a professional project that influences their subsequent professional practice as well as how they position themselves as knowledgeable and competent.

The perspective of “doing gender” contributes an alternative understanding of graduate employment and the encounter with working life. It especially enables us to capture gender as an important influence on individual action in the organizational context.

This paper seeks to clarify the various aspects of legitimacy in public relations in order to establish a better understanding of the limits of professionalization. Legitimacy has always been a central concept in public relations. In order to ensure a license to operate, the conduct of organizations needs to be perceived as legitimate by their stakeholders and the public in general. Public relations has since its conception as a modern profession been confronted with several issues concerning the profession's own legitimacy. The overall cause for these legitimacy problems is often ascribed to the immaturity of the profession and professionalization is generally regarded as an appropriate cure.

Through theorization of the connection between legitimacy, power and professionalization the paper points to two important challenges to the professionalization of public relations: the conflicts of legitimizing the potentially disputed role of public relations as an intermediary function between client and public interests; and the dilemma of legitimizing a profession that has legitimacy as its own object and therefore is dependent on discretion in order to be successful.

The paper identifies four axes of legitimacy in public relations, each constituting different relationships with specific and often conflicting legitimacy claims: client‐public, profession‐client, profession‐public, and profession‐academia.

As a consequence of these distinct legitimacy claims the paper stresses some important limits of the professionalization project in public relations.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to make a contribution to the theoretical understanding of documents and documentary agency in society through examples from a defined institutional and professional setting; and second, to create an understanding for the role of ethical codes in the process of defining and developing modern librarianship.

This study analyses the role of documentation carrying content of professional ethics in the formulation of modern librarianship. This is done through a series of example documents of various kinds, such as founding charters, peer handbooks and ethical codes systematically analysed through the use of document theory and theory on institutional change.

The findings of this study suggest that documents pronouncing ethical self-regulation within librarianship play a primarily legitimising role in situations where new types of libraries emerge or when libraries adapt to social change. The study proposes legitimacy as a key aspect of documentality, thus supplementing the established understanding of the concept.

This study is the first to analyse the role of ethical codes in libraries using document theory. It brings new knowledge to the role of ethical self-regulation in librarianship over time and in different institutional contexts. In suggesting a developed definition of documentality, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of the role of documents and documentation in institutions and in society at large.

As a consequence of new public management reforms, leading professionals in public service organizations have increasingly been involved in management roles. The phenomenon of clinical directors in the healthcare sector is particularly representative of this, as this medical manager role has been adopted in many countries around the world. However, professionals’ managerial role taking still falls quite short of expectations. While most research has searched for the causes of this gap at the individual level by exploring the clash between management and professionalism, the purpose of the paper is to argue that a contextualized understanding of the antecedents at the organizational level, and particularly the existing medical management roles, provides a more thorough picture of the reality.

The paper adopts an institutional perspective to study the development of existing medical management roles and the rise of new ones (clinical directors). The analysis focuses on the case of Italy, a country with a tradition in medical management where, following the example of other countries, clinical director roles were introduced by law; yet they were not incisive. The paper is based on a review of the existing literature and extensive field research on Italian clinical directorates.

The paper shows how in contexts in which doctors in management roles exist and are provided with legitimacy deriving from legal norms, historical settlements between professions and taken for granted arrangements, medical management becomes institutionalized, stability prevails and change towards new doctor-in-management roles is seriously hampered.

The paper contributes to existing knowledge on professionals’ managerial role taking, underlining the relevance of contextual and nation-specific factors on this process. It provides implications for research and for policy making in healthcare and other professional public services.

The performance construct may be one of the most elusive in organization theory. Health care organizations are particularly complex owing to their dual lines of accountability, i.e. professional and administrative. This article examines the factors affecting performance indicator development and use at the technical/managerial and institutional levels, including the accreditation process and the relationship between levels. Using institutional and rational/goal theory, the motivations behind performance measurement behavior at different organizational levels was explored. Results show that the institutional level is motivated by legitimacy while the technical/managerial level is motivated by rationality. Tensions exist between the two levels and between indicator development and use.