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Despite the growing amount of research on the social and organizational role of legitimacy, very little is known about the subtle discursive processes through which organizational changes are legitimated in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the subtle processes of interdiscursivity and intertextuality through which an organization constructs a sense of legitimacy.

Drawing on the case of a newly privatized oil company in a transitional, post-communist economy, the authors’ research uses critical discourse analysis to analyze the annual reports, corporate press releases, and relevant media from the four years following privatization.

The authors argue for a relational understanding of legitimacy construction that emphasizes how legitimacy relies on the multiple processes of intertextuality linking corporate narratives and media texts. Corporate narratives are not produced solely by the discourses that occur at the individual and organizational levels; they are also produced by the much broader discourses that occur at the societal level.

This study’s main contribution is that it reveals the intertextual and interdiscursive construction of corporate narratives, which is a key element in understanding how discourses around privatization are interlinked and draw upon other macro-level discourses to construct legitimacy.

In the current chapter, we discuss the shape and contours of the field of probation in Romania as they appear in scientific literature and mass media, focusing on the concerns academics and professionals have voiced about Romanian probation. We analyse the timeframe from 2014 to 2021, after the introduction of the country’s New Penal Code (NPC). We structure our argument as follows. The chapter begins with a short incursion into the historiography of probation as a field in Romania. The focus, however, is on the adoption of a NPC in 2014, as this was a significant moment that led to changes for both probation workers and probationers. While we present the first 25 years since probation was instituted in Romania in 1997 as a period of experiments, trials and errors, we aim to highlight the development and consolidation that occurred in the period after 2014 (see Durnescu 2008, 2015; Preda, 2015a, 2017; Sandu, 2016). The NPC was intended to bring forward a reconfiguration of the probation system in Romania (Preda, 2015b). Beyond the promise of the NPC, the 2014–2021 period is one where probation edges into the public sphere via extensive media coverage, including the considerable number of probationers or a string of protests by probation counsellors who felt overworked and overwhelmed. We continue the chapter by analysing the composition and the dynamics of the probation population, always looking beyond the mere numbers to other analytic markers (i.e. numbers of obligations and lengths of the probation period). We conclude the chapter by arguing that our discussion of the ‘weight’ of supervision adds to the current understanding of mass supervision by looking at the aggregated impact that different social, political, penal and cultural factors have on probation practice. In other words, large caseloads, limited human resources, precarious material conditions and negative organisational cultures are likely to generate supervision experiences that can be better interpreted by looking and thinking beyond numbers.