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This chapter analyzes how institutional pressures have allowed for continuities as well as brought about changes in modern police organizations in Korea. When facing a legitimacy crisis, the Korean law enforcement system has typically responded with organizational restructuring. Strong myth-building patterns compensate for the lack of moral legitimacy of the police, particularly under authoritarian-military regimes that suppress democratization movements in Korea. Even after seemingly radical organizational changes aimed at placing the police under democratic control, highly institutionalized core structures of the police remain in place. Performance reform after the economic crisis, which was proceeded from reformers’ shared belief in the market-driven solutions, diagnosed the Korean police as a big, inefficient, and self-serving bureaucracy, a diagnosis that eventually caused gradual deterioration in the taken-for-grantedness of policing activities. The internet and social media made the Korean police even more vulnerable to external challenges and a questioning of its legitimacy.

This study examines how narratives and legitimacy formation affect crowdfunding capital assembly from distributed, heterogeneous investors.

The study explores a dataset of 80,181 projects from Kickstarter, a rewards-based crowdfunding platform, between 2009 and 2013. We explore the link between project-related variables, legitimacy formation and outcomes.

Entrepreneurs design narratives and create project legitimacy by exploiting crowdfunding platform-specific features. First, lower funding targets and shorter campaign durations confer positive project legitimacy. Second, entrepreneurs exploit reward-levels as narrative tools that encourage funders to engage with the project. Third, visual pitches transmit a broader sociocultural narrative, leveraging emotional rather than financial reasoning. We also note certain gender effects.

Crowdfunding platforms allow entrepreneurs to pitch business ideas to a broad online audience. We show that project legitimacy, including both structural and narrative elements, is linked to crowdfunding outcomes. In particular, legitimacy is co-created through the generation of a persuasive narrative linking the entrepreneur and investor cohort.

Entrepreneurs use crowdfunding platforms to generate a coherent narrative around unfamiliar business models. Generic platform tools may be set and manipulated in online crowdfunding pitches to support project legitimacy. Ultimately, these are less important than establishing an affinity-based narrative that engages and exploits investor participation. Successful crowdfunding pitches co-author the project story with investors.

Crowdfunding has been traditionally understood as simply an online-mediated venture resource assembly tool. A narrative framework highlights the critical role of legitimacy formation in a disintermediated investment system.

The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-institutional environment. The findings suggest that these domains mediate the relationship between micro-level agency and macro-level institutions. The authors describe how macro-level consensus about the category legitimacy emerges through a competition between judgments embedded in different discourses and how a particular discourse attains validity, forcing other actors to change their initial unfavorable legitimacy judgments and recognize the category’s legitimacy.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

The aim of this chapter is to develop the measurement of corporate legitimacy among Government-linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia. Corporate legitimacy is important for determining the survival of the corporation. The term of legitimacy can be classified into three different aspects, namely, political, economic, and social legitimacy. Political legitimacy indicates the right to govern and rule; economic legitimacy reflects on success through product selling, customers’ satisfaction, and providing better services and goods. However, in the corporate sectors, corporate social responsibility is used as a platform not only to gain economic legitimacy, but most importantly to achieve social legitimacy. Social legitimacy focuses on corporation as a societal institution that is more complex by combining the social norms, values, and expectation. With the above argument, this chapter explores how corporate social responsibility (or corporate responsibility) can be used to show societal acceptance reflecting their corporate legitimacy. The corporations are expected to be socially acceptable according to social norms, values, and beliefs. The growth of the corporation has faced a number of challenges in gaining and maintaining their existence. While the corporations are expected to deal with the challenges effectively, the corporations must also be relevant in the eyes of the stakeholders. To establish this, corporations emphasized on gaining and maintaining legitimacy through various mechanisms. The principles of legitimacy are related to the conformity to the norms, values, and expectation of their stakeholders’ engagement through corporate social activities. The study employed a cross-sectional sample survey designed to collect data from a pre-selected list of non-governmental organization (NGOs) obtained from the Registrar of Societies, Malaysia. From a list of about 22,000 societies, 377 were shortlisted covering five categories of societies: community welfare, education, sport, social and recreation, and business and trade union. This study measured three dimensions of corporate legitimacy comprising pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. Using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), this study found that there is a high level of corporate legitimacy from the perspective of NGOs, which indicated that the NGOs highly view the corporate legitimacy of Malaysian GLCs through their corporate responsibility activities.

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.

This chapter addresses authentic leadership at the intersection of tradition and modernity with a focus on insider-outsider dynamics. The authors develop a typology of insider-outsider perception of authentic leadership and four leadership types – detached leadership, integrative leadership, entrenched leadership and atomised leadership – to provide a conceptual tool that advances authentic leadership research and leadership-building strategies. Investigating the intersection of tradition and modernity, Lines and Turcan illustrate that authenticity and legitimacy are tightly coupled. Leaders need to develop insider legitimacy by alignment with contextual norms, traditions and customs. Lines and Turcan encourage future research to explore the question: Is leadership more about establishing contextual legitimacy or establishing authenticity?

This paper analyzes a multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy, competencies, and resources in order to develop the linkage between institutional and resource-based perspectives by systematically detailing relationships among these factors and organizational viability. The underlying mechanisms of isomorphism and market partitioning serve as a point of departure by which the effects on organizational persistence of two sociocultural processes, cultural (constitutive) legitimation and sociopolitical (regulative) legitimation, are distinguished. Using data on 589 national self-help/mutual-aid organizations, this chapter explores how isomorphism and market partitioning foster legitimacy and promote organizational viability. Results show that the more differentiated an organization’s core competencies and resources, the greater the sociopolitical legitimacy; the more isomorphic an organization’s competencies and resources, the greater the cultural legitimacy. The latter isomorphic processes, however, do not promote greater organizational viability. In fact, while isomorphism legitimates with respect to cultural recognition, it is heterogeneity, not homogeneity, that promotes organizational survival.

Research suggests that context matters for MNEs’ international business strategy. MNEs’ strategies vary when different intertwined contexts interact with each other. While International Business scholars understand well the influence of the institutional environments on firms’ international strategies and operations, some contextual differences are less understood as is the case involving African countries and firms. In this study we investigate how different institutional contexts and legitimacy challenges combine to impact ownership strategic choices of African firms in their cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we study the influence of the host country institutional development and two institutional dimension distances: administrative distance and knowledge distance. Methodologically, we use a sample of 314 CBAs made by acquirers from 24 African countries in 71 host countries worldwide to test a number of theoretically driven hypotheses. This study contributes to our understanding of how foreign investors from less institutionally developed countries that are more likely to face higher legitimacy barriers use ownership strategies to achieve legitimacy abroad.

This chapter examines how citizen journalism affects perceptions of legitimacy among local residents and police officers.

Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with residents and police officers.

Local residents are mostly willing to obey police commands, but a lack of trust in the police and fear of retaliation hinder willingness to cooperate with the police. Citizens’ willingness to follow police orders is mostly a way for them to end the encounter as quickly as possible so the contact will not extend for a prolonged period of time and cause even more serious consequences. Citizens have recorded the police in the past when they witnessed officers not following proper procedures. The police view citizens recording them as a form of defiance and while this makes policing challenging, police officers interviewed still hold high levels of self-legitimacy, most likely due to their organizational and occupational culture. Recording the police has emerged as a way for citizens to challenge police authority and legitimacy during encounters.

While recording the police has increased with recent technological advances, little empirical research has examined its impact on policing and police-community relations. This study connects three critical issues in policing – technology, citizen journalism, and police legitimacy – by assessing the impact of recording the police on police legitimacy in the eyes of the public and police officers. Not only does this study fill our gap in knowledge on citizens recording the police, but it also furnishes valuable implications for policy and future study.