In this article, Bitektine, Gillespie, and Lange shift the focus of social evaluation research by asking not what social judgments do for organizations, but what they do for the evaluators who make them. The authors propose a functional perspective, arguing that judgments like legitimacy, trustworthiness, reputation, status, and authenticity help evaluators address key adaptive challenges in their relationships with organizations, such as determining whether an organization is acceptable, reliable, or worth affiliating with.
Among these, legitimacy plays a central role. It answers the functional question: “Is the organization normatively acceptable?” and rests on comparisons between organizational behavior and social norms. The authors show how legitimacy judgments are often triangulated using other judgment types, which can serve as heuristic shortcuts in the absence of full information. For example, high-status or highly reputed organizations are often presumed legitimate. Legitimacy also draws from all three types of judgment input: direct observation, others’ evaluations, and taken-for-granted assumptions acquired through socialization. This makes legitimacy a particularly robust and multifaceted judgment, i.e., a judgment that evaluators rely on not just to assess conformity to norms, but to manage uncertainty and protect collective values.
By re-centering the evaluator and clarifying the functional benefits of different social judgments, the forthcoming paper by Bitektine, Gillespie, and Lange is essential reading for any legitimacy and social evaluations researcher!
Reference
Bitektine, A., Gillespie, N., & Lange, D. (2025). From the evaluator’s perspective: A functional approach to social judgments. Academy of Management Review, 50(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2020.0405