Anna’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Anna Jasinenko is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her journey into legitimacy research began during her PhD studies, when she presented her work at the 2018 EGOS subtheme on social evaluations, which had been newly founded by Alex Bitektine, Anastasiya Zavyalova, and Patrick Haack. Although her PhD work initially focused on how organizations contribute to the common good and create public value, she was inspired by the social evaluations community to incorporate a social evaluations lens in her work. After finalizing her PhD, she continued her research on legitimacy by joining a project led by Patrick Haack.
Influential Work
A pivotal influence on Anna’s thinking was Bitektine and Haack’s (2015) Multilevel Model of the Legitimacy Process, which connects macro-level institutional processes with micro-level cognition and decision-making. Especially when she started this line of research, the multilevel model was particularly helpful to structure the complexity of multilevel legitimacy and to connect it to adjacent fields, such as psychology, sociology, and organizational studies. It continues to guide her work today, helping her to structure how legitimacy operates across levels of analysis.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
Anna sees one of the core challenges in legitimacy research as stemming from its multilevel complexity. Legitimacy has its intellectual roots in institutional theory, which typically emphasizes macro-level phenomena. In contrast, much of contemporary psychological research focuses more narrowly on individual cognition, often ignoring the institutional contexts in which these judgments are embedded. As a result, efforts to integrate micro and macro perspectives remain inherently difficult because existing research tends to adopt an “either–or” stance. In other words, legitimacy is usually studied either as an institutional phenomenon or as an individual-level judgment, but rarely both at once.
Another related challenge concerns the dominant methodological choices in the field. Anna explains how most research relies on monological approaches such as surveys or small experimental manipulations, treating legitimacy judgments as static and internally generated. Yet, such methods fail to capture the dynamic, interactive processes through which legitimacy beliefs actually develop. As she further explains, in reality, individuals are embedded within social groups, interacting with each other, exchanging ideas, and negotiating meaning. These conversational and group-level dynamics likely play a central role in how legitimacy judgments emerge, shift, and solidify over time. Thus, capturing these processes requires methods that go beyond self-reported, monological measures.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Anna’s expertise lies in applying the multilevel legitimacy model to understand how different types of beliefs – propriety and validity beliefs – shape individual intentions and behaviours. Her work illuminates how legitimacy judgments form and evolve, particularly within socially embedded contexts. By using deliberative experiments, she aims to show how social interactions influence the development of propriety and validity beliefs, offering a more nuanced account of the emergence of legitimacy at the micro level.
Areas for Future Research
Looking ahead, Anna sees a pressing need for research that more effectively integrates micro-, meso-, and macro-level perspectives on legitimacy. Such integration requires strong measurement tools and methodological designs capable of capturing complex multilevel dynamics, which are still underdeveloped in current scholarship. She argues that advancing a more holistic understanding of legitimacy formation is crucial to better understand how individuals become powerful change agents who lead social and institutional transformations.
Anna views deliberative experiments as a promising way forward. Well established in political science, these methods bring participants together in small groups to discuss a topic, with propriety and validity beliefs measured before and after the deliberation event. This approach allows researchers to observe how legitimacy beliefs form, shift, and crystallize through interactions with others. Ultimately, she hopes that such methods will clarify how individual-level legitimacy judgments translate into behavioural responses and, over time, contribute to institutional-level legitimacy.
Discover more about Anna’s research here.