Sonia’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Sonia Siraz is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Organizations at emlyon Business School in France. Her interest in legitimacy research is deeply rooted in lived experience. Before entering management academia, she specialized in law and founded her own consultancy firm. In one assignment, she was responsible for setting up a business that fully complied with all legal requirements yet was perceived as highly controversial by certain audiences. This experience made clear that the core challenge was not legality per se, but legitimacy. It raised fundamental questions about the tensions businesses face when complying with formal rules while remaining socially contested, and about why different audiences form divergent judgments regarding what is appropriate.
Recognizing the significant implications of such judgments for entrepreneurial firms and other actors operating in contested contexts, she turned to the management literature for answers. There, she encountered limited conceptual clarity about what it means to lack legitimacy, how legitimacy outcomes can be understood in more nuanced ways, and why legitimacy judgments vary across evaluators. Legitimacy was often treated as a uniform or static condition rather than as a dynamic, and frequently contested, social evaluation.
This theoretical gap motivated Sonia to change careers and begin a PhD in 2015 at IE Business School in Spain, followed by a postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. Through this academic path, she has sought to develop a more precise understanding of the dynamics of legitimacy in contested contexts and their implications for both new and established ventures.
Influential Works
Several works shaped Sonia’s early thinking on legitimacy, but one that had an immediate influence was Webb et al.’s (2009) “You Say Illegal, I Say Legitimate”. The paper resonated strongly with her own professional experience. It challenged conventional assumptions about the boundaries between legality and legitimacy and offered a framework for understanding how ventures can be viewed as legitimate by some audiences but not others, even when operating in informal or contested spaces.
Another key influence was Alvarez and Barney’s (2007) “Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action.” She read this early in her Ph.D., and it left a lasting impression, not only because of what it said about entrepreneurial opportunities, but because it also encouraged her to think entrepreneurially about research itself. While the paper does not address theorizing directly, its emphasis on creation rather than discovery resonated with her own experience and pushed her to consider whether using or extending existing concepts was sufficient to capture the phenomena she was observing. This mindset influenced her approach to legitimacy research, particularly her efforts to clarify the legitimacy–illegitimacy continuum.
The seminal work of Dornbusch and Scott (1975), Evaluation and the Exercise of Authority, also had a lasting impact. It provided a compelling lens on how evaluation and authority are intertwined, and how legitimacy can be granted or withheld in ways that go beyond formal compliance. Their distinctions around validity, authorization, endorsement, and propriety offered a structured way to think about the multifaceted nature of legitimacy judgments.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
One of the biggest challenges in studying legitimacy is that it spans multiple disciplines, including law, sociology, social psychology, institutional theory, and behavioral economics, each of which conceptualizes legitimacy in different ways and privileges distinct forms of explanation. She encountered this tension in her own work, both when examining the mechanisms underlying legitimacy states, such as polarized legitimacy, and when studying micro-level legitimacy judgments. In the latter, her focus is on how evaluators weigh multiple aligned or conflicting validity cues and their effects on propriety beliefs. Yet across traditions, such evaluations are understood in markedly different ways: some do not treat them as “judgments” or “decisions” at all; others emphasize discursive processes, and still others foreground macro-level structures over individual cognition. These differences are fundamentally epistemological, and they influence not only how legitimacy is theorized and measured but also how insights travel within the broader management literature.
Methodologically, this often means drawing on tools from other fields. While these methods can be well-suited to studying legitimacy judgments, adapting them to legitimacy-specific questions requires careful theoretical justification. It also requires a clear articulation of the value of the methodological tools to audiences working from different assumptions about what legitimacy is and how it should be measured or studied. Advancing the field, therefore, depends on greater methodological openness and willingness to support legitimacy research across paradigms.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Her research advances legitimacy theory both conceptually and empirically, with a focus on contexts (such as foie gras, fracking, or immigration) where legitimacy is contested, in flux, or partial. She specializes in two interlinked areas: theorizing macro-level legitimacy states and empirically uncovering the micro-level mechanisms of legitimacy judgment formation.
At the macro level, she developed a novel conceptual framework of the legitimacy–illegitimacy continuum that moves beyond binary distinctions and introduces new legitimacy states: conditional legitimacy, conditional illegitimacy, and unknown legitimacy. Within unknown legitimacy, she further theorizes variants such as polarized legitimacy. In this variant, audiences are split into two or more opposing groups, with evaluations that are internally consistent within groups and divided across groups into equally significant positive and negative judgments. By unpacking the dynamics of legitimacy states, her work explains how shifts in social, institutional, or audience-specific factors move legitimacy subjects along the continuum. This perspective is directly relevant to understanding phenomena like public approval and backlash, audience fragmentation, and institutional change in today’s increasingly polarized environments. The framework also identifies which legitimation strategies are most effective for each state, offering a more refined understanding of how legitimacy is gained, maintained, or lost.
At the micro level, she examines how individual evaluators make legitimacy judgments, especially when confronted with multiple and potentially conflicting validity cues, such as regulatory approval versus public disapproval. Her research distinguishes between propriety beliefs and validity cues and investigates how evaluators reconcile or prioritize these cues based on their values and their alignment with the cues. She also shows how conflicts between legitimacy types (regulatory, pragmatic, normative, and cognitive) are negotiated during the judgment process. This helps explain why legitimacy perceptions vary across audiences, even when they are evaluating the same subject.
A central theme across her work is that legitimacy is a relational judgment. It depends on who the evaluator is, what values they hold, and the context in which they are embedded. This attention to audience characteristics further enhances our understanding of why the same subject of legitimacy can be perceived so differently, and how this gives rise to distinct legitimacy states.
Methodologically, she uses multiple methods, including experiments to distinguish between propriety and validity cues, test how different combinations of cues shape legitimacy judgments, and examine which legitimation strategies resonate with different audiences.
Overall, her work explains how legitimacy is constructed and contested across both macro-level legitimacy states and micro-level evaluation processes. It contributes to core debates in organization theory, social evaluations, and entrepreneurship, while addressing the growing relevance of legitimacy in today’s polarized and uncertain world.
Areas for Future Research
She thinks a particularly promising direction is to apply and empirically validate different legitimacy states, like conditional, unknown, or even polarized legitimacy, across a range of real-world contexts. We still know relatively little about how evaluators form legitimacy judgments, how these evolve over time, and what effects they produce. This calls for a closer look at the dynamics of legitimacy: how legitimacy subjects shift between different states, what triggers those transitions, and how well legitimation strategies align with the state they are in. The same strategy might reinforce legitimacy in one state but completely backfire in another. A more state-contingent view of legitimation could bring both theoretical depth and practical insight.
It is also crucial to account for context-specificity in legitimacy evaluations. An issue-specific reference framework refers to the norms, values, and beliefs that audiences use to evaluate what is legitimate within a given domain. These frameworks vary widely: what counts as legitimate in one issue domain may be evaluated very differently in another, such as minority entrepreneurship or migration policy. Different evaluator groups, such as venture capitalists, crowdfunders, customers, regulators, and the general public, draw on distinct values and weigh validity cues differently. As a result, the same subject may be perceived as legitimate in one setting and conditionally illegitimate in another.
Finally, practice- and data-driven evaluations of legitimacy show that perceptions, propriety, and process are closely intertwined, even though theory typically treats them as separate. Advancing the field requires a better integration of these elements, supported by robust methodological tools and longitudinal designs that can trace how legitimacy states emerge and shift or solidify over time.
Feel free to reach out to her at siraz@em-lyon.com or visit https://www.soniasiraz.com/.