Moritz’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Moritz is a lecturer in organisation studies at Royal Holloway Business School. His interest in legitimacy began during his PhD, when he worked with his supervisor, Patrick Haack. He noted that his entry into the field involved a degree of “randomness,” as he had limited exposure to organisation and management studies before. However, he quickly became interested in the concept of legitimacy and its origins in sociology and psychology.
Influential Work
Moritz identified several key works that influenced his understanding of legitimacy. While he initially started with Bitektine and Haack’s (2015) multilevel model of legitimacy, he deepened his understanding of the conceptual evolution of legitimacy by engaging with classic works such as Meyer and Rowan (1977) and Suchman (1995).
He noted that Tost’s (2011) model of the legitimacy judgement process had a significant influence on his work. Since Moritz is interested in the behavioural manifestations of legitimacy, he wondered whether positive individual legitimacy judgements actually lead to support for legitimacy objects, whereas negative legitimacy judgements lead to sanctions or change efforts, as suggested by Tost’s model. This was his starting point for testing, in a controlled experimental setting, whether evaluators’ propriety judgements correspond to behaviours.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
Moritz highlights several significant hurdles for researchers in the field of legitimacy. Because legitimacy can be viewed as a property, a process or a perception, it requires a variety of skills and methodological approaches, ranging from archival research methods to experimental designs. He emphasised the importance of ensuring that the chosen research method aligns with the theoretical perspective under study. For example, in the legitimacy-as -perception-perspective, research seeks to capture the cognition of the evaluators and, increasingly, their behaviour. This introduces significant methodological challenges due to biases and endogeneity.
Another challenge relates to long-standing assumptions about legitimacy, such as the idea that judgements leads to corresponding actions, that remain to be tested. The legitimacy field has a highly elaborate body of conceptual work that needs to be rigorously tested using appropriate methods to confirm its validity.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Moritz’s expertise lies in the socio-cognitive and behavioural aspects of legitimacy. He uses controlled experiments to test whether people’s judgments actually align with their actions, moving beyond the field’s traditional evaluative focus. In their research, Moritz and his collaborators show that, contrary to predictions in the literature, judgements of legitimacy and behaviours often do not correspond. This finding is consistent with real-world evidence. For example, a consumer might express a negative judgment about fast fashion but still buy it. He has also theorised the interaction between different legitimacy dimensions (instrumental, moral, and relational) and how institutional logics shape both the weight evaluators place on these dimensions and the standards by which they evaluate organisations.
Areas for Future Research
Looking ahead, Moritz sees further opportunities to study why stakeholders sometimes do not oppose practices or organisations that they consider morally wrong or illegitimate. To address these questions, additional research is needed to disentangle the interplay between legitimacy’s dimensions and to determine when legitimacy judgements influence behaviour and when they do not. Behavioural research, particularly in incentivised experiments, will help scholars better understand the behavioural manifestations of legitimacy.
He also recognises the potential of integrating legitimacy perspectives, such as process- and perception-based research, to capture the dynamic and evolving nature of legitimacy. Finally, there are opportunities to test the assumptions made in classic works using state-of-the-art methods.
Discover more about Moritz’s research here and connect with him on LinkedIn.