Alicia’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Alicia Blanco González is a Professor of Marketing in the Business Economics Department at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, where she also serves as Vice Chancellor for researchers and faculty. Alongside her academic responsibilities, she plays an active role in managing a large public university with more than 50,000 students, balancing institutional leadership with her commitment to teaching and research.
Her engagement with legitimacy research began around 2010, at a time when the concept was still largely unexplored within the Spanish academic context. Together with a small group of colleagues at her university, she was among the first to introduce and develop legitimacy as a research topic in Spain. The early stages were challenging, as the concept was not widely recognized in national academia or international conferences. However, this initial difficulty also created an opportunity to build a new line of research from the ground up.
Over time, Alicia and her colleagues developed a dedicated research stream and established a network of collaborators across Spain, Latin America, and the United States. A key milestone in this journey was the creation of the Legitimacy Observatory, which emerged from collaborations initiated at international conferences, including her meeting with Professor Giorgio Miotto in New Orleans. The Observatory serves as a hub for connecting researchers, fostering collaborative projects, and disseminating research outputs and activities related to legitimacy.
Influential Works
Alicia Blanco was deeply influenced by Suchman’s (1995) seminal work, Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches, which was introduced to her by her maestro. She particularly values the breadth and depth of the paper, which not only defines legitimacy but also systematically outlines its key dimensions and the strategies through which organizations can build and maintain it. In her view, Suchman’s contribution is remarkable in that it brings together multiple aspects of legitimacy—conceptual, strategic, and dimensional—within a single, coherent framework. For her, Suchman’s work remains a cornerstone of legitimacy research—a “modern classic” that continues to shape how legitimacy is conceptualized and studied.
In addition to Suchman (1995), Alicia was also inspired by Deephouse and Carter’s (2005) article, An Examination of Differences Between Organizational Legitimacy and Organizational Reputation, which she considers a key for disentangling legitimacy and reputation, which are closely related but conceptually distinct constructs. In addition, she further highlights the work of Lawrence and Suddaby (2006), Institutions and Institutional Work, as highly influential, particularly for its contributions to understanding the relationship between institutional theory, isomorphism, and legitimacy.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
Alicia Blanco understands the challenges of studying legitimacy as evolving alongside the development of the field itself. Drawing on her experience in supervising PhD students and participating in international conferences, she frames the evolution of challenges in studying legitimacy in three phases:
- The first phase, roughly between 2010 and 2016, centred on conceptual clarification. At that time, the primary challenge was defining legitimacy and distinguishing it from related constructs. In many academic settings—particularly in Spain—legitimacy was still perceived as a concept rooted mainly in political science and not yet fully integrated into management research. Establishing legitimacy as a relevant and distinct concept within business and organizational studies was therefore a major step forward.
- The second phase, which she situates between 2016 and 2020, focused on the dimensionality and multilevel nature of legitimacy. During this period, research increasingly explored different dimensions—such as cognitive, pragmatic, and emotional—and embraced the idea of legitimacy as a multidimensional and multilevel construct. As these perspectives became more widely accepted, the field also saw a diversification of methodological approaches.
- The third phase, which started in recent years, concerns methodological challenges. Whereas significant efforts have been devoted to developing scales and survey instruments to capture legitimacy perceptions, Alicia believes that existing measurement tools can still be further refined. In particular, she emphasizes the need to better align research methods with research objectives. Traditional approaches—such as surveys and experiments—are often insufficient to capture the dynamic nature of legitimacy judgments, especially how they evolve over time.
Another important challenge lies in identifying the factors that drive shifts in legitimacy perceptions. Alicia highlights the role of information asymmetry and the growing influence of digital platforms and social media, which generate signals beyond the control of organizations and can significantly reshape legitimacy judgments. From a marketing perspective, she also points to the need for greater recognition of legitimacy as a key variable in consumer behaviour models. These include understanding the role of emotions in legitimacy judgments, distinguishing between individual, social, and collective perceptions, and reconciling these levels with definitions—such as those of Suchman (1995)—that conceptualize legitimacy as a generalized perception. Methodologically, this raises important questions about how individual-level data can be used to capture broader, collective legitimacy.
Beyond academia, Alicia also emphasizes the practical challenges of legitimacy. While companies are familiar with concepts such as reputation, satisfaction, quality, and price, legitimacy is still not consistently integrated into managerial frameworks, despite its clear influence on stakeholder responses. Moreover, in her work with nursing homes in Spain, Alicia had the opportunity to observe how deeply legitimacy is shaped by cultural factors and media representations. In sectors where legitimacy is contested or damaged, improving perceptions is particularly difficult, even when many organizations perform well. Addressing such challenges requires not only theoretical insight but also practical strategies, making legitimacy research highly relevant for real-world applications.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Alicia Blanco’s research spans a broad range of contributions to legitimacy scholarship, with a particular focus on the relationship between sustainability and legitimacy, exploring how organizations can align their strategies with broader societal expectations. Over time, she has developed a research agenda that connects sustainability practices with legitimacy outcomes, especially in relation to stakeholder perceptions and organizational performance.
A central aspect of her contribution lies in linking legitimacy to consumer behaviour and firm-level outcomes. Her research examines how factors, such as perceived values, influence legitimacy judgments and, in turn, how legitimacy shapes purchase intentions and the financial performance of organizations. By establishing these connections, she aims to demonstrate that legitimacy is not only a normative or ethical concern but also a strategic resource that can generate tangible benefits for organizations. Her work thus provides insights into how companies can design and adapt their strategies to strengthen legitimacy and improve their overall performance.
In addition to her work on sustainability and consumer behaviour, Alicia has made important contributions to understanding legitimacy in the higher education sector. She has examined how universities manage their legitimacy in relation to issues such as rankings, internationalization, student recruitment, and crisis situations. These areas are directly relevant to her role as Vice Chancellor, which, in turn, provides her with direct insights into the practical challenges of managing legitimacy in large public organizations.
More recently, Alicia’s research has shifted toward exploring the role of emotions in legitimacy judgments. Drawing on approaches from neuromarketing and behavioural research, she investigates how emotional responses influence perceptions of legitimacy and how these processes can be better understood using innovative methodological tools. Overall, her work contributes to legitimacy research by bridging sustainability, consumer behaviour, and organizational strategy, while also advancing new perspectives on the emotional and behavioural aspects of legitimacy.
Future Research
Alicia Blanco sees several important and evolving directions for future research in legitimacy. One key area concerns the role and quality of communication in shaping legitimacy. In today’s environment, organizations operate within an increasingly complex information landscape characterized by multiple sources, high information volume, and varying levels of credibility. Understanding how the quality of information and communication influences legitimacy perceptions is therefore a critical challenge.
Additionally, she highlights the need to further integrate legitimacy into marketing and consumer behaviour research. While legitimacy has been extensively studied in management, organizational theory, and accounting—particularly in relation to disclosure and accountability—its role in consumer behaviour models remains underdeveloped. Alicia argues that legitimacy should be treated as a core variable, alongside more traditional constructs such as reputation, satisfaction, quality, and price. Expanding research in this area would help clarify how legitimacy influences consumer responses and decision-making.
Another promising direction lies in the development of strategies to actively manage and improve legitimacy. Alicia emphasizes the importance of providing organizations with actionable tools and frameworks that allow them to strengthen their legitimacy in practice. This includes understanding which strategies are most effective in different contexts and how organizations can adapt to changing stakeholder expectations.
Lastly, methodological advancements also remain a central priority. Alicia points to the increasing importance of robust research designs and high-quality data. Recent studies with large and diverse samples illustrate the potential for more rigorous empirical work, and she stresses the need to continue improving sample quality and methodological standards. Strengthening the alignment between research questions, methods, and data quality will be essential for advancing the field.
Summing up, Alicia sees future legitimacy research as moving toward greater integration across disciplines, stronger methodological rigor, and a closer connection to real-world challenges—particularly in understanding how legitimacy is shaped in complex, information-rich environments, and how it can be effectively managed by organizations.
Discover more about Alicia’s research here.