The Café creates a space for exchange across organizational, entrepreneurial, and related domains. It brings together scholars interested in discussing current research, methodological approaches, applications, and emerging questions around legitimacy.
Activities include thematic discussion sessions and quarterly expert-led webinars designed to encourage scholarly dialogue, exchange ideas, and connect researchers working on legitimacy from different perspectives.
Content and activities will be made available across multiple formats and channels to support broad access and participation.
The Legitimacy Café is hosted by Sonia Siraz with the support of Kata Isenring and Rafnar Lárusson.
The Legitimacy Café Team
Sonia Siraz
Sonia Siraz is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Organizations at emlyon Business School. Before academia, she founded a legal consultancy, encountering a puzzle still driving her research: what happens when legality and legitimacy diverge? She earned her PhD from IE Business School, was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, and studies how legitimacy evolves in contested environments, including minority entrepreneurship.
Kata Isenring
Kata Isenring is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics (Finland). She holds a PhD in Management from the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland). With a background in political science and international relations, her research takes a systemic view of institutions and currently applies it to food transformation, examining how producers and audiences jointly shape the emergence of substitutes and hybrids.
Rafnar Làssuren
Rafnar Lárusson is a PhD Student in Management at the University of Iceland with over 25 years of finance experience. A single question drives his work: how well does legitimacy theory travel into the settings it explains? One study asks whether legitimacy in banking rests with organizations or with the systems that supervise them; another asks why financial crises delegitimate banking less than theory predicts.