Organizations torn by significant contradictions may struggle to maintain internal legitimacy. Taking a narrative perspective and drawing on a US case study, the authors develop a process model showing how organizations with entrenched conflicts in their official narratives manage the resulting polyphony of members’ personal narratives through the development of myths that sustain internal legitimacy by making contradictions ‘liveable’.

The model reveals how myths that represent contradictions as temporary and project a future in which they will be satisfactorily resolved help people cope with inconsistencies in organizing and support the status quo. The researchers’ theorizing suggests that internal legitimacy is constituted by the narratives organizational members author about the desirability, propriety, and appropriateness of their organization and its practices. From a narratological perspective, internal legitimacy, rather than existing on a continuum from high to low and being a resource that can be accumulated, may be understood as a polyphony of distinctive narratives that, while discursively dynamic, is generally durable.

By explaining how future-oriented myths mediate between contradictory organizational demands and members’ legitimacy judgments, this study sheds light on how organizations remain viable despite enduring tensions and reconceptualizes internal legitimacy as an ongoing narrative accomplishment rather than a stable asset.