News from the legitimacy community

In this article, Bitektine, Gillespie, and Lange shift the focus of social evaluation research by asking not what social judgments do for organizations, but what they do for the evaluators who make them. The authors propose a functional perspective, arguing that...

Why do public organizations sometimes lose citizen approval even when their cross-sector collaborations run smoothly? This new study shows it can all hinge on who they team up with. Using two preregistered experiments in Germany (n = 2510), the article shows that a...

Why do some companies gain moral legitimacy while others face public backlash—despite delivering the same positive outcomes? The study reveals that it’s not just what organizations achieve that matters, but why they do it. When outcomes are driven by prosocial...

Legitimacy has long been studied either at the individual or collective level, but recent research highlights the need to integrate these perspectives. In the Journal of Management Studies, Patrick Haack, Jost Sieweke, and Mike Pfarrer explore the often-overlooked...

Marketization,’ i.e., the spread of market logic through the introduction of new market practices, is a pervasive phenomenon that can cause discomfort and sometimes prompt active resistance among actors in the field. It is puzzling why market logic is gaining ground...

While the CEO position is already recognized as a highly demanding role, multi-CEOs lead not one, but several different companies. As such, this ability to reconcile seemingly incompatible roles presents an intriguing research case. Recently, the Academy of Management...