by Pauline Alessandra | Dec 15, 2025 | Publication
Legitimacy tests – moments when an organization’s activities are critically questioned by evaluating audiences – are a frequent occurrence in today’s complex societies. In our paper, “Legitimacy tests: Theorizing legitimacy as justification work,” we...
by Pauline Alessandra | Dec 15, 2025 | Publication
Digitalization reshapes even the most tradition-bound institutions. This study by Jan Danko, Oren Golan, and Katja Rost explores how religious institutions legitimate the use of digital media. It examines Benedictine monasteries – reclusive communities of religious...
by Adrianna Jezierska | Oct 6, 2025 | Publication
At the 2025 EGOS Conference in Athens, the Social Evaluations sub-theme gathered scholars to advance a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that shape how we judge individuals, organizations, and institutions. A recurring theme in the field is its...
by Blog editor | Jun 27, 2025 | Publication
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...
by Blog editor | Jun 25, 2025 | Publication
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...
by Blog editor | Mar 28, 2025 | Publication
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...
