Cynthia’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Cynthia Loos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Business Administration specializing in sustainability management at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, which is located in Germany. From her academic background, she is an industrial engineer, which was still the Technical University of Kaiserslautern when she started her studies. During both her undergraduate and graduate studies, she developed a strong interest in sustainability, both from a technical but also from a business perspective, which then also became the core of her doctoral research. Her entry into legitimacy was indirect: she was studying the professional field of sustainability management, specifically who these professionals are, what they do, how they position themselves within organisations and so on. It is through this lens that she encountered the concept of legitimacy, as sustainability managers often face a constant pressure to justify both their existence and their role within organisations. This ongoing struggle for recognition and acceptance is at its core, as she recognized later on, a legitimacy problem. The legitimation strategies that sustainability manager employ within their organizations eventually shaped her entire first dissertation project, which resulted in a published paper.
Influential Works
Cynthia was initially strongly influenced by an article by Carollo and Guerci (2017), Between Continuity and Change: CSR Managers’ Occupational Rhetorics, published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Although not directly a legitimacy paper, this was the first piece that made her aware of the struggle sustainability managers have and their need to rhetorically justify their role. What struck her the most in this paper was the concept of occupational rhetorics — idealized images professionals use to construct and represent their work — which she later recognized as a form of legitimation strategy, making it a key conceptual bridge in her own research. An amusing twist is that one of the authors later turned out to be a reviewer during the publication process of her paper. Beyond that paper, Cynthia was also influenced by foundational contributions to legitimacy research, particularly Suchman’s (1995) seminal work, Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches, as well as the Multilevel Model of the Legitimacy Process by Bitketine and Haack (2015).
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
For Cynthia, the first challenge in studying legitimacy concerns the legitimacy subject itself. Whereas the majority of legitimacy research focuses on organisations as the primary object of study, her research focuses on occupational groups, and sustainability managers in particular. She considers challenging the questions of how far insights from organizational legitimacy can be transferred to occupations, and where important distinctions need to be made. For instance, she wonders whether, when defining a legitimacy object or subject, the same legitimacy dimensions can be applied across organizations, occupations, and individuals.
A related challenge lies in identifying and working with legitimacy dimensions. The literature offers a large number of possible dimensions (e.g. pragmatic, cognitive), yet it remains unclear which dimensions are relevant in specific contexts and why. Moreover, questions arise about whether these dimensions can be meaningfully aggregated into higher-order constructs that together would make up a different type of legitimacy, how they should be weighted, and whether generalizable answers are possible—given that legitimacy ultimately depends on the perceptions of evaluators.
A third challenge follows from the first two and concerns the measurement of legitimacy. Beyond the availability of existing scales, Cynthia highlights deeper concerns about their theoretical foundations—particularly whether constructs should be modeled as formative or reflective. This is a question she has begun to explore in her own work.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Cynthia’s expertise sits at the intersection of two perspectives that have rarely been brought together so far: the process view of legitimacy, which focuses on how legitimacy is actively constructed through strategies, and the study of occupational legitimacy, which has received little attention in the field. What further sets her work apart is her commitment to qualitative methodology, which is still underrepresented in legitimacy research despite its particular strengths in capturing micro-level dynamics. Her core contribution consists of examining legitimacy through the lens of an occupational group, showing how intrinsic, stable characteristics of the legitimacy subject (rather than situational or contextual factors) shape both how legitimacy challenges are perceived and which strategies are used to address them. More recently, she has developed a new scale designed to capture legitimacy judgments directed at corporate professions, including sustainability managers. This scale is conceptualized as a second-order formative construct, offering an alternative to existing measurement approaches.
Areas for Future Research
Although the field offers many exciting directions for future research, Cynthia identifies the relationship between the process and the perception perspective of legitimacy as the most compelling one. Surprisingly little is known about the conditions under which legitimacy judgments – or concepts such as validity cues – can be deliberately influenced. In particular, current frameworks do not fully account for all the levers involved.
She also highlights the need for greater attention to micro–macro dynamics, including questions such as: Which level of legitimacy judgment – individual or collective – has greater practical impact? How do these levels interact over time? Can legitimacy judgments about an occupational group transfer to the organizations that employ them and vice versa? She sees these cross-level spillover mechanisms as still largely unexplored.
Lastly, she is also particularly intrigued by the implications of new contextual pressures for legitimacy research. For instance, the field of sustainability is facing a growing ESG backlash, especially in the US, where the legitimacy of sustainability-related roles and practices is increasingly contested. She sees this as both a timely and practically important area for future research, calling for greater engagement from legitimacy scholars.
Discover more about Cynthia’s research here.