David’s Path into Legitimacy Research
David Deephouse is a Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Management at the University of Alberta in Canada. His path into legitimacy research was shaped by both professional experience and academic curiosity. Before entering academia, he worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta in the 1980s, where he was involved in monetary policy and banking regulation. During this period, he became increasingly interested in questions surrounding bank regulation, viewed retrospectively as regulatory legitimacy and the social foundations of financial oversight.
A key influence on his thinking was observing how banking regulations intersect with broader societal concerns. He recalls, for example, the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in addressing “redlining,” a discriminatory practice through which banks denied loans to residents of certain neighbourhoods, often based on race or income level, and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, data from which was analyzed by Fed Boston economists Munnell et al. (1996).
These experiences led him to reflect on the ways regulatory systems attempt to establish fairness, accountability, and legitimacy within economic institutions. At the same time, he also became fascinated by how legitimacy operates in highly regulated industries, from banking inspections to safety regulations in sectors such as aviation and food production.
Looking for more intellectual freedom and a flexible lifestyle, he decided to pursue a PhD. While considering different disciplines at the reading room of the U. of Hartford library, he encountered the influential article by McGuire, Sundgren, and Schneeweis (1988) on “Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance.” The paper sparked his interest in how organizations are evaluated by stakeholders and society, so he decided to study management. During his program, legitimacy became a central component of addressing the tension between conformity and differentiation, eventually leading to his PhD Dissertation (1994) on “The Influence of Differences in Corporate Strategies on Legitimacy and Profitability.”
Influential Works
Among the many works that shaped David’s thinking on legitimacy, the first and particularly influential contribution was the article by Ashforth and Gibbs (1990) on “The Double-Edge of Organizational Legitimation”. What resonated most with him was the paper’s focus on the tensions and paradoxes inherent in legitimation processes. Rather than treating legitimacy as a straightforward or purely beneficial organizational asset, the article highlighted its complexities and potential downsides. It also directed him back to the definitional origins of the concept, the distinctions between substantive and symbolic management, performance versus value challenges, and the ways organizations attempt to maintain legitimacy through different strategies.
His understanding of legitimacy was deeply influenced by foundational contributions in institutional theory. Works such as Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) article on “Institutionalized Organizations”, DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) paper on “Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields”, and W. Richard Scott’s seminal book Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems strongly shaped his understanding of legitimacy and organizational conformity. These readings introduced him to the idea that organizations often conform to prevailing norms and expectations in order to gain legitimacy and survive within institutional environments. This institutional perspective became a central pillar of his thinking, particularly the notion that organizations are embedded within broader social systems that shape acceptable forms of behavior and structure.
Another major influence on his thinking has been the relationship between legitimacy, status, reputation, and performance. He points to the contributions of scholars such as Charles Fombrun, Michael Jensen, and Charles Perrow, as well as later works on organizational social evaluations. These works encouraged him to think more carefully about how legitimacy overlaps with related concepts yet is still distinct, consistent with construct clarity that Roy Suddaby reminded us of in 2011. More recently, David has become increasingly interested in how what Siraz et al. (2021) called norms, values, and beliefs (NVB) affected legitimacy judgments, including how evaluative standards emerge and how legitimacy relates to broader social and cultural systems.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
According to David, one of the central challenges in legitimacy research stems from the multi-faceted nature of some of the concept’s definitions and its widespread adoption across disciplines and research domains. While this broad appeal has enriched the field and stimulated diverse applications, it has also generated considerable variety as researchers invoke legitimacy to describe a wide range of evaluative phenomena. This challenge has become even more pronounced as legitimacy research increasingly draws on insights from psychology, marketing, and other disciplines. David therefore encourages scholars to continue refining what they mean by legitimacy and how it differs from related concepts such as reputation, status, approval, esteem, and performance.
In turn, his challenge extends to questions of operationalization and measurement. David notes that many studies claim to measure legitimacy while, in practice, capturing related constructs or relying on broad definitions that do not clearly distinguish legitimacy from other forms of social evaluation. Moreover, although legitimacy is widely recognized as a multidimensional construct, researchers often focus on only a subset of its dimensions. Thus, conclusions should pertain to the aspect studied and only possibly to legitimacy in general. For David, advancing the field requires stronger alignment between conceptual definitions and empirical measures, as recommended by many research design texts.
Another challenge concerns the increasing emphasis on individual-level evaluations. While legitimacy has traditionally been understood as a collective social judgment, many contemporary studies examine it through the lens of individual attitudes and perceptions. David welcomes this development — and was a co-author on two publications — but also cautions that legitimacy cannot be reduced to individual cognition alone. A key task for future research is to better understand how individual judgments aggregate into collective legitimacy and how these collective evaluations, in turn, shape organizational outcomes and individuals. Bridging the gap between individual-level cognition and broader social evaluations therefore remains a major theoretical and methodological challenge for the field.
Finally, David points to the challenge of understanding legitimacy in rapidly changing environments characterized by new technologies, evolving stakeholder expectations, and shifting institutional contexts. The emergence of new industries, the (de-)globalization of markets, and the growing influence of digital media create novel legitimacy dynamics. He is pleased to see the work emerging to better understand how legitimacy judgments form, evolve, and spread under these conditions.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
David’s main contribution to legitimacy research has been to define and measure legitimacy at the organizational level. A central theme throughout his scholarship has been to bring conceptual clarity to legitimacy and to distinguish it from closely related social evaluation constructs. In particular, his collaboration with Mark Suchman helped advance theoretical understanding of how legitimacy differs from reputation and status while also highlighting the relationships among these constructs. He continued this work in Handbook chapters, first with Jon Bundy, Leigh Tost, and Mark Suchman, and then with Patrick Haack.
Beyond conceptual development, David has made pioneering contributions to the empirical measurement of legitimacy. His early work on commercial banks provided one of the first systematic attempts to operationalize organizational legitimacy using archival and media-based data. Drawing on regulatory records, public evaluations, and media reporting, he developed measures for over 100 competing banks that distinguished between different forms of legitimacy, including what would later be recognized as regulative and moral legitimacy. He and Suzanne Carter then compared legitimacy and reputation theoretically and empirically.
More recently, David has broadened his research focus to examining how individual attitudes, values, and responses shape legitimacy judgments. Collaborating with scholars from marketing and psychology, he has drawn on theories and methods from these disciplines to better understand how people evaluate organizations, industries, and emerging technologies. This work reflects his growing interest in the micro-foundations of legitimacy and the processes through which individual evaluations contribute to broader social judgments. At the same time, he emphasizes the importance of maintaining a multilevel perspective, recognizing that legitimacy emerges through interactions between individual perceptions, actions of focal organizations and evaluating organizations, and collective social evaluations. His recent research therefore seeks to bridge micro- and macro-level approaches.
Overall, David’s scholarship has played a foundational role in shaping contemporary legitimacy research. By distinguishing legitimacy from related constructs, developing robust measurement approaches, and, more recently, exploring the multiple levels of legitimacy, he has contributed to establishing legitimacy as a central concept in institutional theory.
Future Research: Toward Substantive Management
Looking ahead, David sees several promising and still underexplored directions for legitimacy research. A central theme is the need to move beyond symbolic representations and pay greater attention to substantive organizational actions. While legitimacy scholars have become increasingly sophisticated in analyzing discourse, narratives, claims, and communication strategies, David argues that legitimacy is shaped not only by what organizations say but also by what they do. Future research should therefore focus more explicitly on the relationship between symbolic management and substantive practices, examining how organizations translate public commitments into concrete actions and how stakeholders evaluate the legitimacy of these efforts. This distinction is particularly relevant in contemporary debates surrounding sustainability, climate change, and other grand societal challenges.
A second major direction concerns the further development of multi-level legitimacy research. Although significant progress has been made at both the macro and micro levels, David believes that the organizational and interorganizational levels remain comparatively underexplored. The growing emphasis on individual-level perceptions has generated valuable insights, but risks overlooking the role of organizations, networks, industries, and validating institutions in the legitimation process. Understanding how these collective actors create, reinforce, challenge, or withdraw legitimacy is therefore a critical next step. In particular, David highlights the need to better understand what he refers to as the “middle level” of legitimacy: the interactions among organizations, professional groups, industry associations, social movements, regulators, and other validating institutions. While scholars have begun exploring how legitimacy judgments travel across levels, much remains unknown about how these actors influence one another and how legitimacy emerges through their interactions. Integrating insights from institutional theory, social movement research, and political action studies could significantly advance understanding of these processes.
More broadly, David advocates for a nested and interconnected view of legitimacy. Explaining how individuals are embedded within groups, groups within organizations, organizations within networks and industries, and industries within broader institutional and societal systems, he argues that future research should pay greater attention to how legitimacy processes unfold across these interconnected layers and how influences flow both upward and downward between them. For instance, this includes examining the role of regulators, professional associations, industry networks, international standards organizations, and supranational institutions such as the United Nations in shaping legitimacy judgments and organizational behavior. Developing a richer understanding of these dynamics, he argues, will be essential for advancing legitimacy theory and explaining how legitimacy is created, maintained, and contested in increasingly complex organizational and societal systems.
Discover more about David’s research from Google Scholar or the University of Alberta.