Roy’s Path into Legitimacy Research
Roy Suddaby is a Professor and Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. Before joining the University of Victoria in 2015, he held faculty positions at the University of Alberta and the University of Iowa. Roy entered academia relatively late, as he practiced corporate and commercial law for approximately ten years before deciding to pursue a PhD.
When he began his doctoral studies, legitimacy was not yet on his research agenda. Instead, he wanted to understand how professional service firms, particularly law firms, adapt strategically to changing market conditions. At the time, a growing number of law firms in North America and Europe were merging with large accounting firms to create multidisciplinary partnerships. This novel organizational form challenged established professional boundaries. While economists largely viewed this development as an inevitable market evolution, Roy was intrigued by a different question: how does a new organizational form become legitimate?
This question eventually became the foundation of his doctoral research and marked his entry into the field of legitimacy. His dissertation examined the emergence of multidisciplinary partnerships and the challenges they faced in gaining acceptance among professional and societal audiences. The timing proved particularly revealing. The collapse of Arthur Andersen following the Enron scandal abruptly halted the momentum behind these partnerships, illustrating how legitimacy can be lost through events that reshape public trust and professional expectations. Although multidisciplinary partnerships eventually re-emerged in different forms, this experience demonstrated to Roy the central role legitimacy plays in the emergence, evolution, and survival of different organizational forms. Since then, legitimacy has remained at the core of his research, providing a lens through which to understand institutional change, organizational evolution, and the social foundations of organizations.
Influential Works
Several scholars and works have profoundly shaped Roy’s thinking about legitimacy. Among the most influential is the work of Max Weber, whose writings provided an early intellectual bridge between Roy’s background in law and his academic interest in legitimacy. Weber’s treatment of legitimacy, authority, and the institutional foundations of social order offered Roy a particularly rich framework for thinking about why certain forms of authority and organization come to be accepted as appropriate and valid. Weber’s broader intellectual approach also reinforced Roy’s interest in understanding legitimacy not simply as a property of organizations, but as a phenomenon embedded in wider social and institutional processes.
Among more contemporary scholars, Mark Suchman’s (1995) work Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches had a particularly profound influence. Roy was drawn not only to the conceptual richness and enduring influence of the paper, but also to Suchman’s own trajectory. Like Roy, Suchman had a background in law before moving into academia, creating an intellectual connection between their otherwise different paths. Suchman’s influential framework provided Roy with a foundation for thinking about the different dimensions and processes through which legitimacy is constructed and maintained. The extraordinary impact and longevity of his paper further demonstrated to Roy the importance of developing concepts that can provide a common language for a diverse research community.
A second major contemporary influence was Andrew Abbott’s book The System of Professions (1988). Abbott’s work was important to Roy not only because of its substantive focus on professions, but also because of the way it approached the phenomenon theoretically. Earlier sociology of professions had largely sought to define professions through a set of relatively stable characteristics such as, for example, specialized knowledge, expertise, and jurisdictional protection. Over time, however, these lists of characteristics became increasingly extensive, to the point that the concept of a profession risked becoming too broad to be analytically useful. Abbott challenged this static approach by conceptualizing professions as part of a dynamic system, emphasizing their historical development, interactions, and changing jurisdictions.
This process-oriented perspective had a lasting influence on Roy’s own thinking about legitimacy. Abbott’s work suggested that phenomena such as professions – and, by extension, legitimacy – cannot be fully understood by isolating their individual characteristics. Instead, they need to be examined as evolving processes whose different elements interact over time. This insight became particularly important for Roy’s later work on legitimacy, including the 2017 Academy of Management Annals paper Legitimacy, co-authored with Alex Bitekine and Patrick Haack. It encouraged him to think about legitimacy simultaneously as a phenomenon with substantive or “property” elements, process characteristics, and a perceptual dimension. More broadly, Abbott’s historical and relational approach reinforced Roy’s conviction that organizational phenomena should be studied in their broader context rather than artificially separated into isolated components. Just as Abbott argued that professions can only be understood in relation to other professions within a larger system, Roy emphasizes the importance of examining legitimacy through the interactions among its different dimensions, actors, and processes. For him, this means resisting the temptation to simplify complex phenomena to the point where they become detached from the organizational and social realities in which they are embedded.
Challenges in Studying Legitimacy
For Roy, one of the central challenges in studying legitimacy is understanding its inherently dynamic nature. Legitimacy is closely intertwined with institutional change, yet institutional change does not always occur in dramatic or revolutionary moments. In fact, Roy argues that revolutionary change is relatively rare; much institutional change unfolds gradually and incrementally. Because dramatic transformations are more visible, researchers often focus on them while paying less attention to the slower evolutionary processes through which legitimacy develops and changes over time. He sees this as partly a methodological problem: management research has yet to make sufficient use of historical approaches that can capture these gradual processes. Studies such as Eleanor Westney’s historical analysis of Japan’s selective adoption of Western institutions demonstrate the value of this perspective, but historical methodology remains comparatively difficult to incorporate into mainstream management research.
This emphasis on process also has important conceptual implications. Drawing on Andrew Abbott’s work, Roy argues that legitimacy should not be studied entirely in isolation from related forms of social evaluation. Legitimacy is intertwined with constructs such as status, identity, reputation, and authenticity, which often operate together rather than independently. While the field has made considerable progress in defining and measuring legitimacy as a distinct construct, Roy believes that the next step is to understand how these different forms of evaluation interact dynamically. Doing so requires moving beyond static conceptualizations toward a process-oriented understanding of how perceptions and evaluations develop over time and in relation to one another.
These conceptual challenges are closely connected to methodological ones. Roy sees considerable potential in combining historical approaches with experimental methods. Once researchers have a better understanding of the historical and contextual processes through which legitimacy evolves, experiments can be designed to isolate and test specific mechanisms within those processes. For example, scenario-based experiments could examine how people weigh legitimacy against authenticity under different circumstances. A craft industry might place greater value on authenticity, whereas a more conventional manufacturing context might place greater emphasis on legitimacy. Such designs could help researchers move beyond simply asking whether legitimacy matters toward understanding when, why, and under what conditions different forms of social evaluation matter more than others.
Roy also sees a need for legitimacy research to become more attentive to practice. Scholars have developed an increasingly sophisticated theoretical understanding of legitimacy, but he argues that the field now needs to devote greater attention to testing and applying these ideas. Practitioners, after all, are less concerned with theoretical distinctions than with understanding what actually works. This is particularly relevant in the context of social media, where influencers, executives, and other practitioners increasingly understand how social evaluations can be strategically managed and even monetized. Marketing scholars, Roy suggests, may already have greater sensitivity to these practical dynamics, and legitimacy research could benefit from engaging more closely with these perspectives.
Ultimately, Roy sees the field as having reached a point where theory needs to be matched by stronger empirical testing and practical application. Theoretical flexibility is valuable, but theories should not be treated as established truths simply because they are well developed or widely cited. Legitimacy itself evolves through processes of social and institutional change, and the theories used to explain it should therefore be continually confronted with empirical evidence. For Roy, the challenge is not to generate ever more theory, but to develop better ways of testing, refining, and applying the rich theoretical foundations that legitimacy scholarship has already established.
Expertise and Main Contribution to Legitimacy Research
Roy’s specialty in legitimacy research lies in understanding legitimacy as a complex discourse and social process, with a particular focus on the rhetoric through which legitimacy is constructed, negotiated, and maintained. Drawing on his broader work on professions, institutional change, and social evaluations, he approaches legitimacy not as an isolated or static property, but as a phenomenon that unfolds through interactions, conversations, and evolving systems of meaning. His work emphasizes the importance of examining the arguments, narratives, and rhetorical strategies through which actors seek to establish what is legitimate and why.
His central contribution can be summarized in one proposition: legitimacy should be understood simultaneously as a property, a process, and a perception. As a property, legitimacy refers to the characteristics or status attributed to an organization, practice, or institution; as a process, it concerns the ongoing work through which legitimacy is constructed and negotiated; and as a perception, it reflects how audiences evaluate and make sense of a legitimacy subject. Roy sees rhetorical theory as particularly valuable because it brings these three dimensions together. Rhetoric is not simply about persuasion or communication; it provides a way to understand how actors construct meanings, make claims, respond to competing interpretations, and shape social evaluations over time.
This perspective also connects closely to Roy’s broader argument that legitimacy should not be studied in isolation from related forms of social evaluation, such as status, identity, reputation, and authenticity. Rather than treating these concepts as entirely separate constructs, his work highlights how they become intertwined in practice and evolve together through social processes. In this sense, his research pushes legitimacy scholarship toward a more dynamic and relational understanding—one that captures not only whether something is perceived as legitimate, but also how legitimacy is produced, contested, and transformed through discourse and interaction.
Future Research: Exploring the Relationships Between Different Forms of Social Evaluation
Looking ahead, Roy sees one particularly promising and underexplored direction: understanding how legitimacy interacts with other forms of social evaluation, and especially with authenticity. While legitimacy is now one of the most extensively studied forms of social evaluation, we know considerably less about how it relates to other evaluative criteria that audiences use to assess organizations, practices, and products. For Roy, legitimacy and authenticity are particularly intriguing because they can sometimes reinforce one another, but they can also come into tension. What is perceived as legitimate by a broad audience is not necessarily perceived as authentic, and efforts to increase legitimacy may sometimes come at the expense of authenticity.
One context in which this tension becomes particularly visible is professional wrestling. Roy’s doctoral student Eraj Hassan examines the historical evolution of professional wrestling in the United States, where the practice has long occupied an ambiguous position between competitive sport and entertainment. As wrestling became increasingly scripted and performance-oriented, some audiences and critics perceived a movement away from the authenticity of the sport toward entertainment and spectacle. The case therefore illustrates a tension between authenticity as the preservation of a perceived “pure” form of the practice and legitimacy as broader audience acceptance and popularity. Tracing how wrestling has moved back and forth between these poles offers an opportunity to understand how different audiences, critics, and organizational decisions shape the relationship between authenticity and legitimacy over time.
A similar tension emerges in Roy’s work with his PhD student Amit Sharma, who studies the challenge of scaling craft production without undermining its authenticity. Drawing on examples such as craft production in Japan, his research explores what happens when practices traditionally associated with small-scale, intimate, and artisanal production begin to expand. Scaling can increase visibility and market acceptance, potentially strengthening legitimacy, while simultaneously threatening the characteristics that audiences associate with authenticity. This raises a fundamental question: is there a point at which an organization or practice becomes too large, standardized, or commercially oriented to retain its authenticity?
Together, these examples illustrate a broader research agenda around the trade-offs and complementarities between different forms of social evaluation. Roy sees considerable potential in examining how organizations navigate situations in which audiences simultaneously value legitimacy, authenticity, and other evaluative criteria that may not always point in the same direction. Rather than studying legitimacy as an isolated construct, future research could therefore explore how these evaluations interact, compete, and evolve together. Such a perspective would contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how organizations and practices gain acceptance while maintaining the characteristics that audiences perceive as distinctive, authentic, or meaningful.
Discover more about Roy’s research here.