Theoretical background

Why Legitimacy Matters

Legitimacy is essential for organizations and institutions. It provides the social approval and material support that enable them to grow, innovate, and survive, especially in complex and uncertain environments (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). When organizations and institutions are seen as legitimate, they gain the trust of stakeholders and access to critical resources. When they lose legitimacy, they risk scrutiny, sanction, or even collapse.

Foundations of Legitimacy Research

Legitimacy research has a long-standing tradition in organization and management theory, dating back to seminal works by Dornbusch and Scott (1975) and Meyer and Rowan (1977). Most of early research has built on Suchman’s (1995) definition of legitimacy as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within a socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (p.574), thereby principally focusing on collectively established legitimacy. From that perspective, legitimacy exists in the shared norms, values, or procedures that are recognized as objective and binding, beyond the subjective experience of individuals. Over time, acknowledging that individual perceptions also matter, scholars have started to explore individually conferred legitimacy where actors subjectively assess and personally support those norms, values, or procedures as desirable or proper (Deephouse & Haack, 2026; Zelditch & Walker, 2003).

Evolving Perspectives on Legitimacy

The duality between collective and individual legitimacy has eventually become a focal point in contemporary research which has gradually moved from a static, organization-centric view of legitimacy to one that is dynamic, evaluator-focused, and multi-level. As of today, questions of legitimacy have been theorized and examined through three dominant perspectives (Suddaby et al., 2017):

• Legitimacy as Property – Legitimacy is treated as a resource or asset that an organization possesses (e.g., Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Suchman,1995; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002).
• Legitimacy as Process – Legitimacy is seen as a dynamic process shaped by actors and their interactions (e.g., Barron, 1998; Barnett, 2006; Golant & Sillince, 2007; Rao, 1994).
• Legitimacy as Perception – Legitimacy emerges through individual-level and collective-level perceptions and judgments of appropriateness, with the evaluator as a central actor (Bitektine, 2011; Bitektine & Haack, 2015; Tost, 2011; Zelditch, 2001).

Offering fundamentally different yet complementary conceptions of legitimacy, these perspectives (property, process, and perception) have significantly broadened the theoretical reach of legitimacy research.

A Multi-Level View of Legitimacy: Validity, Propriety, and Consensus

While research has for a long time examined legitimacy at the collective level, it is only recently that scholars have been paying greater attention to the perceptions, judgments, and actions of individual evaluators. Most recent theoretical developments advance legitimacy as a multi-level process of social judgment formation, in which macro and micro components of legitimacy interact (Bitektine & Haack, 2015). Three interrelated concepts are now viewed as central to understanding legitimacy:

• Validity: The collective-level construal of appropriateness – what is generally perceived as legitimate within a group or society. Validity exists as a social fact, external to any single evaluator’s experience, and corresponds to Suchman’s (1995) understanding of legitimacy as a “generalized perception”.
• Propriety: An individual-level belief or judgment about whether a legitimacy object is appropriate for its social context. These personal judgments may lead evaluators to support, reject, or challenge legitimacy objects (Bitektine, 2011; Tost, 2011).
• Consensus: The degree to which evaluators agree in terms of their propriety beliefs. While often correlated with validity, consensus is conceptually distinct: high perceived validity can mask underlying disagreement and low consensus may, in turn, undermine legitimacy despite strong validity cues (Haack et al., 2021; 2025).

Validity influences propriety via validity cues which consist of signals such as public endorsements, certifications, or media framing that guide individual interpretation. Over time, individuals may align their propriety beliefs with perceived validity due to conformity pressures and fear of social sanctions (Haack & Sieweke, 2018). Conversely, when evaluators reveal dissenting propriety beliefs, they may erode or destabilize collective legitimacy (Jacqueminet & Durand, 2020).

Current Key Challenges in Legitimacy Research

While theoretical advancements have been substantial over the last years, some key challenges remain in capturing the dynamic, evaluator-focused, and multi-level nature of legitimacy. Most notably, the following issues stand out:

1. Lack of conceptual clarity around the sources and antecedents of legitimacy: Researchers often do not clearly identify the focal evaluator(s) who grant legitimacy, nor do they theorize the precise mechanisms that underlie the evaluator’s conferral of legitimacy (Díez-Martín et al., 2021; Schoon, 2022).
2. Handling multiple validity cues: Much of the work to date has examined the effect of a single validity cue on propriety. We know relatively little about how the presence of multiple and conflicting validity cues within the same level or across different levels influences evaluators’ propriety beliefs (Deephouse & Haack, 2026).
3. Mapping validity and propriety to legitimacy dimensions: The relationship between propriety/validity (Bitektine & Haack, 2015) and the classic dimensions of legitimacy (pragmatic, moral, cognitive; Suchman,1995) remains underexplored. For instance, scholars have rarely examined how multiple dimensions of legitimacy interact with each other over time and generate concurring, conflicting, or compensatory validity cues (Haack & Rasche, 2021).
4. Measurement limitations: Existing measures often conflate validity and propriety beliefs, creating conceptual ambiguity between the two constructs (Haack & Sieweke, 2020). Moreover, it remains to be seen how individual-level measures can be aggregated into collective-level constructs and what the content of such aggregation is

Emerging Research Directions

Building on these key challenges, promising avenues for improvement and future research include:

• Clearly specify the focal object and the evaluator, the relationship between them for the given research context, and discuss the underlying mechanisms that lead to the conferral of legitimacy.
• Extend the multi-level perspective towards a nested model in which the propriety beliefs of evaluators at different levels, as well as their corresponding judgments and behaviors, provide validity cues for the formation of the propriety beliefs, judgments, and behaviors of other evaluators.
• Investigate how evaluators weigh competing validity cues and under what conditions these cues override others in shaping evaluators’ propriety beliefs.
• Clarify the relationships between propriety/validity considerations and dimensions (e.g., moral, pragmatic, or cognitive) of legitimacy.
• Develop measurement tools that unambiguously capture propriety and validity beliefs and test how individual-level measures can be aggregated into collective-level constructs.
• Test whether propriety translates into corresponding behaviors, i.e., examine whether positive propriety beliefs lead the evaluator to support a legitimacy object, whereas negative propriety beliefs trigger actual resistance.
• Explore the “grey area” between legitimacy and illegitimacy, i.e., conditional legitimacy, unknown legitimacy, and conditional illegitimacy (Siraz et al., 2023).

Given the current research focus on legitimacy as a multi-level, socially-constructed construct, future legitimacy research might significantly benefit from greater integration with related literatures such as trust, reputation, stigma, and status.

Conclusion

Legitimacy remains a central, evolving concept in organization and management studies. Since the seminal contributions of Dornbusch and Scott (1975), Meyer and Rowan (1977), and Suchman (1995), legitimacy research has evolved beyond static, organization-centric models to embrace a more dynamic, evaluator-focused, and multi-level perspective. In this way, contemporary scholarship better reflects the complex realities organizations and institution face in an increasingly pluralistic and uncertain world. In particular, the distinction between validity, propriety, and consensus offers a powerful conceptual framework for understanding how individual judgments coalesce – or fail to coalesce – into collective perceptions of appropriateness that affect organizational survival, change, and institutional evolution. As social transformations and global challenges continue shifting the expectations placed on organizations and institutions, legitimacy research will become even more vital in understanding how these entities can continue securing and sustaining their license to operate.