A Domain Model for Moral Legitimacy of Business-Like Practices

Abstract

Legitimacy is pivotal in nonprofit organizations’ success. The trend that nonprofit organizations are hybridized increasingly with business-like practices and social nonprofit missions raises a debate on whether and how people grant business-like practices legitimacy. This study addressed these problems from a moral legitimacy perspective, and proposed a domain model that argues that people make moral legitimacy judgments on business-like practices based upon their normative preferences for whether the organization should focus on principles in one of two fundamental human relational domains, Market Pricing (MP) and Communal Sharing (CS). Such normative judgments can be determined by organizational contexts, including the service field and the organization’s sector. The findings of an online experiment supported the model in general, and also showed important heterogeneity across service fields and business-like practices.