Abstract
Occasionally, organizations are forced to adopt new practices that are inconsistent with the expectations of their stakeholders. An immediate adoption of the practices would risk the organization’s legitimacy, but as previous research has noted, the perceptions of organizational stakeholders can be managed through symbolic actions. In this paper, I examine how actors from four retail organizations symbolically legitimated the adoption of the hypermarket format within their individual contexts by means of internal professional magazines. The analysis suggests that the organizations buttressed their legitimacy by reversing the idea of loose coupling - adopting the new practice but maintaining their formal appearances.
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