Organisational legitimacy and refugee-led community organisations: examining form, function and cultural vis-à-vis scientific expertise

Abstract

ABSTRACT Organisational forms are defined by the cultural and the scientific – a dual dimensionality of organisational legitimacy. This study examines organisational legitimacy of refugee-led community organisations (RCOs), as they form or emerge out of refugee camps and places of displacement and then transition to fit into taken-for-granted cultural-scientific organisational models in places of resettlement. Analyses draw from participant observation, interviews and focus groups with leaders of RCOs. Findings illustrate how the ‘face’ of RCOs imitates western forms in managing external recognisability, while they retain embodied, culturally-specific practice modalities in their actions and programming for co-ethnic constituencies. Findings also point to the centrality of cultural expert knowledge in RCOs’ processes of organisational legitimacy. In finality, we argue that the RCO, in its strategies of decoupling form from function and of deploying cultural expertise, perhaps resists the taken-for-granted legitimacy of organisations as primarily or solely rooted in the modern and the scientific, while also complicating and problematising the very meaning of those terms and pointing to questions about organisational ethno-racialisation. RCOs elucidate localised dissent more clearly, as they ‘resettle’ and negotiate their insider-outsider qualities into a newer synthesis. RCOs’ contestations notwithstanding, their struggle for legitimacy is yet an ongoing contested process.