The Process of Repairing Organizational Legitimacy

Abstract

This paper aims to explain the persistent legitimacy loss of a highly institutionalized organization by analyzing the process of failing legitimacy repair. Therefore, I reconstruct the prominent case of the State Office of Health and Social Affairs (LAGeSo) in Berlin, which became a symbol of authority failure during the ‘German refugee crisis’ in 2015. My findings show that whereas media triggers the organization to take action by attributing a need for change of the legitimacy object, they at the same time perceive the actual effects of these changes as an impediment of legitimacy repair. Using a paradox lens, I argue that these tensions of restructuring, cooperation and communication originate from the duality of legitimacy object and subject and are rendered salient through media’s paradoxical cognition. This contributes to our understanding of legitimacy repair in at least two ways: first, the revelation of a potential paradoxical downward spiral of legitimacy repair challenges the assumption that strategies of legitimacy repair mechanically produce desired outcomes; second, the paper contributes to the process perspective on legitimacy by revealing the fluid nature of the object of legitimacy, demanding for a more complex and dynamic lens when analyzing legitimacy processes.