External Legitimacy Research Articles

“A Little More Gravitas”: Why Correctional Health Care Workers Value Third-Party Certifications

ABSTRACT Some people who work in correctional health care (CHC) choose to obtain third-party professional certifications. Prior research indicates that, in the aggregate, rates of certification correspond to rates of litigation; that is, increases in states’ numbers of CHC certifications tend to follow from increases in the number of lawsuits incarcerated people file against them. These statistical patterns, however, do not reveal what perceived value certification offers to the individuals who pursue it. To address this open question, we conducted interviews with 33 certified CHC workers. These interviews revealed two major themes in individuals’ ideas about the value of certification. First, certification constitutes a source of external legitimacy, helping people counteract the stigma associated with working in corrections and claim professional validity and social esteem. Second, certification provides workplace credibility, helping people assert expertise and access career opportunities in their working lives. These findings add new depth to social scientific understanding of how people manage working in stigmatized occupational settings and navigate the conflicting imperatives of care and punishment that characterize correctional environments.

Indie economics: social purpose, lay expertise and the unusual rise of modern monetary theory

ABSTRACT We argue that the IPE literature on economic expertise has been characterised by ‘methodological elitism’ that makes it ill equipped to account for the influence of heterodox and grassroots forms of expertise. To remedy this, we posit a theoretical framework that emphasises the tensions between two forms of professional legitimacy. One is internal legitimacy and it is rooted in appeals to scientific objectivity, political neutrality and high professional barriers of entry. However, internal legitimacy may clash with external legitimacy, which is a function of a clear articulation of social purpose. Taking the surprising rise of Modern Monetary Theory as a case study, the paper makes two claims. First, its ideas did not coalesce into a distinctive heterodox brand of economics through traditional mechanisms like academic peer-review and citation networks, but through intense online activity. Second, the messaging that spurred MMT consistently combined constitutive claims with explicit declarations of social purpose. The result was an open project with a broad normative appeal, which successfully enrolled a large group of passionate followers and co-creators. To date, IPE scholars have been blind to such alternative forms of knowledge production.

Evolving Normative Dynamics: Understanding China's Varied Approaches to Overseas Corporate Social Responsibility in the Belt and Road Initiative Era

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is nowadays a global development initiative, with which China pursues a new international identity as a “responsible major country.” The inadequate fulfilment of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in BRI partner countries however has tainted the BRI's cooperative “win–win” principle and sparked external legitimacy crises. This study explores how Chinese policymakers respond to overseas CSR challenges in the realms of environmental and societal responsibility. By integrating both constructivist and rationalist elements, we employ three key variables to facilitate cross-case comparisons. Our analysis reveals that China has favoured a parallel overseas CSR governance system that allows for tailored responses to specific contexts. China's nuanced approaches to international CSR standards reflect rational decisions influenced by issue-specific domestic–international normative fit, perceived legitimacy of the relevant international regime, and the significance of each issue to China's global status. This research offers insights into China's contextualised engagement with international CSR norms in the BRI era.

Pro-Western or pro-Russian? Elections, foreign policy and inter-party rivalry in Georgia

ABSTRACT The article studies Georgia’s relations with Russia and the West as an object of rivalry among Georgian political parties. It argues that political parties have instrumentalized Russian–Georgian relations by picturing a) other political parties, b) politicians, and c) government policies as pro-Russian, in an attempt to delegitimize their opponents. Since the Georgian political establishment perceives the West as a source of internal and external legitimacy, the instrumentalization of Georgia’s Western policy has taken place in a complex way. On the one hand, political parties have positioned themselves as pro-Western actors and depicted their opponents as a threat to Georgia’s Western future. On the other hand, being sensitive towards the West’s assessment of Georgia’s democratization process, they used it to delegitimize their opponents and legitimize themselves. Delegitimization attempts occurred not only between the ruling party and the opposition, but also among opposition parties themselves.

Rebranding after international acquisitions: challenges of legitimation in emerging and developed countries

PurposeThis study describes how a multinational enterprise (MNE) gains acceptance after rebranding acquired brands from different countries among its internal and external stakeholders and identifies factors that influence this process.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a single case-study approach, including 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with employees of a firm involved in the rebranding process in six countries. The countries are Sweden, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.FindingsThe findings reveal how the MNE integrated brands it acquired in different international markets into one overarching corporate brand. The study shows that in emerging countries, external legitimation (external implementation process, country profiles and customer buy-in) constitutes the most significant challenge. By contrast, in developed countries, internal legitimation (employee buy-in and internal implementation process) is more challenging.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes to and extends the rebranding literature by using a legitimation lens to analyze the rebranding process. This lens shows how internal and external stakeholders are both crucial to successful rebranding. The study provides a comprehensive perspective of the process, identifies challenging factors and differentiates between their importance in emerging and developed countries.Originality/valueTo address the dearth of research on how firms legitimize a new brand in different national contexts, the study compares the rebranding process in multiple countries and discusses the factors influencing the rebranding process.

Myth of Sovereignty in the Era of Hyper-Globalisation

Globalisation has made it necessary to review modernity’s paradigms. One such paradigm that may no longer be an accurate descriptor (if it ever was) of international society is that of the sovereign nation-state. Through an exploration of both the western nation-state and the space collectively referred to as ‘postcolony’, two different experiences of globalisation are exhibited, each with different power manifestations. For the former, globalisation has challenged both internal and external legitimacy, which as in turn led to perceptions of a loss of sovereignty. However, the loss of sovereignty does not imply the loss of power; sovereign power has morphed into biopower, with power remaining within that space. In contrast, the postcolony’s historical relationship with sovereignty is one of negation- the denial of it. Globalisation thus threatens not the specific manifestation of power in sovereignty, but rather the continued subordination to western sovereignty. This has occurred due to a continuation of the ‘state of exception’ and socioeconomic hegemony. The piece does not, however, claim to be a definitive analysis of power, sovereign or otherwise, under globalisation. Such an inquiry would be a much greater project that went beyond the two broad categories west/postcolony, looking at specific national contexts: ‘realities’ rather than ‘reality’, accounting for the heterogeneity of both the forms and experiences of colonialism. It is a map of the terrain, and like any map is pitched at the level of generalisation.

Diffusion of BIM policies in China: an event history analysis

PurposeDespite the critical role of the policy environment in facilitating the advancement of building information modeling (BIM) as a systemic innovation to reshape traditional facility design, construction and operation processes, scant scholarly attention has been paid to systematically investigating how and why complex BIM policies are concretely and gradually implemented in different regional contexts from a dynamic policy diffusion perspective. This study aims to empirically investigate how different types of BIM policy instruments are dynamically implemented in heterogeneous regions over time and how the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions is comprehensively impacted by both internal efficiency needs and external legitimacy pressures.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed a positivist research paradigm in which BIM policy data from 182 prefecture-level and above cities in China during 2011–2022 were analyzed with quantitative approaches for theory verification. Based on the content analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of the adopted BIM policy instruments in heterogeneous regions over time, the event history analysis (EHA) method was then used to further examine the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions.FindingsThe content analysis results show that while environmental instruments (such as technological integration and goal planning) are the primary policy instruments currently adopted in China, recent years have also witnessed increasing adoptions of supply-side instruments (such as fiscal support and information support) and demand-side instruments (such as demonstration projects and tax incentives). After controlling for the impacts of regional fiscal and technical resources, the EHA results illustrate that BIM policy adoption positively relates to regional construction industry scale but negatively relates to regional industry productivity and that compared with public pressures from industry participants, vertical pressures from the central government and horizontal pressures from neighboring regions are more substantial drivers for policy adoption.Originality/valueAs an exploratory effort of using a dynamic policy diffusion perspective to systematically investigate how BIM policies are adopted in heterogeneous regional contexts to facilitate BIM advancement, this study not only characterizes the complexity and dynamics of BIM policies but also provides deepened understandings of the mechanisms underlying policy adoption in the conservative construction industry. The findings hold implications for how multifarious policy instruments can be more effectively and dynamically adopted to facilitate the advancement of BIM and related technologies as innovative solutions in the construction domain.

Does the Social Enterprise Ecosystem Facilitate the Growth of Social Enterprises? An Extended Case Study of Taiwan, China

Social enterprise (SE) ecosystems are a central concept in understanding the growth of SEs, yet existing research still needs to discuss the attributes of the ecosystems and their actual impacts on SEs. Based on an extended case study, this paper explores the actual impact of ecosystems on SEs in Taiwan, China. It is found that the SE ecosystem is not a dichotomous variable of “yes-no”, but of being “strong” or “weak”. Taiwan’s SE ecosystem has supportive conditions for SEs, such as favorable public policies, research institutes, and certification of SEs. However, due to deviations in implementing public policies and the lack of cross-sectoral cooperation between the government and other actors, Taiwan’s SE ecosystem is functionally “weak”. That is, the ecosystem needs to play a sufficient role in constructing the identity of SEs, providing legitimacy support, and linking resources. Under these circumstances, while maintaining the stability of their mission and core competencies, SEs appeal to themselves to gain internal and external legitimacy to achieve organizational growth. This finding reveals the complex relationship between SE ecosystems and the growth of SEs, and has implications for the construction of supportive SE ecosystems.

Measuring political legitimacy in two dimensions: internal and external measures

Research on political legitimacy encompasses two distinct traditions, one institutionalist and another drawing on political culture accounts of legitimacy. Recent contributions argue in favor of an integration of these two vantage points in the study of political legitimacy. Following these lines of reasoning, we investigate empirically whether a two-dimensional approach in political legitimacy research integrating the institutionalist and political culture perspectives can contribute to establish a more comprehensive and nuanced view on political regimes and their legitimacy. We conceptualize political legitimacy in combining an external normative with an internal empirical perspective, collect data for both and compare the relationship between these two dimensions of political legitimacy in an internationally comparative framework. Using data from Integrated Values Surveys and Varieties of Democracy we find that both dimensions are closely linked in general, discover important deviations from this pattern in the case of citizens' performance evaluations, pinpoint a particular group of hybrid cases that either lost internal or external legitimacy while collecting positive evaluations on the other dimension, and discuss the consequences of these findings for regime stability and future research on political legitimacy.

External democracy promotion in times of internal rule-of-law crisis: the EU and its neighbourhood

ABSTRACT This article seeks to unpack the implications of the deteriorating rule of law within the EU’s eastern members for the EU’s external democracy promotion. We examine the legitimacy of the EU’s support for democracy in the European neighbourhood in light of the internal EU rule-of-law crisis. Adopting a sociological perspective, we emphasize local perceptions of the EU by tracing the legitimation dynamics at play in neighbouring societies. We adopt a tripartite conception of external legitimacy based on appropriateness, utilitarian consensus, and empathy. Using representative public opinion surveys, we show that the democratic erosion in the eastern EU members has not (yet) negatively impacted the EU’s credibility in supporting democracy in the neighbourhood. The article contributes to the research on the legitimacy of EU foreign policy and the literature on the legitimacy of international organizations. It also contributes to the broader effort at provincializing International Relations and decentring EU foreign policy studies.

Implementing shared service centres in Big 4 audit firms: an exploratory study guided by institutional theory

PurposeThis study aims to investigate why and how shared service centres (SSCs) are implemented as well as how they affect audit firm practice and audit quality.Design/methodology/approachIn this qualitative study guided by the theoretical framework of institutional theory, the authors conducted 25 semi-structured interviews in seven European countries, including 16 interviews with audit partners from Big 4 firms, 6 with audit team members, 2 with interviewees from second-tier audit firms and 1 with a member of an oversight body.FindingsThe authors show that the central rationale for audit firms to implement SSCs is economic rather than external legitimacy. The authors find that SSC implementation has substantial effects on audit practices, particularly those related to standardisation, coordination and monitoring activities. The authors also highlight the potential impacts on audit quality.Originality/valueBy exploring the motivation for and effects of SSC implementation amongst audit firms, the authors offer insights into the best practices related to subsequent change processes and audit quality.

The Influence of Internal Governance and External Legitimacy on Greenwashing: A Digitalization Perspective

The Influence of Internal Governance and External Legitimacy on Greenwashing: A Digitalization Perspective

Rationalising externally-driven change: Charities and the exploitation of new-practice requirements

Although legitimacy is critical when attempting to introduce new practices in the nonprofit charity sector, little is known about individual processes of legitimation within such organizations, and how legitimacy emerges and interacts with perceived external pressures. This article investigates how charity organizational actors (using rhetorical arguments) linguistically legitimate/delegitimate new practices as a means of facilitating internal and external legitimacy. The study explores, as an example of organizational change in its early stages, newly-introduced accountability and reporting practices emanating from the current Charity Statement of Recommended Practice in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. The findings show that external regulative and cognitive pressures can be assessed and legitimated as something rational and reasonable in cases where organizational actors perceive the change as “exploitable.” Moreover, they provide evidence of how different interpretations can foster implementation and action (or trigger inaction) and affect the introduction of business-like practices in the nonprofit sector.

The Multinational Enterprises Strategies in Emerging Economies

The purpose of this paper is to review international business articles, particularly what strategies in emerging economies and multinational enterprises subsidiaries strategies. There are two main papers utilized, the first one is Hoskisson, Eden, Lau and Wright's 2000 article, entitled Strategy in Emerging Economies. Strategy formulation and implementation by private and public enterprises in a variety of regional contexts and from three major theoretical perspectives: institutional theory, transaction cost economics, and the resource-based view of the firm. The second paper is Amy J Hillman and William P Wan's 2005 article, The Determinants of MNE Subsidiary Political Strategies: Evidence of Institutional Duality. Using recent theoretical advances in institutional theory that acknowledge that MNE subsidiaries face pressures for isomorphism both within the corporation (internal legitimacy) and within the host country (external legitimacy). A common thread can be drawn between these two articles, namely the use of institutional theory in determining the strategy for multinational enterprises.

Sovereign wealth fund governance: A trade-off between internal and external legitimacy

In this paper, we provide a better understanding of what drives sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) to improve their governance. Using the most recent SWF governance scoreboard from Maire et al. (2021), we estimate a fractional response model to determine whether SWF governance disclosure norms are driven by the search for internal or external legitimacy. Overall, we find that SWFs have better governance when they originate from democratic countries with high-quality, national governance. Our results also show that SWFs tend to have better governance quality when they need to acquire external legitimacy vis-à-vis the target company and its government. In particular, we find that SWFs have an incentive to improve their governance when they are sufficiently internationalized, when the amount of foreign assets invested abroad is sufficiently large or when the amount of shares acquired in developed countries is significant. These findings demonstrate how SWFs may proactively build legitimacy in host countries when they need to adapt their foreign entry strategies. Our results have important implications for understanding the determinants of SWF governance in general.

Re-orientating agricultural research to address complex challenges: Legitimacy dynamics of a hybrid research organisation

Agricultural research organisations play a critical role in the agri-food system; not only through the provision of research and technologies, but also by brokering relationships with stakeholders throughout the research process to create impact. Yet over the past decade, as the focus has shifted towards such multi-actor innovation processes, the role and legitimacy of the agricultural research organisations world-wide has been challenged. Occupying an intermediary position in agricultural innovation systems means that agricultural research institute legitimacy is constantly under pressure from the rural community, academics, policy makers, industry, and general society as the institute attempts to be all things to all people. Here we present the outcomes of an organisational change programme within an applied agricultural research organisation, in response to a government-led agenda to increase impact for research users. By using institutional theory of hybrid organisation legitimacy, we shed light on the multiple institutional logics that co-exist within an agricultural research institute, and how these align with the external institutional environment. We show that with the introduction of a new multi-actor innovation logic, attempts were made to legitimise, externally and internally, knowledge co-production. Yet agricultural research organisations, and those who work within them, need dedicated time for learning and reflecting on the values, beliefs, and practices of the different actors in the innovation system, otherwise they only selectively adopt practices that maintain existing institutional logics. The main theoretical implications show how that change towards an impact culture is influenced by the existing logics, and how organisational legitimacy provides a framing for understanding the success (or otherwise) of introducing new modes of innovation in hybrid research organisations. Practically, space and resourcing are needed to experiment with new logics and deliberate strategies are required to increase the repertoire of research roles while maintaining internal and external legitimacy. The practical implications demonstrate the barriers and opportunities of re-orientating hybrid agricultural research institutes, agricultural innovation systems, and the roles of the researchers that work in them, to deliver to the complex societal challenges facing the agri-food sector.

Foreign Influence and the Legitimacy of Constitution Building in South Sudan

AbstractMany countries write their constitutions with some form of international involvement. Internationalized constitutional assistance has been made easier by technology as well as trade and political exigencies. The question, therefore, is: How does this inevitable foreign influence impact constitutional legitimacy? This article discusses this question and asserts that foreign influence interacts with three approaches of constitutional design to shape constitutional legitimacy: (a) popular participation, (b) elites’ contracts, and (c) transnational constitutional implants. Such a transactional relationship is referred to as the “three-stone legitimacy theory”, which implicates both the internal and the external legitimacy of a constitution. The former means citizens’ acceptance that a constitution meets their aspirations, while the latter refers to the international community's satisfaction with the resulting constitution as guaranteeing the universal democratic ethos. The article ends with a proposition conceptualized as a “blueprint” for a democratic constitutional legitimacy in South Sudan.

일선 경찰관의 민주적 법집행의지에 대한 구조방정식 모형분석

Numerous studies have identified the impact of police self-legitimacy on support for democratic policing. In Korea, a study exploring legitimacy has been underway from the law enforcement's perspective since 2022. This study introduced the concept of police self-legitimacy, which employed a structural equation model analysis to evaluate whether a linear relationship could be predicted in a single model, with self-legitimacy as a mediator, between independent variables and dependent variables.
 Among the independent variables only the relationship with citizens significantly affected the support for democratic policing. The impact of organizational justice and the relationship with superiors, however, was not exist. Among the mediator, it was evident that only self-assesed legitimacy influenced the support for democratic policing, whereas the effect of external legitimacy was not exist. Additionally, the study found that self-assessed legitimacy mediated the influence of citizen relationships on the commitment to support democratic law enforcement. Theoretically, it was anticipated that external legitimacy would exhibit a stronger connection with citizens. So, further exploration should be needed to understand the outcomes via indirect effects mediated by self-assessed legitimacy. This study offers the opportunity to shift the focus towards the normative aspects of law enforcement. By contrasting other viewpoints of both citizens and police police legitimacy, police legitimacy can be comprehended more systematically.

How do professional staff influence academic knowledge development? A literature review and research agenda

ABSTRACT Changing relationships between government and the higher education system have created a wide range of new tasks within universities. Many have been adopted by an emerging workforce known alternately as professional, non-academic, or support staff. Its rapid growth has sparked a debate about ‘administrative bloat’. We aim to move beyond this negative, dismissive framing by reviewing the literature to explore whether and how professional staff influence academic knowledge development. While this specific question has received little scholarly attention, we found relevant research in 54 documents from a diffuse group of journals and authors. Our review makes two specific contributions. First, we examine the competencies and relationships of professional staff and their influence on conditions and processes in universities. We find that professional staff increasingly have a private sector background, but that the implications of such a background for competencies remain opaque. Furthermore, their relationships with university leadership and academics as well as actors beyond the home organization place them in strategic positions in their networks. We claim that their involvement in strategy development and implementation, daily management, and academic practices demonstrate a potential to influence knowledge development. Second, we propose a research agenda to understand this influence. The agenda is built around the institutional logics of professional staff, the institutional work that they engage in to promote these logics, and the resulting influence on knowledge development. We hypothesize that professional staff stimulate convergence in knowledge production and strengthen the higher education system’s external legitimacy as a producer of knowledge.

The Role of European Think Tanks as a Channel of the EU Public Diplomacy Towards Domestic and Foreign Publics

<p>This article examines the role of European think tanks in public diplomacy efforts of the EU. It builds on Bourdieu’s field theory and concept of capital using data from EU official documents, website materials, and semi-structured interviews with representatives of think tanks from Brussels, France, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom, as well as their networks and the EU institutions. The article argues that EU institutions provide financial support for think tanks to obtain political capital in the form of internal and external legitimacy. The European Commission mobilises think tank academic capital by funding their educational activities, which helps to deal with the “democratic deficit” and plays the role of intellectual “soft power” by training current and future policymakers in Europe and beyond as potential allies in competition with other regions. Due to the particularity of the EU public sphere, characterised by the lack of outreach mass media, the European Commission tries to improve its capacity to shape public opinion at the European and global levels by using think tank publicity capital in its communication activities via new media platforms, distinguished by direct access to wider audiences. The European Commission benefits from think tank social capital, encouraging them to create transnational networks regarded as contributing to the promotion of integration within the EU, building relations with candidate countries, and strengthening its position in multilateral negotiations. Although the citizen’s dimension is not always at the core of practices of European think tanks, this article demonstrates their effectiveness as a channel of public diplomacy towards transnational publics.</p>