External Legitimacy Research Articles

A social networks approach for strengthening participation in technology innovation: lessons learnt from the Mount Elgon region of Kenya and Uganda

Participatory approaches to agricultural technology development have not yet fully lived up to their promise to incorporate farmer knowledge. This paper introduces a social networks approach (SNA) to improve participatory research processes for co-innovation. Drawing upon findings from a collaborative project developing conservation agricultural production systems for smallholders in western Kenya and eastern Uganda, the paper explores farmer support networks to improve participation in technological innovation and development. Key research themes include: identifying farmers’ agricultural production networks; the local articulation of agricultural production networks and mindsets; using networks to facilitate meaningful participation in technology development; and disadvantages and advantages of using a social network approach. The introduction of SNA improved participatory research by building external and internal legitimacy for determining who participates, discouraging participatory attrition, and providing a meaningful forum for participation of all stakeholders. As a result, the introduction of SNA is demonstrated to show strong promise for improving processes of participatory technology development in agriculture.

Assessing the sociology of sport: On sport organizations and critical knowledge

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key scholar in the development of the sociology of sport in continental Europe, Fabien Ohl, reflects on Francophone traditions in the development of the field. Considered first is the emergence and recognition of the sociology of sport within Francophone traditions in sociology on one hand and the need to ‘lean’ on the sport sciences on the other. The challenges for the sociology of sport are considered in light of the central tendencies in the life and sport sciences and on the optimization of sporting performance; here it is noted that the sociology of sport must, by necessity, work to keep a place within the sport sciences. The close of the essay considers strategies for advancing external legitimacy for the sociology of sport by gaining recognition of its value within the sport sciences and in sport management; here gaining access to sport organizations and showing the value of a ‘sociological lens’ are deemed essential.

Disclosure practices of foreign and domestic firms in Australia

Even while straddling the global economy, multinational corporations (MNCs) need to adapt to different institutional regimes in host country markets in which they operate. This research examines the extent to which MNC-subsidiaries are embedded in their local institutional context in terms of how they pursue local legitimacy and respond to local laws and standards of disclosure of executive remuneration in the host country. Drawing attention to key socio-economic influences on foreign MNC-subsidiaries, we examine whether global MNCs respond to disclosure requirements in a host country and address a higher level of information asymmetry associated with multinational operations. The analysis of disclosure levels of MNC-subsidiaries vis-à-vis domestic firms suggests that, other things being equal, MNCs are more responsive to increased disclosure requirements than their local counterparts if they have substantial economic interactions with domestic product-markets. These results demonstrate that MNCs are willing to incur the marginal cost of increasing disclosure if commensurate benefits justify it. Another interesting finding relates to the negative association between legal system type (common law) of MNC's parent country and disclosure level of director and executive remuneration. It highlights that MNC-subsidiaries with higher regulatory (institutional) distance disclose better level of remuneration to gain external legitimacy and reduce their liability of foreignness.

“What is, Becomes What is Right”: A Conceptual Framework of Newcomer Legitimacy for Online Discussion Communities

Online community newcomers can face challenges in community participation, acceptance and fostering member relationships. Consequently, a crucial behavioral strategy for community acceptance identified by previous research is legitimacy. However, current conceptions lack classification and structure, and have a narrow focus. A broader scope for investigating legitimacy is needed for improved theoretical and practical application. This research expands on newcomer legitimacy by classifying newcomer behavior in 4 parenting and cycling discussion communities using directed content analysis. The analysis developed a newcomer legitimacy conceptual framework with categories including geographical, contextual, cultural, testimonial, lurking and external legitimacy. This research offers a valuable contribution by classifying existing theory, developing new theory, and providing a conceptual framework to guide future studies of newcomer behavior.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Internal–External Legitimacy Tensions and EU Foreign Policy in the European Periphery

In the wider EU periphery, the effectiveness of EU policy is dependent on external perceptions of EU legitimacy and the local resonance of EU norms. However, the EU often faces tensions between the internal legitimacy demanded by key non-state actors within the EU and the external legitimacy needed for the effective export of policy — leaving the EU caught at times between internal legitimacy and external effectiveness. Furthermore, these tensions are often the product of ‘antagonistic’ relationships between European transnational actors and third-party states. These legitimacy tensions, and the antagonistic relationships which exacerbate them, help to explain how legitimacy plays an important role in both the ‘capability-expectations’ and the ‘normativity-outcomes’ gaps that are said to afflict EU foreign policy. This article seeks to provide a conceptually rich discussion of these legitimacy tensions and present empirical examples through a case study on the issue of human rights and democracy in Central Asia.

Rehabilitating the sick role: the experiences of high-risk women who undergo risk reducing breast surgery

In recent years, Talcott Parsons’ work has come under renewed scrutiny by sociologists who argue that his concept of the sick role has a role to play in current accounts of health and illness. In this paper we describe the ways in which Australian women who had undergone elective risk-reducing breast surgery (with or without ovarian surgery) spoke about their convalescence. Women presented two contrasting recovery narratives in describing their experiences, with the negative effects of breast surgery either minimised or emphasised. In an effort to explain these differences, we draw upon the Parsonian concept of the sick role and argue that the extent to which women either embraced or rejected the sick role in their accounts was related to the amount of external legitimation they had received from healthcare professionals. We conclude that the concept of the sick role may provide useful insight into women's experiences of risk-management today.

Traditional acupuncturists and higher education in Britain: The dual, paradoxical impact of biomedical alignment on the holistic view

Traditional acupuncturists' quest for external legitimacy in Britain involves the standardization of their knowledge bases through the development of training schools and syllabi, formal educational structures, and, since the 1990s, the teaching of undergraduate courses within (or validated by) Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), a process which entails biomedical alignment of the curriculum. However, as holistic discourses were commonly used as a rhetorical strategy by CAM practitioners to distance themselves from biomedicine and as a source of public appeal, this ‘mainstreaming’ process evoked practitioners' concerns that their holistic claims are being compromised. An additional challenge is being posed by a group of academics and scientists in Britain who launched an attack on CAM courses taught in HEIs, accusing them of being ‘unscientific’ and ‘non-academic’ in nature. This paper explores the negotiation of all these challenges during the formalization of traditional acupuncture education in Britain, with a particular focus on the role of HEIs. The in-depth qualitative investigation draws on several data sets: participant observation in a university validated acupuncture course; in-depth interviews; and documentary analysis. The findings show how, as part of the formalization process, acupuncturists in Britain (re)negotiate their holistic, anti-reductionist discourses and claims in relation to contemporary societal, political and cultural forces. Moreover, the teaching and validation of acupuncture courses by HEIs may contribute to broadening acupuncturists' ‘holistic awareness’ of societal and cultural influences on individuals' and communities' ill-health. This investigation emphasises the dynamic and context-specific (rather than fixed and essentialized) nature of acupuncture practice and knowledge.

Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs)

Multidisciplinary coordinated Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) are a growing model of providing health, legal, and emotional support services to victims of sexual assault. This article conceptualizes SARTs from an organizational perspective and explores three approaches to researching SARTs that have the potential of increasing our understanding of the benefits and challenges of multidisciplinary service delivery. These approaches attend to several levels of organizational behavior, including the organizational response to external legitimacy pressures, the inter-organizational networks of victim services, and the negotiation of power and disciplinary boundaries. Possible applications to organizational research on SARTs are explored.

Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation

AbstractThis article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analytical work required in building the Kiribati Adaptation Project as a World Bank success story and policy model worthy of replication in new sites is demonstrated. However, heeding calls within the policy mobilities literature to avoid fetishizing mobility and attending to the contradictions between global flows and local institutional specificity, the article finds limited evidence of replication in noted sites of emulation. Instead, there is compulsive citation, publication, and circulation of experiences and successes within the World Bank, which operates to build internal and external legitimacy.

Documentality and legitimacy in future libraries – an analytical framework for initiated speculation

Purpose– The purpose of this article is to contribute to a discussion about the future of librarianship.Design/methodology/approach– An analytical framework is used to discuss the future of libraries. The framework is based on current trends in contemporary librarianship and is used as a way of structuring predictions about the future of librarianship. Special attention is given to public libraries and academic libraries.Findings– Libraries are seen moving from a traditional situation with a high degree of constitutive documentality and internal legitimacy with collections in focus to one with a high degree of performative documentality and external legitimacy, with adjustment to user needs as the prime goal. This development is related to the emergence of New Public Management and can be seen both in public and academic libraries. It is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.Originality/value– The analytical framework and concepts used are originally developed for this text and prove to be valuable tools in fulfilling the purpose of the article. It represents a new and original way of discussing the future of libraries.

Directors' Social Identifications and Board Tasks: Evidence from Finland

Manuscript Type Empirical Research Question/Issue Scholars and practitioners have been interested in the tasks of boards of directors, yet we know relatively little about the impact of directors' social identification on their engagement in specific board tasks. Examining the 92 largest Finnish industrial organizations, we explore how the directors' identification with the organization, its shareholders, and customers affects the extent to which the board engages in external legitimacy, networking, advice and counsel, top management monitoring, financial monitoring, strategic participation, and strategic evaluation tasks. Research Findings/Insights Following the social identity perspective, we provide new insight to understand the relationship between board tasks and the directors' relevant identifications. We find that organizational identification is positively related to the level of board task involvement. We also discover that shareholder identification is negatively related to strategic participation tasks and only weakly related to other board tasks. Theoretical/Academic Implications We contribute to the present literature on boards of directors by applying an empirical, analytical lens to theories on how and why directors engage in board tasks. In particular, we show that different social identifications of the directors have different explanatory power towards the subsets of resource provision and monitoring tasks. Practitioner/Policy Implications Our findings suggest a re-evaluation of the shareholder supremacy view as the only driver of value creation for the organization. Additionally, we advocate that board, organization, and industry characteristics are similarly weak in predicting the involvement of the directors in the board tasks examined.

Degrees of legitimacy: Ensuring internal and external support in the absence of recognition

Unrecognised states, such as Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Transnistria are denied (widespread) international recognition, and have therefore tended to be viewed as illegitimate entities by the international community. This is despite much recent academic literature which has rejected binary conceptions of sovereignty and has demonstrated both the varying levels of international engagement available to non-state actors and the degrees of statehood and legitimacy that can be achieved without (external) sovereignty. Taking this literature as its starting point, but based on a reconceptualization of existing approaches to legitimacy in the context of non-recognition, this article analyses legitimation strategies adopted by unrecognised states and how these affect their degree of internal and external legitimacy. Drawing on evidence from several case studies, it finds that there is often a fraught relationship between different forms of legitimacy. Both external and internal legitimacy are crucial if unrecognised states are to survive, but external legitimacy is always problematic in the absence of recognition and attempts to garner external support risk undermining the internal legitimacy achieved. Strategies for ensuring internal legitimacy can similarly undermine attempts to achieve external support. These tensions affect both the type of governance found in these entities and their ability to survive.

Bureaucratic power at play? The performance of the EU in the International Atomic Energy Agency

This article examines the performance of the European Union (EU) in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Following Barnett and Finnemore, the article argues that the EU as an intergovernmental organization (IO) possesses bureaucratic power based on high technical knowledge and rational–legal authority that it can use to gain influence in the Agency. The EU uses its technical knowledge to be a first-mover in political and technical discussions, and uses its financial support to influence the Agency's technical standards and practices for nuclear safeguards, security, and safety. Nevertheless, the analysis shows that its rational–legal authority as an international organization is limited. Being a regional IO, it does not automatically possess the impartiality and hence legitimacy that ordinarily characterize an international organization. Thus, to further improve its performance in the IAEA, the EU must look beyond internal policy issues and focus on its external legitimacy and standing as well.

Somaliland: Dynamics of internal legitimacy and (lack of) external sovereignty

Despite its strong legal and historical claims to sovereignty, the Republic of Somaliland remains entirely unrecognized by the international community more than 20years after it proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991. Paradoxically, Somaliland’s lack of external legitimacy has, in some ways, facilitated the growth and development of its internal legitimacy. In contrast, Somalia enjoys widespread external recognition from the international community but has very little domestic legitimacy and largely fails to govern effectively the territory it claims. Somaliland’s high degree of domestic legitimacy and its strong desire for external recognition increasingly come into conflict with one another both in the eastern parts of Somaliland and in the continued democratic development of its hybrid domestic political institutions. The safest prediction for Somaliland is continued de facto statehood where its strong internal legitimacy enables it to survive in a hostile external environment but fails to translate into widespread sovereign recognition of its significant domestic accomplishments. Ultimately, though, Somaliland’s ability to deliver the “goods” on economic development and poverty reduction for its citizens will be significantly hampered without external recognition of its domestic achievements.

Contested norms in new-adopter states: International determinants of LGBT rights legislation

This article is concerned with the question of why lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights legislation is introduced at higher levels in some cases and less so in others. To address this puzzle, the article analyzes changes in LGBT rights legislation across European Union (EU) member states between 1970 and 2009. It focuses on the diffusion of five different categories of such legislation (anti-discrimination, criminal law, partnership, parenting rights, and equal sexual offenses provisions) to new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe, compared with diffusion patterns in older EU member states. I argue that new-adopter states are more dependent on international resources for making new issues visible and are more inclined to see policy adoption as a means to gain external legitimacy and improve reputation. The analysis reveals that the transnational embeddedness of a state’s LGBT advocacy organizations is a powerful statistical explanation for successful policy diffusion to new EU member states, alongside international channels that lead to LGBT visibility among society and state authorities. In addition to lending cross-national, empirical reinforcement to some of the theoretical expectations regarding the international sources of diffusion, the results suggest variability in the determinants of LGBT policy adoption between the 15 old and 12 new EU states. Domestic factors, particularly economic modernization, are more relevant for policy adoption in the older member states, whereas the newer member states display greater dependence on transnational actors and are more influenced by international channels.

Clearing the Cupboard: The Role of Public Relations in London Clearing Banks’ Collective Legitimacy-Seeking, 1950–1980

This essay conceptualizes and historically documents a negle cted trade association function: legitimacy-seeking. It uses the Committee of London Clearing Bankers case to show how an association can, by using manipulative public relations techniques, fulfil that function for its members. To the circumstances that prevent rent-seeking associations from becoming industry level efficiency enhancers, the essay adds a new factor—a political legitimacy crisis. Through the Committee, the banks’ leaders responded to such a crisis in the 1970s prompted by the threat of bank nationalization. The case yields the following generalizable point. When members are faced with an external legitimacy threat, a trade association, even one with a history of collaborative learning, can get stuck at the rent-seeking end of the associational spectrum. By morphing from a cartel into merely a vehicle for asserting its members’ political legitimacy through instrumental public relations, this is just where the Committee remained on that continuum.

Clearing the Cupboard: The Role of Public Relations in London Clearing Banks’ Collective Legitimacy-Seeking, 1950–1980

This essay conceptualizes and historically documents a negle cted trade association function: legitimacy-seeking. It uses the Committee of London Clearing Bankers case to show how an association can, by using manipulative public relations techniques, fulfil that function for its members. To the circumstances that prevent rent-seeking associations from becoming industry level efficiency enhancers, the essay adds a new factor—a political legitimacy crisis. Through the Committee, the banks’ leaders responded to such a crisis in the 1970s prompted by the threat of bank nationalization. The case yields the following generalizable point. When members are faced with an external legitimacy threat, a trade association, even one with a history of collaborative learning, can get stuck at the rent-seeking end of the associational spectrum. By morphing from a cartel into merely a vehicle for asserting its members’ political legitimacy through instrumental public relations, this is just where the Committee remained on that continuum.

Human rights, self-determination, and external legitimacy

It is commonly supposed that (a) at least some states possess a moral right against external intervention in their domestic affairs and (b) all human rights violations give members of the international community reasons to undertake preventive or remedial action against offending states. No state, however, currently protects or could reasonably be expected to protect its subjects’ human rights to a perfect degree. In view of this reality, many have found it difficult to explain how any existing or readily foreseeable state could enjoy a moral right of nonintervention without denying the normative force of human rights. This article seeks to reconcile these apparently incompatible commitments by arguing that, in addition to acting in defense of human rights, outsiders must be appropriately responsive to individuals’ distinct and potentially countervailing interests in collective self-determination. I show that, under certain demanding but not unrealistic conditions, individuals’ interests in self-determination are of sufficient weight not simply to ground a judgment against intervention in particular cases but to generate arobust right of nonintervention on the part of some states that nevertheless fail to secure perfect protection of their subjects’ human rights.

Citizen networks in the Garden City: Protecting urban ecosystems in rapid urbanization

Citizen groups can be important actors in urban environmental stewardship, and network structure often influences function and performance. However, most previous studies focus on cities in “developed” countries, thereby overlooking conditions relevant for the parts of the planet where most people live and most urban growth is expected. This paper describes a citizen network engaged in environmental issues in Bangalore, India, where rapid urbanization puts pressure on conventional management structures as well as the ecosystems providing benefits for the city's inhabitants. The study uses a mixed methods approach of qualitative interviews and social network analysis. Results show that the citizen network functions as a platform that enables interaction between diverse interest groups, and as a watchdog that monitors parks, lakes and trees to prevent further loss of fragmented urban ecosystems. The network's activities are influenced by internal tensions between inclusiveness and efficiency, and between internal and external legitimacy. Although core actors have central network positions, strong leadership or political alliances are not considered important; members instead prefer to emphasize transparency and democratic participation. This limits the capacity to act collectively on controversial issues, but creates an inclusive forum that bridges between groups in the heterogeneous and dynamic population. This is important for monitoring Bangalore's fragmented ecosystems and for raising public awareness and support. Findings indicate an urgent need to develop a comprehensive framework for urban environmental stewardship, to better describe potential roles of citizens in governance across diverse social, political and ecological conditions, and during different periods of urban change.

La cárcel a la luz de los derechos humanos: Análisis de límites al poder punitivo estatal legítimo

Imprisonments in Colombia are the main outcome of criminal procedures. It is also the scenery that best illustrates the illegitimacy of the prison punishments in the legal system, taking into account the principles of the legal order. Currently there is, indeed, a lack of external legitimation of Criminal Law, which has been provided with the “function of ultima ratio” in the social sciences. That is, a fundamental element of social control. As important as it is, the delegitimizationof imprisonment due to its excessive use in Colombia presents many flaws if we consider the principle of proportionality. Therefore, in the Colombian context, the legal system is not oriented towards its goal of sustaining the model of State that is established in the Political Constitution in the first article, which claims that the latter is based on the respect for human dignity. In this paper I state that the excessive use of imprisonment as the main punishment in Colombia´s legal system contrasts the model of State proclaimed in the constitution. This, prison, currently an anachronistic institution, must be limited only to serious crimes. Several alternatives to jail are presented, making an emphasis on the importance to provide as well alternatives to delinquency.