Legitimate Practice Research Articles

The intellectualisation and categorisation of early modern fencing

ABSTRACT This paper traces the changes to the intellectual classification of fencing. The authors of fencing treatises attempted to shift the perception of fencing from its long held violent connotations and towards a more elevated and legitimate practice. This change was prompted by multiple factors, key amongst them were the proliferation of print, the rise of the duel, and courtesy books, such as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. These factors allowed fencing to be reconceived with new methods and to reach a wider audience. However, to appeal to a larger and increasingly educated audience, early modern fencing treatises adopted new pedagogical tools and made efforts to legitimise fencing, elevating their new methods above fencing’s violent nature. To achieve this elevation, authors of fencing treatises attempted to raise fencing’s intellectual standing through the application of the trivium and later geometry and humanistic learning, in order to reposition fencing as a practice worthy of gentlemanly study. In this paper, I outline the process of this change and argue that, despite concerted effort to intellectualise fencing, as a means to obtain legitimacy, attempts were never wholly successful, due to an inability to completely separate conceptions of violence from the new science.

Not ready in the ways that count- a qualitative exploration of junior doctor's perceived preparedness for practice using Legitimation Code Theory.

Despite demonstrating the required competencies to graduate, many newly qualified doctors find the transition to internship difficult. There is a concern over whether their preparation is aligned with the expectations of the role. This study aimed to gain a better understanding of the competencies needed for legitimate practice as junior doctors and explores their perceived preparedness for practice. A qualitative, descriptive study using focus groups was undertaken with first year internship doctors. Thirty-two junior doctors in their first year of internship took part in five focus groups. The data were analysed using a reflective thematic analysis approach with a subsequent analysis using the Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) specialisation dimension coding framework to aid interpretation. Personal attributes including adaptability, organisation and proactivity form the basis of achievement in internship. While graduates felt ready in some ways, it was not in the ways that counted. Participants felt well prepared in terms of their clinical knowledge and skills, but legitimacy came from being able to take responsibility, communicate effectively and apply knowledge confidently and efficiently to all aspects of patient care, something that they did not feel ready to do. Using LCT has revealed a shift in the basis of achievement between medical school, where individual academic performance is rewarded, and internship, where personal and social competencies are legitimised. There is a clash between what graduates feel well prepared for and the expectations and demands of the internship role, resulting in a difficult and stressful transition from student to doctor.

Telemedicine in Italy: Healthcare authorization profiles in the modern medico-legal reading.

The ruling n. 38485, 20 June 2019, of the Italian Supreme Court, III criminal section, addressed by the perspective of the law the very sensitive and new issue of telemedicine. This commentary deals with the issue of authorization of telemedicine activities by the health authority, starting from the Italian Court of Criminal Cassation, III section, decision n. 38485/2019. The case law explored the authorization of a health point, which carries out telemedicine services. Starting from the perspective discussed by Italian health regulations, the paper examines how the health act could be defined, with the possibilities offered by telecommunications, and how it now relates legally to the physical place where it takes place. Even if telemedicine opens the way to virtual spaces of health practice, the Ministry of Health Italian Guidelines pose functional and logistical issues to guarantee users' safety and health care system accountability. Then, functional requirements for health legitimate practice, and their continuous monitoring, together with the responsibilities of the service centers, health professionals and health facilities, are discussed. The questioning of States' health law, in a broad health system such as that of the Europe, characterized by autonomous health regulations, is extremely important for cross-border health policy with telemedicine, as overall regulatory compliance in health care is the ground criterion for risk prevention and patient safety, to be properly verified.

The role of sociomateriality in the formalisation and legitimation practices of openness paradox

The role of sociomateriality in the formalisation and legitimation practices of openness paradox

Substance- or legitimacy-oriented (de)legitimation of global governance institutions. The double-edged role of complexity

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to International Relations studies on the (de)legitimation of global governance institutions by introducing a focus on substance-oriented (de)legitimation practices to complement existing legitimacy-oriented perspectives. Building on the distinction between performance and performativity, the paper clarifies the concepts of performing (de)legitimation as legitimacy-oriented and performative (de)legitimation as substance-oriented. It argues that while the former primarily aims to contest or establish legitimacy, the latter targets substantive outcomes but affects legitimacy as a by-product. The paper introduces three distinguishing criteria – orientation toward legitimacy or substance, focus on form or function, and justificatory or substantive manifestation – to differentiate between the two. Their empirical manifestation is illustrated through a case study of the United Nations’ open-ended intergovernmental working group on business and human rights, which highlights the role of complexity and how it can serve both sets of (de)legitimation practices by contributing to legitimacy and substance, respectively.

A quest for legitimacy? An exploratory study of the new meanings of sports and physical activity in contemporary Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Arabian Kingdom is currently undergoing significant socio-cultural changes, primarily driven by Vision 2030, a strategic document outlining the nation's future development. This initiative includes efforts to enhance sports participation and physical activity levels across various sectors of the country. This paper represents one of the first attempts to understand the effects of the Vision on domestic sports/physical activities policy through the lens of selected actors in the field. with a special interest in youth sports. Based on extensive fieldwork that took place within the country, including qualitative semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from various organisations within Saudi sports, we identify several key facets seen as crucial enablers or obstacles for the field of sports and physical activities. The individual facets form two main groups – activities of state authorities in Saudi Arabia, specifically the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Sports, and informal practices influenced by broader cultural changes oscillating between the traditional views and contemporary demands. Amongst the identified cultural facets, gender takes a crucial discursive position. As we examine these processes through the lens of concepts of soft power and rightful resistance, we identify formal and informal legitimation practices used by stakeholders to achieve and potentially surpass the goals set by Vision 2030 for the Kingdom's sporting landscape.

Promoting mindfulness in education: Scientisation, psychology and epistemic capital

Mindfulness is increasingly found in many educational settings in the United Kingdom, but existing research has focused primarily on clinical efficacy or implementation issues, rather than sociological interests. This article draws on data from the ‘Mapping Mindfulness in the UK’ study to help explain the successful growth of mindfulness in education, by exploring the discursive strategies through which practitioners construct, promote and solicit support for the practice among policymakers and educational leaders. The analysis highlights the significance of certain authorities or epistemic capitals, and logics of ‘scientisation’, for positioning mindfulness as a credible and legitimate practice for educational contexts, yet also reveals competing discourses and alternative conceptualisations. In doing so, it extends theories of ‘scientisation’ by explicating the role of ‘harder’ and ‘softer’ forms of psychology within these processes. The research makes original contributions to sociological understandings of mindfulness and education, while offering new insights on broader theories concerning science and society.

Locked out? Navigating the geographies of precarity on Britain's waterways

AbstractMotivations for living on the UK's waterways range from lifestyle to financial, but increasing numbers have been pushed aboard in response to current, and longstanding, cost‐of‐living and housing crises. However, while more affordable than living on land, our qualitative investigation reveals a diversity of practices and experiences of marginalisation on the waterways, drawing out the impacts of temporal and spatial fluidity to inform our understanding of precarity in a mobile world. The waterways are a contested and politicised space with diverse actors seeking to delineate legitimate practices and users. Liveaboard boaters practice residential subjectivities in what others designate as leisure spaces. Resistance to such powerful claims to the waterways is not necessarily chosen or active and yet has become implicit to boaters' everyday practices. The mobility and liminality offered by boat living, experienced by some as a chosen freedom and others as a restrictive imposition, presents opportunities for resistance to powerful interests but also social marginalisation and stigmatisation. Through a focus on moorings, we highlight the legal and spatial grey areas regularly inhabited by all boaters. In seemingly secure marinas, we expose a hidden world of housing precarity with residential boaters' living in the shadows of these leisure‐designed spaces, resulting in no stability, security or statutory rights. For boaters out on the waterways, precarity continued, albeit with different manifestations. Powerful local actors mobilise narratives that disembed boaters from the waterways through the absence and poor maintenance of essential facilities alongside the loss of legal, safe mooring sites. Precarity emerges as not something restricted to ‘vulnerable groups’ but an ever present ontological condition. As such it is critical to understand how individuals and communities are responding to their implicit vulnerability, and the opportunities and challenges that mobility offers to the development and practice of this agency.

A multimodal analysis of (de)legitimation through argumentation in extremist discourse: The case of Dabiq

Abstract Even after the demise of its territorial caliphate in 2019, ISIS persists as a potent threat, adapting to new technologies and maintaining its status as an active insurgency. Amidst the backdrop of the terror group’s demonstrated resilience, this paper examines its practice of (de)legitimation and language of persuasion through a multimodal argumentation analysis. It combines the argumentation strategies (topoi) proposed by Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and tools from Social Semiotics with argumentation theories, achieved through a comprehensive enthymematic deconstruction of arguments in ISIS’s e-magazine, Dabiq. The findings reveal four interrelated sets of plausibly inferable premises, namely, advantage and disadvantage; threat and obligation; negative consequence and history; and authority and Shariah law. These premises fall within broad social, political, historical, and religious categories and are deliberately crafted to lend support to ISIS’s desired conclusions, aimed at systematically altering the addressees’ state of knowledge and eventually eliciting acceptance from the intended public.

Russia and the liberal order: from contestation to antagonism

Abstract Russia's large-scale war against Ukraine is rightfully viewed as a major violation of the fundamental norms of international society. It creates a problem for the literature on the liberal international order, which used to treat Russia as engaging in contestation—a legitimate practice which, according to some accounts, constitutes an essential aspect of any order. This article aims to develop a conceptual frame for the radical rupture resulting from the war by describing it as an expansion of antagonism. In the post-structuralist theory employed here, antagonism is always present at the margins of any order as a daily experience of failure, of the impossibility of total ordering. Russia's war started from the rhetorical negation of Ukraine's existence as a sovereign nation, but expanded into an antagonism that eventually threatens to ‘cancel’ Russia itself. To explore this case conceptually and empirically, I approach international order as a set of performative practices unfolding within a hegemonic structure. Russia is not alone in perceiving the liberal hegemony as unjust, but the expansion of antagonism on such a scale is rather unique. It can be damaging to democracy worldwide unless it is mobilized for the construction of broader anti-war coalitions.

The practice of information appraisal: An ethnographic study of a health information intervention.

As healthcare systems grow increasingly complex, greater demands are placed on patients' abilities to find, understand, appraise, and use health information - often termed their 'health literacy'. Most health literacy research does not focus on information appraisal. When it does, there is a tendency to equate it with patients' assessment of credibility. This reproduces a healthcare-centric understanding of information appraisal where patient agency is omitted. This study explores how participants in a health information intervention practiced information appraisal. The intervention aimed to increase information uptake for people with low back pain by delivering health information to them through animations. This study draws on ethnographic participant observation of the encounters between the intervention and its participants, including 49 rapid interviews and semi-structured telephone interviews with 23 participants carried out in the spring of 2021. Inspired by a social practice approach, the study thoroughly grounds the health literacy subcategory of 'appraisal' in practice. It illustrates that participants appraised the information provided in the intervention according to several factors. These include relating the information to their personal health needs, interpreting the intended audience of the health animations, and prioritising their attention situationally between the animations and other immediate concerns. We suggest that information appraisal is a fundamental component of health literacy and should be considered key in research, policy and practice. To accommodate current healthcare ideals of patient centeredness, empowerment and informed choice, the complex and dynamic ways in which people appraise health information need be considered legitimate practices of health literacy.

When an International Organization Fails to Legitimate: The Decline of the OSCE

Abstract Various international organizations have recently faced legitimacy crises, but many have demonstrated resilience and relegitimated their rule. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is an exception. It is clearly an organization in decline and is on the brink of irrelevance. The closure of its Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine in April 2022 in the wake of the Russian attack is only the latest manifestation of the organization’s long-term legitimacy crisis. Based on the case of the OSCE, this article contributes to the study of legitimacy crises to better understand when such crises can lead to decline. Drawing on twenty interviews with senior officials, the analysis suggests that the OSCE’s failure to (re)legitimate has two interrelated causes: (1) the organization’s institutional weaknesses and impeded leadership have prevented OSCE actors from engaging in effective legitimation practices, and (2) the heterogeneous and largely zero-sum preferences of the OSCE participating states have made them unwilling audiences for (re)legitimation practices. In doing so, the article contributes to our comprehension of the consequences of legitimacy crises.

Theorising political legitimisation: From stasis to processes

Legitimacy remains a key concept in political sociology, and perhaps even more so in lay understandings of political processes and structures, as evidenced by conflict over territories and regimes around the world. However, the concept suffers from a rather static representation, and even when addressed in processual form, in terms of specific moments in the process, such as conditions favouring legitimacy or its effects. Building from an Eliasian perspective, we argue for a more processual concept of legitimisation to encompass the dynamic social networks (figurations) that constitute the more unintentional context for deliberate legitimation claims. As networks expand and intensify, processes of legitimisation incorporate changing and more diverse bases for legitimacy claims, as well as a greater variety of such claims and counterclaims. As the power relations between contending groups change, legitimation practices become part of the integrating functions of the state, shaping figurations and the social habitus.

The Legitimation of International Organizations: Introducing a New Dataset

Abstract This article introduces a new dataset on how international organizations (IOs) justify their authority. For a long time, IOs were believed to derive legitimacy from member-state consent and technocratic problem-solving capacities. Over recent decades, the growing politicization of IOs, political polarization within Western democracies, and power shifts in the international system have spurred IOs’ efforts to justify their right to rule, using a variety of legitimation practices. While research on the theory and practice of IO legitimation has grown considerably over the past decade, much of this work builds on case studies of prominent global and regional IOs. As a result, we lack data suitable for systematic comparative analyses across time, IOs, and world regions. The Legitimation Strategies of Regional Organizations (LegRO) dataset aims to narrow this gap, providing data on the standards, intensity, and modes of legitimation for twenty eight regional IOs from 1980 to 2019. These variables inform theoretical and policy-relevant research on contemporary global governance by providing the first systematic overview of IOs’ legitimation practices.

‘Battleship at the port of Europe’: Italy's closed-port policy and its legitimizing narratives

From March 2018 to August 2019, during Matteo Salvini's mandate as Minister of the Interior, Italy implemented the so-called ‘closed-port policy’, the closure of Italy's ports to migrant-rescue ships. This policy was initially pursued by Salvini's direct will through circulars before being justified ex-post by a legislative act. This paper analyses the lively parliamentary debates around rescue at sea in order to illustrate the majority's discursive rationales in support of the closed-port policy and its transformation into law. Theoretically, this work adopts a multidisciplinary perspective which combines the works on critique and justification (Boltanski, Thévenot 2006; Boltanski, 2011) with those on legitimacy (Schulze, 2015) to speak to the political geography debate concerning border and migration regimes. These literatures enable the paper to innovatively approach the crucial role of parliaments as conflictual arenas which require governing majorities to enact specific legitimation strategies. By adopting this perspective, this work sheds light on the disputed rationale of migration policies while exploring how legitimation practices worked within the Italian Parliament. My argument unfolds in three main stages: first, the article examines the genealogy of the closed-port policy; second, it explores the legitimation strategies put in place by the majority in order to justify its policy and law; and last, it looks at how specific geographical imaginaries underpin the main narratives constructed through these different legitimation strategies.

Habitus Reshaping through the Search for Entrepreneurial Legitimacy in the High Velocity Field

Using the conceptual peculiarity of Bourdieu's theory, in this paper we aim to provide a new theoretical contribution to the understanding of the relational dynamics of legitimation in entrepreneurship. In-depth, contextual examination of entrepreneurs in 70 companies in the computer programming industry was carried out to determine how legitimation practices are shaped in relation to the dynamics of the relationship between entrepreneurs and the social structure. We base the methodological strength of the research on the rigour of the grounded theory method, using multiple data sources and data collection techniques (in-depth interviews, observations, and qualitative and quantitative secondary data). Our results reveal that susceptibility to hysteresis of habitus is what strongly defines the directions of the search for legitimation. By elucidating them, we show the natural coexistence of entrepreneur profiles of conflicting legitimation strategies, while also contributing to the understanding of shaping the entrepreneurial habitus in the high velocity field.

Elites’ (De)legitimation Practices toward International Organizations

Abstract Research on legitimacy of international organizations (IOs) has often focused on discursive self-legitimation by IOs. This article explores the role of other (de)legitimizing actors. Distinguishing between elites of different political and societal sectors, we use unique data from a survey of 860 political and societal elites in Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and a global elite group, to perform the first systematic analysis of elites’ (de)legitimation practices toward IOs. We analyze behavioral as well as discursive practices that may boost or challenge citizens’ legitimacy beliefs toward IOs, and describe how elites’ repertoires of (de)legitimation practices vary across IOs, elite sectors, and geographical locations. Explanatory analyses test whether the use of legitimation and delegitimation practices can be explained by characteristics of the interviewed elites. We find that most elites engage in (de)legitimation of IOs. Legitimation is more common than delegitimation. While discursive practices are more frequently used, behavioral practices are more widespread than acknowledged in previous research. Societal elites are more frequent (de)legitimizers of IOs than assumed in more state-centric accounts of global governance. Attitudes of elite individuals (confidence in the IO and ideological position) partly explain engagement in (de)legitimation. By providing the general pattern of elite (de)legitimation of IOs, the article sets the scene for more detailed case studies of diverse (de)legitimation practices toward specific IOs.

Managing the crisis: International organisations’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as legitimation work

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes legitimation practices of international organisations in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse a sample of 252 major international governmental organisations (IGOs) and 250 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), using information collected from their websites in September – December 2020. We seek to understand why the vast majority of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the crisis and what were the different types of reactions. We study variations in legitimation practices among different types of organisations – governmental vs non-governmental, general-purpose vs task-specific, large vs small, etc. Drawing on rational choice and neo-institutionalist scholarship, we test several hypotheses to account for the patterns of IO’s legitimation work triggered by COVID-19 crisis. Our findings give some support to both theoretical perspectives. Organisation’s resources are the best predictor for its conduct in response to the crisis. At the same time, organisations largely behave in a conformist way, actively engaging in legitimation work, and investing in their public visibility in relation to COVID-19 pandemic.

Es nuestra tradición: the archaeological implications of an ethnography on a modern ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico

AbstractPre-hispanic ballgames have an extensive temporal depth and geographical breadth across Mesoamerica, with over 1,500 ball courts recorded on 1,200 archaeological sites in Mexico alone. It is likely that ballgames played critical but variable roles in how communities related to each other. Most interpretations emphasize ballgames as cosmological rituals and legitimation practices exclusive to elites, perhaps often overlooking the more mundane sociopolitical processes and reasons why they carried such critical meaning for people of all classes and statuses. Ethnographic research on modern ballgames played by Indigenous and mestizo communities today can helpfully provide some insights or maybe deeper understandings into ancient ballgame practices and their relation to Mesoamerican communities. While modern games are not isomorphic with the ancient games, the duration of these traditions underscores their continuing importance and their relativity to current research. In this article I present the results of an ethnographic study of the modern ballgame pelota mixteca de hule (Mixtec rubber ballgame) in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Considering the results from the ethnographic data, I then discuss an archaeological case study in the Nejapa Valley of southeastern Oaxaca where numerous ballcourts were recently documented over the past decade.

The Legitimation Effects of Peacebuilding and Development Interventions—Strengthening Land Registration in Northern Uganda

Fostering legitimate authority has become a priority of the international peacebuilding and development community, notably in fragile states and conflict-affected settings. Yet, how peacebuilding and development interventions feed into legitimation practices of public authorities remains underexplored, let alone how interveners can strategize on this. Analysis of programs to support land registration in Northern Uganda brings out how interventions not just enhance the legitimacy of targeted authorities. Often unintentionally, they impact on struggles for legitimacy between different state and nonstate authorities and change their relative legitimacy. They do so by redistributing land governance roles and responsibilities; stimulating certain practices of land governance; and contributing to the discussion on legitimacy assessments. The conclusion argues for more sensitivity to legitimation effects of peacebuilding and development interventions.