Legitimation Strategies Research Articles

The art of balance: Indigenous sport governance between traditional government and self-governance

The governance of Indigenous people is in many contexts a combination of political ambitions to promote self-governance, and more traditional policies and governance practices. These combinations often carry unintended contradictions and exclusionary processes. In this article, we investigate the consequences of one such contradiction: the aspiration for self-determination and self-governance on the one hand and the aspiration for broader political influence in decisions about resources to Sámi sport on the other. Since legitimation of governance structures and practices is essential for their overall functionality, we constructed the research question: What strategies are used to legitimise the policy and governance practices of Sámi sport? To explore this research question, we employed Sámi sport in Finland as an empirical case. Results show that authorisation as a legitimation strategy is prominent and used at institutional and individual levels. Moral evaluation as strategy is based on authoritative actors’ personal choice. Inclusion and integration in mainstream policy is seen as a rational legitimation strategy, which is supported by narratives where smallness and uniqueness are dominant.

The geopolitics of outbound travel: Theorizing outgoing tourism as state strategy

There has been a general bias in tourism research toward the politics of the destination country, neglecting the theoretical importance of state policies at source countries in influencing tourism flows. In most studies of international travel, political action is essentially ensconced on the destination side, as governments and other authorities, competing in broader markets, attempt to make destinations attractive for potential visitors. Overlooked is the fact that source states influence tourist routes and behavior, changing the volume, composition, timing, and targets of foreign travel. In redressing these gaps, this paper will present a theory of outgoing travel from a nation-state perspective. I present a typology of theoretical connections between regulating outgoing travel and state strategies of domestic legitimation and foreign policy. Finally, I use this theoretical framework to investigate the specific case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to determine to what degree the Chinese central state makes use of outgoing tourism to achieve policy objectives.

“I’m a female-PhD and I’m married”: resisting gender stereotypes of female PhDs on Zhihu

ABSTRACT While most of the studies have focused on how female PhDs are stereotypically depicted as a sexless third gender and an ultimate leftover in Chinese mainstream media representation, little attention has been paid to how such negative stereotypic representation and its underlying patriarchy are resisted. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2005, 2014) and legitimization strategies (van Leeuwen, 2007, 2017), this study sets out to investigate how the discursive legitimizing strategies for female PhDs play out on Chinese social media by employing a corpus-assisted approach. The data for the present study comprise 2,124 posts retrieved from China’s most popular community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. It is revealed that Zhihu users commonly employ (1) personal authority, specifically that of female PhDs, to establish legitimacy; (2) moral evaluation, involving negation, affirmation and re-evaluation to legitimize the presence of female PhDs and their marital practices; (3) rationalization, including definition, explanation, means-orientation and goal-orientation to achieve the social empowerment of female PhDs. Also, this study probes into the ideologies implicated by the use of these discursive practices in relation to the wider sociocultural contexts. The implications may hopefully shed light on the optimal ways for female PhDs’ advocacy in contemporary China.

Legitimation struggles in international organizations: the case of the African Union

ABSTRACT How do international organizations (IOs) and their proponents claim legitimacy, and how do their opponents undermine such legitimacy? This article develops a framework that accounts for the links between legitimation and delegitimation strategies and how they regularly produce ‘legitimation struggles’. Drawing on the case of the African Union between 2015–2020, the study goes beyond existing research in three ways. First, legitimation struggles are not simply related to input and output legitimacy but are deeply related to the social purpose of the organization. Second, legitimation struggles do not only involve IO representatives and member-states but are strengthened by a range of other non-state agents. Third, while discursive strategies are essential, legitimation struggles are reinforced when they are combined with behavioural or institutional legitimation strategies. Future research would do well to go beyond the current Western-centric bias and draw on our findings to investigate legitimation struggles under different conditions around the world.

Master Narratives in US Contemporary War Discourse: Situating and Constructing Identities of Self and Other

The present paper aims to discuss the discursive strategies of otherization, legitimation, and normalization typically found in extracts from the author’s video corpus of US Presidents’ selected official statements at the height of actual or potential armed conflicts between the First Gulf War (1990-1991) and the end of the Obama Administration (2016). The underlying working assumption is that, to consolidate asymmetrical power relationships and monitor dissent and/or win domestic consent about the use of force, the US Administration systematically resorts to a relatively restricted inventory of political myths and cultural constructs sustained by strategic storytelling and powerful master narratives, or Intertextual Thematic Formations. The qualitative analysis, informed by a systemic functional, critical discourse approach, is undertaken at both the macro- and micro-levels, with a view to highlighting how master narratives project distinct/conflicting standpoints and socio-institutional roles and identities (e.g. the-President-as-Father-of-the-Nation; the-Community-as-Protector-of-its-Members'-Interests; the-West-as-Civilizer), while feeding the myth of a ‘super-empowered’ President and ultimately sustaining the ideological square. The final contention is that awareness-raising pedagogical models are needed which work upwards from the bottom of the hierarchical narrative structure, contextualizing the master narrative and linking it to the audience’s individual narratives, so that discourse can fulfil its critical function of dismantling potentially manipulative and/or normalizing discourse practices and foster civil society-led, personal counter-narratives that remove stereotyping and oversimplification.

Authentic cult: media representations of cultural consumption and legitimization of cultural hierarchies

The article explores legitimization strategies related to cultural consumption in the Czech media space by comparing the representations of cultural products in influencer communication on social media and in legacy (print and online) media outlets. Departing from the theoretical debate on the intersection of cultural omnivorousness and the emergence of algorithmic culture, the article poses the question: what strategies do influencers on social media and journalists in legacy media outlets employ to present consumption of cultural products as legitimate, interesting, and cool? Based on qualitative content analysis of 10 Instagram profiles of prominent Czech influencers and culture sections of 10 Czech legacy media, it discusses two main discursive legitimization strategies: (1) the notion of authenticity, used by social media influencers and (2) the notion of cult, used by legacy media in two distinctive ways – as (a) legendary, part of the pop cultural canon and (b) new, contemporary, part of up-to-date cultural savviness.

Public services as carriers of ideas that (de-) legitimise the state: The illustrative case of free education in Sri Lanka

Vital public services have long been considered a source of performance legitimacy for states, based on the material outputs they provide for citizens. However, cumulative evidence shows that the relationship between service delivery and citizens’ perceptions of the state’s right to rule is not an instrumental equation. This article argues part of the explanation for this lies in the underexplored ideational properties of public services. Theoretically, for public services to become significant for legitimacy, they must register in the repertoire of normative ideas against which the state’s moral appropriateness is ultimately judged. This article shows how this happens, empirically, using the illustrative case of free education in Sri Lanka. Based on media, archival and interview data collected across critical junctures from independence through to the contemporary era, the historical analysis shows how free education became entwined with wider ideas about social justice during the formative period of post-colonial state transformation, how elites later capitalised on and narrated these ideas in their legitimation strategies, and how this ideational heritage has been revived to challenge the states moral authority when it is perceived to deviate from it. This case reveals the explanatory potential in tracing the entwinement of public services and normative ideas to critical junctures of state (de-)legitimation, observing how elites discursively ‘perform’ performance legitimacy, and analysing services that carry ideas as ripe discursive arenas wherein the legitimacy of the state is claimed and contested. The implication is that the category of performance legitimacy may usefully be extended beyond the instrumental, to incorporate the ideational. ‘Performance’ legitimacy is not an exclusively instrumental source of legitimacy if, through the political process of legitimation, public services become carriers of ideas that (de-) legitimise the state.

Trust in numbers: Serious numbers and speculative fictions in rare earth elements exploration.

In the early 2010s, a spectacular fall in prices for a class of mineral commodities called the rare earth elements (REEs) and the collapse of hundreds of new exploration companies made clear the fragility of the high-risk markets around these companies and the strategies of legitimation that supported them. New regulatory processes built around technical disclosures generated vast stores of geotechnical data. Rather than generating trust among market actors, however, these processes dramatically altered the temporalities of global extraction and energized unruly narrative spaces. In their efforts to keep mineral claims active and companies afloat, REE-focused exploration experts have struggled to navigate different arenas of discussion while holding their respective logics in tension. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with exploration geologists and promoters, this article examines how experts federate flows of 'serious' and 'speculative' information in both carefully regulated reports and rumor-filled online forums. Such spaces are organized by aesthetic conventions and social criteria for establishing persuasiveness-forms that STS scholars have long analyzed as literary technologies. Rather than helping to secure experts' authority, however, I argue that the diverse literary technologies that now dominate exploration promotion and finance work have radically redistributed interpretive roles. In their struggles to mediate senses of 'crisis' endemic within venture markets, exploration experts must enact the ideals undergirding new regulatory requirements even as they learn to defer to the speculative musings of others.

Legitimising (Note 1) Alternative Voices in Sustainable Development (SD) Discourse: The Case of Scientist Rebellion (SR)

This paper investigates the language of legitimation considering a number of open letters published by the pressure group Scientist Rebellion (SR) to address sustainability issues. The questions this paper seeks to address include the following: Which legitimation strategies did the authors of the open letters examined make use of to buttress their arguments? Did these resources serve a legitimatory function, a delegitimising function against adversaries, or both? Are the open letters under investigation characterized by legitimising mechanisms that are specific to this genre? Using van Leeuwen’s theoretical framework, a number of legitimation strategies are identified, which were put in place by SR representatives to raise awareness of questions concerning sustainable development (SD) and to seek public consent in relation to their proposals.

The discursive construction of organizational legitimacy in higher education: Multimodal discourse analysis on Chinese business schools

Applying a Multimodal Discourse Analysis framework, this study focuses on university websites to explore how organizational legitimacy is constructed through discursive strategies. Our findings show that under authoritative administrative logic and market logic, universities construct two organizational identities: policy followers and product/service suppliers, and use exemplification and authorization strategies respectively through visual discourse to legitimate the identities. To avoid potential conflicts between the legitimacy claims associated with these two identities, universities apply a decoupling strategy to isolate the two identities, along with both explicit and implicit expressions, through the intertextuality between visual and verbal discourses. The constitutive characteristics of universities’ website discourse reveal the complexity of Chinese institutional context in higher education field and the constitutive influence of the institutional background on organizational discourse and legitimation strategies.

A political game?: the dispute over the Canal Istanbul project

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand how ideologies become embedded in political projects through strategies of legitimation aimed at justifying specific ideas, beliefs, and emotions. By using the political negotiation between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) concerning the Canal Istanbul Project as an illustrative example from Turkey to ‘ideology in action’, this article shows how various rhetorical combinations appeal to an analysis of ‘ideology at work’. Our analysis is based on 20 in-depth interviews with both opponents and supporters of the project, in addition to a comparison of two official websites providing scientific evidence from each party’s perspective. The results show that the two poles of the dispute aim to recruit more people as their political supporters by using their own scientific reports with claims that they are ‘objective’ and aspire for the benefit of Istanbul.

Statebuilding and the Origins of the “American Empire”: Towards the Problem of Legitimizing Sovereign Inequality in the 21st Century

In recent decades, “statebuilding” policies in the Greater Middle East have been used by Washington as a tool for forging an “American empire” based on unequal relations between the U.S. and its dependent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, current research focuses mainly on the instruments for implementing these policies and ensuring the acceptance of new political and economic institutions by the local population. Unlike the established approaches, the author examines Washington’s statebuilding efforts as a specific practice of legitimacy aimed at entrenching sovereign inequality and institutionalizing the US political control over “client-regimes.” The study draws on the theoretical legacy of the English school, which views “legitimacy” as a phenomenon inextricably linked with “international society,” comprising a group of states bound by common goals, institutions, and values. The legitimation strategies adopted by members of this society involve the performance of various international roles through which states acquire recognized statuses, rights and obligations. Focusing on the US roles such as “imperial power” and “patron,” the author concludes that Washington’s statebuilding efforts were aimed at linking the US interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq with the collective goals of international society, and thus served to legitimize inequitable relations with “client-states” under the formal legal equality of members of international society. Therefore, the application of the proposed approach helps to shed light on the underexplored aspects of the legitimizing instruments of the US dominance and the means of institutionalizing sovereign inequality inherent in the “American empire” in the 21st century.

Strategies of (De)Legitimation of COVID-19 Vaccines in Tanzanian Political Speeches

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked worldwide efforts to combat the health crisis, including vaccine development and distribution. However, varying political responses to vaccination policies complicated public discourse and influenced vaccine acceptance. This research paper employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to compare (de)legitimation strategies used in Tanzanian political speeches by two presidents: late President Magufuli and current President Samia Suluhu Hassan. The study focuses on their approaches to legitimizing or delegitimizing COVID-19 vaccines in 2021. Two speeches were purposefully selected based on their relevance to vaccination decisions. President Magufuli employed strategies such as discrediting experts, discrediting others, denial, conspiracy theories, and making accusations to delegitimize vaccines. In contrast, President Samia justified vaccine acceptance using strategies such as authorization, moral evaluation, emotional appeals, and rationalization. These differences in approach can be attributed to their respective ideologies. President Magufuli, a populist leader, displayed scepticism towards Western medicine and promoted local solutions, while President Samia presented herself as a pragmatic leader who prioritizes scientific solutions and international cooperation in addressing health crises. The findings shed light on the complexities of public health communication and vaccine acceptance in Tanzania.

Strategies of Legitimization through Axiological Proximization in War Poetry

Despite an increased interest in war studies and militant discourse in recent years, proximization and legitimization perspectives remain scarce. This paper investigates such perspectives in war poetry by proposing a framework of axiological proximization. In this paper, we have focused upon axiological proximization that is a forced construal of a mounting ideological conflict between the political speaker and his/her enemy. This paper focuses on rhetoric of war poetry from Afghanistan and Kashmir concerning legitimization strategies. The study is qualitative in nature and lays emphasis upon the ways war poetry as a critical language embarks upon proximization and legitimization strategies especially via axiological proximization. The movement from ideological clash to the physical conflict is an essential part of axiological conflict. Axiological proximization marks the “self” with positive home-values and the “other” with alien values. This leads to antagonism between the ‘home values’ of the political speaker and ‘alien values’ of the enemy. The mechanism of axiological proximization is a salient feature of rhetoric of war poetry from Afghanistan and Kashmir where the two antagonistic ideologies are contrasted: freedom of the East versus negative values of the West.

The art of (self)legitimization: how private museums help their founders claim legitimacy as elite actors

This article explores private art museums’ role for elite legitimization processes. Based on interviews with founders, directors, and curators of Germany-based private museums, I explore the discourses participants invoke to legitimize museum founders as actors in the artworld and as elites generally. I draw out a two-pronged legitimation strategy. First, respondents posit private museums’ increasingly important role for today’s art ecosystem, implying logics of discursive innovation and organizational flexibility vis-à-vis public museums. Second, interviewees construct intra-group status hierarchies via notions of the autonomous and ethical collector-founder versus other ostentatious private collectors and unethical wealth elites more widely. Together, these narratives effectively conflate seemingly opposite discourses of private entrepreneurialism and authenticity, allowing interviewees to signal legitimacy for founders over both public and other private actors. This elite legitimation work is performed by both founders and those institutionally connected to them, showing how legitimization can be a complex and institutionally mediated process.

Exploring social enterprise legitimacy within ecosystems from an institutional approach: A systematic literature review and research agenda

AbstractThe legitimation of social enterprises is contingent upon the institutional context and targeted stakeholders; however, this claim has not been explored systematically, considering existing legitimacy strategies. Understanding the reasons behind the pursuit of legitimacy and the strategies that can be employed in specific contexts is paramount for social enterprises to obtain legitimacy and enhance positive social impact. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review at the intersection of social enterprise legitimacy, institutional theory and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Drawing on articles in journals included in the Web of Science database, the review enhances understanding of social enterprise legitimacy research through institutional contextualization by answering the question: ‘Why and how do social enterprises aim to obtain legitimacy in different contexts and towards which ecosystem actors?’ Six main reasons why social enterprises pursue legitimacy are identified, namely: to acquire tangible (financial and material) and intangible (community support and trust) resources; to compete with commercial businesses and non‐governmental organizations; to comply with stakeholder demands; to overcome institutional challenges; to create social impact; and to bring about institutional change. Alongside these reasons for legitimacy pursuit, legitimacy strategies and the addressed actors and institutions are identified and synthesized into three categories: institutional context dependency; closeness to the audience; and multidimensionality and process perspective, identifying promising avenues for further research that are more context‐sensitive. The review provides guidance for social enterprises seeking to identify and adapt legitimacy strategies, enabling them to address the pressing issues of legitimacy deficits that continue to hamper the generation of social impact.

Legitimation Strategies of Social Enterprises in the Institutional Context of Nepal

Legitimation Strategies of Social Enterprises in the Institutional Context of Nepal

Egypt’s diaspora policy in the post-June 2013 era as a transnational mechanism of regime legitimation

ABSTRACT This article seeks to explore the question of why and how autocrats update their diaspora policy. Building on scholarship that deals with states’ motivations to engage with ‘their’ diasporas, alongside scholarship that has focused on authoritarian regimes’ durability, the article demonstrates how a regime’s legitimation process takes place in the transnational sphere and illuminates how authoritarian consolidation strategies maintain a constant interaction with the transnational sphere and are fed by it. Presenting an extended case study of Egypt’s diaspora policy under ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, this article demonstrates how the updated policies and discourse, which include positive and negative engagement, are part of regime legitimation strategies and are designed to mobilize support for the post-June 2013 regime and its narrative, both domestically and abroad, and constitute part of the regime’s strategies for consolidating its power.

Politics by other means: an analysis of the discourses of Italian technocratic Prime Ministers

AbstractTechnocracy is becoming increasingly relevant in Western democracies and particularly in Italy, a country characterised by four technocratic governments in three decades. Despite the growing number of dedicated studies, there is a persistent gap in the existing literature concerning the discursive dimension of technocracy – namely, how technocrats frame the historical context, legitimise their policy agendas and, more broadly, the establishment of their governments. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing the speeches given by four Italian technocratic Prime Ministers to the parliament when asking for the vote of confidence. Methodologically, we perform first the content analysis to map the themes addressed in the speeches, their quantitative relevance and variation over time. Then, we turn to critical discourse analysis to understand the specific argumentative strategies that legitimise policy action in five key and interrelated dimensions: context, legitimation, the state, European Union and political economy. The analysis seeks to answer three research questions: What are the main discursive strategies of legitimation used by technocrats? Do they change significantly between governments and over time? Do partisan policy options and worldviews emerge clearly, or do they remain under the surface? The paper aims to contribute to the theoretical conceptualisation and empirical analysis of technocracy by highlighting the subjective, performative and overall political dimensions of the phenomenon.

Legitimation Strategies in the CSR Discourse of the Romanian Food Retail Companies During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 in Romania determined companies to adapt their communication. Through a quantitative content analysis, this work presents the topics that were covered in CSR communication by three food retail companies in Romania and the legitimation strategies that were used in the CSR discourse from their pandemic press releases. The research focuses on 21 press releases from Kaufland Romania, Lidl Romania and Carrefour Romania food retailers’ websites, issued between March 2020 and May 2020. The results show that the most frequent communication topics of the three organizations was that of actions for health institutions and patients. Likewise, it also shows that rationalization legitimation was the most used strategy by Lidl and Kaufland, the companies presenting the means by which they carried out CSR actions and the effects of these actions. Moral legitimation was the most used strategy by Carrefour, the company assigning evaluative attributes to the pandemic period or to the affected people.