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Organizations and their effectiveness-2016/Key concept definitions
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== Legitimacy == === Bo === Legitimacy: Our relational contract is an equilibrium that grants you discretion. I'm okay with that. === Mara === Thomas Franck’s (1988) is an international lawyer and I think this definition has some interesting implications for our discussions of formal and relations contracts. Franck defines legitimacy as “the quality of a rule which derives from a perception on the part of those to whom the rule is addressed that it has come into being in accordance with the right process”. He identifies four indicators of legitimacy: *”Determinacy”= clarity, letting people/states know exactly what is expected of them. The more determinant a rule, the more difficult to resist compliance and to justify non-compliance & the less room for “flexible” interpretation *“Symbolic validation/ritual/pedigree”= for a rule to be legitimate, it needs to be able to communicate its authority—“the authority of the rule, the authority of the originator of a validating communication and, at times, the authority bestowed on the recipient of the communication.” It does this through: **”Symbolic validation”: when some kind of signal or act is used as a cue to elicit compliance with a command. The cue is a surrogate for articulating the reasons for obedience. Ex. a salute reinforces a soldier’s deference to his commander **“Ritual”: a specific form of symbolic validation marked by ceremonies, often—but not necessarily—mystical, that provide unenunciated reasons or cues for eliciting compliance with the commands of persons or institutions…often presented as drama, to communicate to a community its unity, its values, its uniqueness in both the exclusive and inclusive sense”. Ex. taking community **”Pedigree”: “a subset of cues that seeks to enhance the compliance pull of rules or rule-making institutions by emphasizing their historical origin, their cultural or anthropological deep-rootedness”. Ex. the act of Parliament bringing a bill to the Queen for her approval *”Coherence”: “a rule is coherent when like cases are treated alike in application of the rule and when the rule relates in a principled fashion to other rules of the same system….requires that a rule, whatever its content, be applied uniformly in every ‘similar’ or ‘applicable’ instance.” Ex. in the US, we express this through tenets like “justice is blind” and “all men are equal before the law” *”Adherence” (to a normative hierarchy): “rules tend to achieve compliance when they, themselves, comply with secondary rules about how and by whom rules are to be made and interpreted” and these secondary rules, in turn, must comply with a “unifying rule of recognition” that “specifies the sources of law and provides criteria for the identification of its rules”, which is the ultimate authority (e.g. US Constitution) === Aaron === Even a lapsed sociologist knows only one place to turn when it comes to defining legitimacy: Weber! Here goes (in hyper-brief form): ::''An acceptable relationship or exercise of authority.'' === Woody === ''Legitimacy'' is a challenging term to define. In sociology, following Weber, it refers to the right and acceptance of authority. But it can also be a resource, and there is an ample literature on negotiating and claiming legitimacy (see Marc Suchman, Managing Legitimacy, Acad Mgmt Rev July 1995). Suchman attempts to disentangle pragmatic, moral, and cognitive aspects of legitimacy. I tend to like the pragmatic and cognitive aspects, which suggest that behavior is perceived to be appropriate in a particular context. There is a wonderfully rich discussion of legitimacy in the online ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', which if you don't know is a wonderful resource. i cut and paste a little snippet below: ''Descriptive and Normative Concepts of Legitimacy'' If legitimacy is interpreted descriptively, it refers to people's beliefs about political authority and, sometimes, political obligations. In his sociology, Max Weber put forward a very influential account of legitimacy that excludes any recourse to normative criteria (Mommsen 1989: 20). According to Weber, that a political regime is legitimate means that its participants have certain beliefs or faith (“Legitimitätsglaube”) in regard to it: “the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige” (Weber 1964: 382). As is well known, Weber distinguishes among three main sources of legitimacy—understood as both the acceptance of authority and of the need to obey its commands. People may have faith in a particular political or social order because it has been there for a long time (tradition), because they have faith in the rulers (charisma), or because they trust its legality—specifically the rationality of the rule of law (Weber 1990 [1918]; 1964). Weber identifies legitimacy as an important explanatory category for social science, because faith in a particular social order produces social regularities that are more stable than those that result from the pursuit of self-interest or from habitual rule-following (Weber 1964: 124). In contrast to Weber's descriptive concept, the normative concept of political legitimacy refers to some benchmark of acceptability or justification of political power or authority and—possibly—obligation. On the broadest view, legitimacy both explains why the use of political power by a particular body—a state, a government, or a democratic collective, for example—is permissible and why there is a pro tanto moral duty to obey its commands. On this view, if the conditions for legitimacy are not met, political institutions exercise power unjustifiably and the commands they might produce do then not entail any obligation to obey. John Rawls, in Political Liberalism (1993), presents such an interpretation of legitimacy. On one widely held narrower view, legitimacy is linked to the moral justification—not the creation—of political authority. Political bodies such as states may be effective, or de facto, authorities, without being legitimate. They claim the right to rule and to create obligations to be obeyed, and as long as these claims are met with sufficient acquiescence, they are authoritative. Legitimate authority, on this view, differs from merely effective or de facto authority in that it actually holds the right to rule and creates political obligations (e.g. Raz 1986). According to an opposing view (e.g. Simmons 2001), political authority may be morally justified without being legitimate, but only legitimate authority generates political obligations. === Christof === Legitimacy, according to new institutionalist theory, is the perception of an organization as desirable, proper, and appropriate. Adopting legitimate policies or practices does not require justification, whereas not adopting them does. Legitimacy is granted by an “audience” (= institutional environment), which makes legitimacy an inherently relational concept. This definition goes beyond ideas of a regime’s legitimate authority (Weber 1978[1922]) and the public’s voluntary acquiescence to a government (Verba, Nie, and Ki 1979). According to Suchman (1995), the grounds on which an organization or action is considered legitimate can be pragmatic ("it works well"), moral ("it is the right thing to do"), and cognitive ("it’s how we do things"). For a more detailed definition, see Deephouse & Suchman 2008. Some organizational sociologists have worked to differentiate legitimacy from reputation and status (e.g. Bitektine 2011; King & Whetten 2008). Suddaby and Greenwood’s Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy is one study that links the concept of legitimacy to accounts as well as the jurisdictional struggles Beth Bechky discusses in Object Lessons.
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