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Organizations and their effectiveness-2016/Key concept definitions
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=== 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.
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