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Legitimacy-Related Research in Organization Studies, Stakeholder Theory, and Marketing Studies

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Handbook of Business Legitimacy

Abstract

Legitimacy, trust, and democracy are concepts developed in sociology and politics literatures. This chapter reviews understandings and conceptualizations of legitimacy in organization studies, stakeholder theory, and marketing studies. It gives particular attention to the intersections of legitimacy-related research in these fields of study. From this list, the supreme discipline in legitimacy-related social-scientific research is probably organization studies. The stakeholder approach emerged as a strategic management approach, and stakeholder relationships and stakeholder legitimacy constitute important intersections between organization studies, stakeholder theory, and marketing studies. Compared with organization studies, legitimacy is not a major topic in marketing studies where works explicitly addressing legitimacy or referring to it are still quite rare. That notwithstanding, in marketing studies, there are literatures that deal with related topics, partly making use of, partly not making use of, the term “legitimacy” (or related terms such as “legitimate” or “legitimation”).

The chapter briefly addresses how the scholarly interest in order and power has spawned legitimacy as a research subject. Then, it discusses landmark conceptualizations of legitimacy and legitimacy-related research programs in organization studies. An analysis of normative and descriptive approaches to legitimacy in stakeholder theory follows, expanded by an overview of legitimacy-related topics concerning markets and marketing practices. The chapter concludes – inter alia – that legitimacy-related research in organization studies has cut off the normative, political, and ethical dimensions of the concept. Stakeholder theory’s normative dimensions are contested; however, it is probably right to not make legitimacy its single, normative core. From a contemporary perspective, marketing studies, especially critical marketing studies and macromarketing, seem to be equipped with the presuppositions to address legitimacy as a valued characteristic of institutions and other marketing affairs.

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  1. Marketing-Department, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Michaela Haase

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  1. Michaela Haase
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  1. Roskilde University , Roskilde, Denmark

    Jacob Dahl Rendtorff

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Haase, M. (2019). Legitimacy-Related Research in Organization Studies, Stakeholder Theory, and Marketing Studies. In: Rendtorff, J. (eds) Handbook of Business Legitimacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68845-9_45-1

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