Organizational Legitimacy

This contributed research volume explores organizational legitimacy in business. It examines the ways in which it can be measured, its perceived influence on the market, and the relationship between organizational legitimacy and overall organizational success. This book also explores the application of organizational legitimacy in various fields and economic sectors. Based on the concept of legitimacy, this book encompasses a more contemporary and comprehensive idea which transcends the traditional concepts of corporate reputation, business ethics or corporate social responsibility. The legitimacy of organizations is not a new concept. Organizational legitimacy has received significant attention from researchers in institutional theory, resource dependence theory, organizational ecology, and stakeholder theory. It has become one of the most vibrant topics in the domain of business-management. Furthermore, according to Institutional Theory, organizational legitimacy is crucial to the overall survival of organizations because legitimacy facilitates: access to capital, provides new business opportunities, creates financial opportunity, affects the competition for resources, solves social problems better, affects other performance measures (such as the initial value of listed public stock prices or stock market risk), and generates stakeholder support. During last decades the efforts to understand how organizations do to acquire, manage and use legitimacy have been considerable; however, current research on the role of legitimacy for organizations is fragmented and has not been granted the attention which it deserves. This book provides success cases of business actions that have been taken to increase organizational legitimacy and how such steps have been increased organizations overall stability and survival.