For public relations managers to be effective in establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders, they must understand and negotiate the many environmental influences on the organization that impact its survival. Institutional theory suggests that organizational survival depends not just on material resources and technical information, but also on the organization’s perceived legitimacy (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Suchman (1995) defines organizational legitimacy as the “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within a social system” (p. 574). A conferred status, organizational legitimacy is controlled by those outside the organization and thus relies on the organization maintaining a coalition of supportive stakeholders who have legitimacy-determining power (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978).
Suchman (1995) suggests managers can build a legitimacy reservoir through frequent and intense communication with the organization’s social surroundings. As a critical feature in organizational survival, organizational legitimacy has been explored through a diverse range of theoretical lenses, including nstitutional
theory (Ruef & Scott, 1998; Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & Caronna, 2000), resource dependency theory (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), and organizational ecology Aldrich, 1979; Aldrich & Marsden, 1988; Hannan & Freeman, 1989), just to name a few. While described as an “anchor-point” for understanding organization environment conditions (Suchman, 1995, p.571) and clearly focused on stakeholder perceptions and the importance of building communication links with stakeholders, organizational legitimacy has not been recognized widely by public relations scholars as a long term goal of building organization-public relationships. Heath (2001) suggests that legitimacy gaps”, will be part of the emerging vocabulary of public relations scholars and practitioners as the discipline focuses more on relationship management. To this end, he provided some focus on organizational legitimacy in his recent text (see Heath, 2001), recognizing the work of Everett (2001) in organizational ecology and Metzler’s (2001a) rhetorical perspective on achieving legitimacy through dispute resolution. His lead, however, does not appear to have been followed in the discipline’s journals and textbooks. A review of two of the major public relations research journals over the past decade revealed only two articles dealing with organizational legitimacy in public relations (Boyd, 2000; Chay-Nemeth, 2001).
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Toward A Model of Organizational Legitimacy in Public Relations Theory And Practice
