The Iterative Process of Legitimacy-Building in Hybrid Organizations

Hybrid organizations face the fundamental challenge of building legitimacy. To deal with this challenge in administrative theory and practice, we apply an analytical framework following an organizational logic of legitimacy building to an exemplary case of hybridity—the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine. Our framework application illustrates that pragmatic legitimacy (i.e., establishing instrumental value) must be built before moral legitimacy (i.e., fostering normative evaluation) and cognitive legitimacy (i.e., creating comprehensibility), followed by an iterative process of mutual influence between the legitimacy forms. Originating in the management literature, the framework promises new insights for public administration research on hybrids.

Does Academic Freedom Protect Antisemitism?

The examples listed in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism suggests that some political views common in humanities and social science disciplines are antisemitic. In some disciplines, these views are well estab­lished in both teaching and publication. Yet the American Association of University Pro­fessors has long used prevailing disciplinary views as a guide to which faculty statements cannot be sanctioned. What should universities do when not just individual faculty, but entire disciplines have been captured by radical antizionism, when students are taught that Israel has no moral legitimacy and must be eliminated? How should personnel decisions be affected? Should this evolving situation lead us to rethink the relationship between advo­cacy and indoctrination? Can universities keep the search for the truth at the core of their mission in the wake of disciplinary solidarity behind antisemitism?

The Legitimacy of Sustainability Standards: A Paradox Perspective

Sustainability standards have proliferated widely in recent years but their legitimacy remains contested. This paper suggests that sustainability standards need to cope with an important but unexplored paradox to gain legitimacy. While standard setters create low entry barriers and requirements for adopters so that standards can diffuse quickly and achieve a status of cognitive legitimacy, standards also need to ensure that adopters create high levels of impact, thereby acquiring moral legitimacy. While the need for diffusion and impact occurs at the same time, they cannot be achieved simultaneously. We unpack this paradox and show that its salience for standard setters differs depending on (a) the growth trajectory of a standard and (b) the perceived intensity of the demands for diffusion and impact. We outline five response strategies that standard setters can use to tackle the diffusion–impact paradox and illustrate our theoretical considerations through a detailed case study of the UN Global Compact. Our paper advances scholarly understandings on how sustainability standards gain legitimacy and sheds light on the complex and inherently paradoxical nature of legitimacy. We derive implications for the literatures on sustainability standards, legitimacy, and paradox management.

The Fork in the Road for Social Enterprises: Leveraging Moral Imagination for Long-Term Stakeholder Support

Social enterprises (SEs) that receive early stakeholder support for their dual economic/social missions risk losing moral legitimacy when stakeholders assess them for social impact and find it lacking. We present a process model that begins at the “fork in the road” of stakeholder assessment and shows that when SEs continue to focus on primary stakeholders at the expense of secondary stakeholders impacted by the firm, they risk losing moral legitimacy and broader stakeholder support. Our model shows the process by which SEs can leverage their moral imagination and develop capabilities to generate long-term stakeholder support and sustained value creation.

Emotion, Affect, and Law

This chapter introduces perspectives within an emerging anthropology of emotion, affect, and the law, which traces how embodied emotional responses are mobilized socially and politically to reinforce the moral legitimacy of particular legalistic and technocratic solutions to the problem of violence in Africa. Taking the particular case of Dominic Ongwen, a convicted commander of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army who was brought before the International Criminal Court for a range of crimes against humanity, we see the beginning of a trend to demonstrate methodologically an interrelationship between micro processes and macro and historical processes. This happens through a study of the emotive and affective processes that go into the making of individual ‘perpetrators’. But we also see that part of that process involves the necessary connection to the longue durée that makes such racial depictions immediately believable. Through an examination of both the psychosocial and complex historical and political conditions that underscore inter-generational trauma in postcolonial contexts, we see how the intersection of emotion, affects, and law has played out in the study of law and anthropology.

Sharīʿah non-compliant income disclosures and the moral legitimacy strategies of Islamic banks

Purpose The purpose of this study is to understand the reasons behind the different patterns of Sharīʿah non-compliant income (SNCI) disclosures amongst Islamic banks and, in particular, the extent to which Islamic banks make SNCI disclosures. The process involved in gaining and maintaining moral legitimacy forms the framework for this study. Design/methodology/approach Interviews were conducted with managers of Islamic banks involved in the reporting of SNCI in company annual reports. Findings The interview findings show that Islamic banks prefer to use procedures to gain and enhance moral legitimacy amongst their customers, business partners and staff. The constraints and challenges that Islamic banks face in SNCI reporting make this a popular means of securing moral legitimacy. However, these practices may not lead to enhanced and more communicative SNCI disclosures by Islamic banks. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explains the motivations behind SNCI reporting by Islamic banks and frames these motivations under the moral legitimacy framework.

“Never to Be Forgotten”

This chapter explores the clergy’s doctrine of political resistance expressed during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. The clergy’s justifications of political resistance as the Revolutionary-era troubles began emerged against the backdrop of clerical arguments for resistance articulated after the overthrow of Governor Edmund Andros in 1689. The memory of Andros, his tyrannical reign over New England, and the clergy’s resistance to him were evoked by the clergy during the Revolutionary era. This act of pre-Revolutionary resistance provides important context for understanding how the clergy themselves thought about the moral legitimacy of resisting one’s political authorities in the Revolutionary period. Colonial resistance to oppressive British agents was not a new or novel idea.

Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Heresy

B.R. Ambedkar’s big heretic choice was his conversion to Buddhism on October 11, 1956. This conversion was, in fact, the most countering example of his heresy. In this regard, it has been an integral part of his philosophical and political struggle against the Indian apartheid. Dr. Ambedkar did not convert to Buddhism in order to escape the caste system. He converted in order to fight the caste mentality. As we can see, for Ambedkar conversion was a great struggle for choice and autonomy. He saw the moral legitimacy and political value of conversion in its heretic feature of gaining freedom. Far from treating freedom as a mere word, he considered it as the power of having a dissident voice. He saw a direct link between conversion and social freedom of the Untouchables.

An institutional approach to the SHE’-E-O plight: evidence from organizational legitimacy and SHE’-E-O dismissal

Purpose This paper aims to examine how regulatory legitimacy and moral legitimacy influence biased performance evaluations on female chief executive officers’ (CEOs) dismissal. Design/methodology/approach The final sample contains 10,780 firm-year observations from 2004 to 2013. Findings This paper finds that the negative relationship between firm performance and CEO dismissal is weakened when the firm has a female CEO. In addition, the regulatory legitimacy pressure and moral legitimacy pressure can disrupt the biased performance evaluations in the board. Originality/value This study enriches female leadership literature regarding gender stereotype issues by incorporating institutional approach and organizational legitimacy literature. By focusing on regulatory legitimacy and moral legitimacy, this work also helps to further understand gender-related organizational behaviors and outcomes.

Das Recht auf Asyl bei Emer de Vattel 1758: unvollkommenes Recht, vollkommenes Recht, Menschenrecht

When, within the framework of a highly controversial debate of the early 1990s in Germany on the right to asylum, Winfrid Brugger argued, a human right to asylum could not be based on sound reason, he referred to the supposed impossibility of an imputation of the plight of refugees to certain foreign states. In more recent debates, similar arguments have been brought forward and formulated as a problem of imperfect or perfect duties and rights. Much earlier, in 1758, Emer de Vattel already had discussed the right to asylum as a right that has aspects of both an imperfect right and a perfect right. This has mostly been ignored in the recent debate. In this article, I try to show how de Vattel reasoned. His argumentation limited the otherwise strong sovereignty of states by referring to the reasons of the moral legitimacy of their powers. This led him to the result that the per se perfect right to asylum, imperfect in relation to specific states, can, if states collectively fail to admit a refugee in urgent danger, become a claim against a specific country in the shape of a perfect right to self-help. I will briefly try to reconstruct some of de Vattel‘s ideas with concepts of Ronald Dworkin and Robert Alexy. The difference between Dworkin’s rule and Alexy’s Regel becomes relevant for understanding de Vattel’s perfect and human right to asylum. In the end, I will briefly investigate how much of de Vattel’s thought depends on assumptions a XXIst century thinker would probably not be ready to suppose any more. It will become clear that de Vattel’s thought on asylum is mostly independent from rather controversial assumptions of his work; it fits rather well to some recent approaches limiting sovereignty by human rights and concepts of territorial justice.