Various versions of legitimacy theory predict that a duty and obligation to obey legitimate authorities generally trumps people's personal moral and religious values. However, most research has assumed rather than measured the degree to which people have a moral or religious stake in the situations studied. This study tested compliance with and reactions to legitimate authorities in the context...

The emergence of electronic commerce raises important questions about the building and leveraging of legitimacy for both practitioners and scholars of strategy. New entrants’ click-and-mortar or click-and-click business models are challenging the legitimacy of large and mature brick-and-mortar incumbents. The implications of this challenge for the financial services industry—as for many other i...

We analyze the history of the insurance industry’s categorization of the computer to challenge implicit assumptions about legitimacy. We show that a new category can be legitimated without a full understanding of the category’s boundaries and legitimation does not entail taken for grantedness or implicit rule following. Based on these insights, we develop an alternative conceptualization of leg...

In this paper I focus on Gillian Brock’s treatment of the case refugees. After noting a potential distinction between our otherwise closely related theoretical approaches in which we view refugee regime as legitimacy repair (Owen) or correction (Brock) mechanism, draw contrast ways addressing and argue that difference my historical approach presentist turns out to have implications for how conc...