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Early management theorists viewed organizations as "rational systems"--social machines designed for the efficient transformation of material inputs into material outputs (Scott, 1987: 31-50). In addition, theorists of the period often depicted organizations as tightly bounded entities clearly demarcated from the surrounding environment. Resources materialized at factory gates, production technologies "revealed" themselves to engineers, and products evaporated off loading docks, all ex hypothesi. Since the late 1960s, however, this imagery has undergone a dramatic change. "Open system" theories (Scott. 1987: 78-92) have reconceptualized organizational boundaries as porous and problematic. and institutional theories (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991) have stressed that many dynamics in the organizational environment stem not from technological or material imperatives, but rather from cultural norms, symbols, beliefs, and rituals. At the core of this intellectual transformation lies the concept of organizational legitimacy. Drawing from the foundational work of Weber (1978) and Parsons (1960), researchers have made legitimacy into an anchor-point of a vastly expanded theoretical apparatus addressing the normative and cognitive forces that constrain, construct. and empower organizational actors.
Despite its centrality, however, the literature on organizational legitimacy provides surprisingly fragile conceptual moorings. Many researchers employ the term legitimacy, but few define it. Further, most treatments cover only a limited aspect of the phenomenon as a whole and devote little attention to systematizing alternative perspectives or to developing a vocabulary for describing divergent approaches (witness, e.g., the "debate" between Hannan & Freeman, 1989, and Zucker, 1989). Without such integrative efforts, research on organizational legitimacy threatens to degenerate into a: chorus of dissonant voices, fragmenting scholarly discourse and disrupting the flow of information from theorists to practitioners.
For example, many recent studies of legitimacy seem increasingly divided into two distinct groups--the strategic and the institutional--that often operate at cross-purposes. Work in the strategic tradition (e.g., Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975: Pfeffer, 1981: Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) adopts a managerial perspective and emphasizes the ways in which organizations instrumentally manipulate and deploy evocative symbols in order to garner societal support. In contrast, work in the institutional tradition (e.g., DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1991: Meyer & Scott, 1983a: Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Zucker, 1987) adopts a more detached stance and emphasizes the ways in which sector-wide structuration dynamics generate cultural pressures...