Organizational Legitimacy, Interaction, and Meanings of Relations: Relational Maneuvering in a Supplemental Education Organization

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 21: Meaning, Legitimacy and Professions

Abstract

How are legitimacy dynamics managed in organizations? While institutional theory indicates that organizational legitimacy is conferred by showing conformity to external widely shared expectations, this research demonstrates another possibility. Drawing on inhabited institutionalism, dyadic operationalization of legitimacy, relational embeddedness, and relational work, I seek to understand how interactions and interpersonal social relations play a role in shaping the complex (both external and internal) organizational legitimacy dynamics. This article demonstrates how social interactions constitute a cultural repertoire of meanings of relations and how what I term “relational maneuvering” – the process of contextually redefining relations based on a given repertoire – reshapes audiences’ expectations and secures organizational legitimacy in daily interaction. Bridging organizational legitimacy and interactions, this article makes two contributions. To legitimacy research, I point out that other than demonstrating conformity to widely shared expectations, adjusting audiences’ expectations can also help organizations confer legitimacy. To inhabited institutionalism, I show that besides the ongoing interactions, formal structure, and organizational goals, the history of interactions also informs the local reaction to institutional myths.

Author

• Ziheng Chen, Renmin University of China