The failure of many governments to provide basic rights for their citizens has given rise to the expectation that globally operating corporations should step in and fill governance gaps, for example in the area of human rights. Today, many large multinational corporations claim to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, yet no tools exist to assess whether and to what degree they have indeed systematically revised their business practices to take on these new responsibilities. Managing Corporate Legitimacy addresses these research gaps by clarifying the role of the corporation as a private actor in global governance at conceptual and empirical levels; by contributing to our theoretical understanding of CC as a new phenomenon in globalization; and by furthering the development of appropriate approaches to CC in practice through its toolkit. The tool structures the implementation process in five learning stages (defensive, compliance, managerial, strategic and civil). The final civil stage describes political corporate behaviour. The author includes an empirical assessment of five Swiss multinationals in this book which reveals that most companies – even those with relatively long-standing and mature policies on social and environmental issues – have only just started to learn how to become corporate citizens. The book therefore concludes with a discussion of an issue-specific extension of the assessment tool and presents methods for setting priorities in the approach to corporate citizenship that may also facilitate corporate engagement with stakeholders. The tools developed in this book provide practical and detailed guidance for implementing and embedding CC and managing corporate legitimacy. It will be essential reading for practitioners looking for ways to legitimize their engagement with societal issues and for academics considering how we can better measure the engagement of business with CC.

Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas's social theory for the critical study of management, organization and employment, this book proposes a new definition of legitimate corporate action; based on Habermas's principles of communicative rationality and discourse ethics. Systematic in its application of the full range of Habermas's arguments to management and economics, it uses insights from these disciplines to inform a critique and reconstruction of Habermas's work. The result is a distinctive new conceptualization of the relationship between social interaction and economic structures and institutions. Concluding that corporate legitimacy - the successful combination of market economics with distributive and environmental justice - is only possible in the context of deliberative forms of democratic workplace governance, the findings of this work have serious implications for our understanding of corporate social responsibility and of the part managers and employees can play in putting it into practice.

This volume explores organizational legitimacy in business, featuring examples from a variety of industries around the world. Synthesizing the most current theoretical insights and best practices, the contributing authors examine the ways in which organizational legitimacy can be understood, its perceived influence on the market, and the relationship between organizational legitimacy and overall organizational success. The authors draw from different methodological perspectives to develop a holistic approach to organizational legitimacy that transcends the traditional concepts of corporate reputation, business ethics or corporate social responsibility. Historically, efforts to understand how organizations acquire, manage and use legitimacy have applied insights from institutional theory, resource dependence theory, organizational ecology and stakeholder theory, but the field has remained fragmented, despite the profound implications of achieving legitimacy for ensuring organizational stability, survival and sustainability through access to capital, resources and business opportunities, as well as problem solving, performance measurement and stakeholder support. Presenting case studies of successful initiatives, the book addresses: · How organizational legitimacy is defined and measured · How organizations achieve legitimacy and how they acquire resources · How different stakeholders (e.g., consumers, investors, employees) make legitimacy judgments and resource allocation decisions · Whether audiences in the same socio-cultural context arrive at shared legitimacy judgments with regard to a focal organization

This book provides an overview of legitimacy-related challenges at hybrid organizations and demonstrates legitimacy’s importance for the strategic development of organizations. In a reader-friendly way, it addresses the question of how hybrid organizations can gain legitimacy from the perspectives of key stakeholders. To do so, the book examines legitimacy management in the context of two real-world hybrid organizations – the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine and the Swiss Center for Design and Health in Bern, Switzerland – from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It shows why the systematic combination of three types of legitimacy has the potential to optimize the level of legitimacy in emerging hybrids, contributing to their success. It also explains how organizational legitimacy can be operationalized using governance legitimacy, purpose-rational legitimacy, and value-rational legitimacy. This book equips managers and executives working at hybrid organizations with useful guidance and hands-on strategic tools to develop legitimacy management strategies. It also offers a source of inspiration for academic research and teaching in this field.

This Handbook forms part of wider research in responsibility, ethics and legitimacy of corporations. Through an interdisciplinary perspective with comparative integration of sociological, politological, philosophical, theological, ethical, economic, legal, linguistic and communication theoretical approaches this Handbook will clarify how the interrelation between company and environment is mediated by legitimating notions in public spaces and public relations; how and why these notions have changed radically; how these transformations strike on the epistemological as well as practical dimension of business companies; and the problems involved in these transformations at the macro-, meso- and micro levels. The Handbook begins with a historical introduction and chronology of the development of business legitimacy, providing a comprehensive assessment of the concept’s evolution and identifying the most influential authors and their works. These may be divided into authors who follow (1) a philosophical, sociological, or conceptual tradition in management and leadership in their treatment of legitimacy and those who belong to the research tradition of (2) application of the concept in management science and leadership as well as in organizational theory and business practice in the interdisciplinary perspective of the different approaches. The Handbook continues with systematic approaches and major themes developed in the concept of business legitimacy. Contributions here may be conceptual, empirical/applied or case studies. The different parts of the volume deal with the different topics to which business legitimacy has been applied, with how legitimacy is relevant in the various operational areas of the firm, and with the legitimacy theory’s responses to some of the most important issues that businesses and organizations currently face.

Business ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, values-driven management, corporate governance, and ethical leadership are necessary horizons for the legitimacy of corporations in the process of globalization. Based on hermeneutics and institutional analysis, this book discusses the place of values in corporations and the role of ethics in management. With the theories of business ethics as a starting point, it is possible to propose a vision of the good citizen corporation. The book presents theories, concepts of responsibility for stakeholder justice, and basic ethical principles of respect for autonomy, dignity, integrity, and vulnerability. This is the foundation for an analysis of the ethical relations to internal and external constituencies of the firm, i.e. shareholders, owners, investors, management, employees, consumers, and local community. The interaction with the environment is further analyzed with a focus on ethical principles as the basis for sustainability. This investigation culminates with the conceptualization of the firm as a collective and institutional moral agent. The content also includes analysis of concrete political developments in the US, Europe, and the United Nations. Finally, the book provides a framework for a new corporate strategy based on global business ethics.

Carolin Decker develops and empirically applies a framework in which business exits serve the purpose of re-establishing a firm’s previously harmed legitimacy. Her findings support the idea that legitimacy needs drive the likelihood of fit-enhancing business exits in divesting firms.

Nuclear technology places special demands on society and both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy for peaceful purposes require a large measure of security and monitoring at the international level. This book focuses on nuclear waste management, which can work in democratic countries only if viewed as legitimate by the population. This book posits the inability of democracies to establish such legitimacy as an explanation for the current absence of public policy decisions that can identify a solution. The problems are such that they can be resolved only if fundamental aspects of the modern notion of legitimacy are set aside.