Discussion of legitimacy theory
论文作者：留学生论文论文属性：thesis登出时间：2010-06-22编辑：vshellyn点击率：276
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关键词：Discussion legitimacy theoryaccounting
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In the social and environmental area of accounting, legitimacy theory has become one of the most cited theories among others. A lot of researchers still have deep doubt that if it offers any real insight into the voluntary disclosures of corporations. This paper states responses to two specific concerns in brief.
I’m sure that legitimacy theory does provide a wonderful mechanism for understanding voluntary social and environmental disclosures made by companies. For critical public debate, this understanding would play an important role while giving explanation.
Refer to contributing to our understanding of accounting disclosure; the problem for legitimacy theory is that sometimes the term has been used fairly loosely. We cannot say that is a problem of the theory itself, because to a range of theories with disciplines the same problem is still existing. Through the observation we could see that obviously. (Caudill, 1997) Failure to adequately specify the theory has been identified by Suchman (1995), who observed that “Many researchers employ the term legitimacy, but few define it”. Hybels (1995) comments that, “As the tradesmen of social science have groped to build elaborate theoretical structures with which to shelter their careers and disciplines, legitimation has been a blind man’s hammer.”
There is an important issue which needs to be acknowledged. Actually, there are two major classes of legitimacy theory. The ‘macro-theory’ of legitimation, also called Institutional Legitimacy Theory, is used to solve how organizational structures have been accepted as a whole from society at large. “Within this tradition, legitimacy and institutionalization are virtually synonymous. Both phenomena empower organizations primarily by making them seem natural and meaningful” (Suchman, 1995). The current business environment is normally treated as a given and static context while doing accounting researches. Those business environment includes the capitalist structure, democratic government, etc.. However, this assumption needs to be considered carefully for a longitudinal study.
Legitimacy is a resource, just like money, that a business requires for its normal operation. Sometimes, the actions and events may increase the legitimacy for companies’ operation, and other times, may decrease. Low legitimacy will result in terrible consequences for an enterprise. To the worst, a company may lose its right of operating due to these terrible consequences.
Although we think a company is in the status of being legitimate, it is still very difficult for us to figure out how to measure legitimacy. Legitimacy is just an abstract concept although it has concrete consequences. There aren’t many detailed disciplines for distinguishing and evaluating legitimacy in the social environment. For a researcher, it seems to be a necessarily subjective task when he tries to directly establish, or even rank the legitimacy of various organizations, which really depends on the researcher’s own views. As Hybels (1995) argues, “I reject this view because it is based on a conflation of the roles of observer and participant in social science”.
From the point that we cannot measure a firm’s legitimacy directly in subjective ways, we must look at it from an alternative aspect which is the fact that being legi
timate “will let organizations to attract resources necessary for survival” (Hearit, 1995). Hybels (1995) develops this as follows:
Legitimacy has always been treated as simply as one of many resources that organizations must gain from their environments. But rather than viewing legitimacy as something that is exchanged among institutions, legitimacy is better conceived as both part of the context for exchange and a by-product of exchange. Legitimacy itself has no material form since it exists only as a symbolic representation of the collective evaluation of an institution, as evidenced to both observers and participants perhaps most convincingly by the flow of resources. Legitimacy can be called as “a representation of representations.” because of the higher-order representation of that symbolism. 留
Since the legitimacy can help companies to ensure the continuous inflow of capital, customers and labors, people put more emphasis on managing their legitimacy in company. External parties and the state also set up some regulations in case of the absence of legitimacy. “By mitigating these potential problems, organizational legitimacy provides managers with a degree of autonomy to decide how and where business will be conducted”. (Neu et al., 1998) Researchers have to change their direction from direct assessment of legitimacy to another one, which is measuring it in terms of the resources provided by relevant stakeholders. “Rather than engage in the further development of entirely abstract constructions of the legitimating process… researchers should investigate the flow of resources from organizational constituencies as well as the pattern and content of communications” (Hybels, 1995). Through the above professionals’ opinions, now we can be much clearer about legitimacy theory.
