TY - JOUR
T1 - From Micro-Level to Macro-Level Legitimacy: Exploring How Judgments in Social Media Create Thematic Broadness at Meso-Level
AU - Illia, Laura
AU - Etter, Michael
AU - Meggiorin, Katia
AU - Colleoni, Elanor
PY - 2022/9/23
Y1 - 2022/9/23
N2 - Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.
AB - Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.
U2 - 10.1108/S0733-558X20220000083005
DO - 10.1108/S0733-558X20220000083005
M3 - Article
SN - 0733-558X
VL - 83
SP - 111
EP - 131
JO - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
JF - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
ER -