ABSTRACT
New-institutionalism theorists have made efforts to investigate a possible trade-off between the research of legitimacy and internal efficiency. Indeed, when an organization faces competing pressures, it can engage in compromise, avoidance, defiance, decoupling and/or manipulation. The uncertainty of context, in fact, would drive the actor’s decisions toward a final goal that the new-institutionalist literature defines as the ‘research of social legitimacy’. Where uncertainty represents the limit to be overcome to contain the ‘risk exposure’ which qualifies the individual to act in a constant evolving world, the search for social legitimacy could embody one of the objectives of the strategic action. The opportunity of combining different aims is given from the possibility to describe these phenomena in terms of power struggles and negotiations among external and internal constituencies, attributed to very diverse institutional logics. When an organization faces internal competing identities/values and some factions adhering to those identities, managers could attempt deletion, compartmentalization, aggregation and synthesis.
