An overview of legitimacy theory as applied within the social and environmental accounting literature

This chapter provides an overview of legitimacy theory as applied within the social and environmental accounting literature. In doing so it fi rst defi nes organizational legitimacy and describes how organizational legitimacy can be considered to be a resource that is necessary to the survival of an organization. We then proceed to describe legitimacy theory as a positive theory that embraces a systems-oriented perspective and which is often considered as being derived from political economy theory .