Organization-Based Legitimacy

In recent decades, organizational theorists have understood organizational legitimacy in relation to external institutional and strategic environments. ¹ We argue for renewed attention to internal, organization-based sources of legitimacy, defined in terms of an organization’s “core ideologies,” a pervasive and durable set of values that define the organization’s purpose and mission (Collins and Porras [1994] 2002). We contend that organizational action is based on an interaction between an organization’s response to broader institutional pressures and its particular identity, based on its core ideologies.