Administrative Science Quarterly

     The psychology of legitimacy is increasingly central to organizations, especially as firms enter the knowledge economy, in which individuals and their ideas become the chief sources of wealth creation. More and more, firms from every sector are characterized by flattened hierarchies, greater levels of individual autonomy and self-management, large numbers of peripatetic temporary workers, and control processes guided more by normative codes of conduct than by top-down authority relations and direct supervision.  Attaining and maintaining legitimacy from and between employees is ever more important as the traditional processes of organizational legitimation are rapidly being replaced by individual and group-based processes. With legitimacy, firms can build loyalty and positive and productive work environments, and organization leaders can effectuate positive and sustainable change. This raises a number of important questions for managers and organizations in their search for internal legitimacy. What are the psychological antecedents to legitimacy? How can organizations best use these social psychological building blocks to leverage the creativity, energy, and dedication of their knowledge employees? Conversely, how do individuals construct rationalizations and stereotypes to legitimize discriminatory and prejudicial ideas and actions? Given that organizational control is increasingly shaped by normative group codes of conduct, what are the impacts of these legitimizing ideologies on firms? And how can managers spot and mitigate the discriminatory processes of legitimation while building on healthy ones?

     In the Psychology of Legitimacy, editors Jost and Major seek to answer these and other questions in an ambitious collection of research on the psychological processes of legitimation and de-legitimation. The editors' chief interest is in uncovering how we construct ideological rationalizations, as individuals and as social entities, so that we mayas to better understand the psychological drivers of social inequality. The result is a masterly overview of the latest research on the psychological, sociological, and organizational development theories of legitimacy. Although the volume may be asking more questions than it answers, this collection of theory-based empirical studies will provide students of organizational studies with a valuable introduction to the psychology of legitimacy.