From Micro-Level to Macro-Level Legitimacy: Exploring How Judgments in Social Media Create Thematic Broadness at Meso-Level

Abstract

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.

Citation

Illia, L., Etter, M., Meggiorin, K. and Colleoni, E. (2022), "From Micro-Level to Macro-Level Legitimacy: Exploring How Judgments in Social Media Create Thematic Broadness at Meso-Level", Gegenhuber, T., Logue, D., Hinings, C.R.(B). and Barrett, M. (Ed.) Digital Transformation and Institutional Theory (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 83), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 111-131. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20220000083005