2018/12/17 by Rashedur Chowdhury, Arno Kourula, Marjo Siltaoja · 65 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Psychology · #Cognition #Computer science #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Economics #Ethics in Business and Education #Grassroots #Law #Legitimacy #Management and Organizational Studies #Political science #Politics #Positive economics #Power (physics) #Psychology #Public relations #Set (abstract data type) #Sociology
paper · open access · doi:10.1177/0007650318816954
published in Business & Society 60(2), 420-453 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2018/12/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, development, and resolution of an issue, and they address these paradoxes using cognitive, moral, and pragmatic legitimacy strategies. While cognitive and moral strategies tend to be used consistently, the flexible and paradoxical use of pragmatic strategies has important consequences, both for GROs’ legitimacy and for their potential influence over powerful organizations associated with them. We enrich our framework with the help of two illustrative cases and discuss the implications of the framework for GROs’ legitimacy strategies in business and society literature.