Keywords

3.1 Organizational Legitimacy

Legitimacy has been an object of interest in several different academic fields. Consequently, there are many possible reference points for our discussions. We have chosen to follow the approach of the American sociologist and lawyer Mark C. Suchman, laid out in his classic article “Managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches” (1995). This perspective provides an overall picture and balances a strategic and an institution-focused understanding (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Suchman’s sociological view, combined with his background in law, also fits well with our own interest in the social dynamics and legal implications of different conceptual framings.

Turning to the substance of the legitimation theory, we could start with the premise that, to organizations, legitimacy is something highly desirable, necessitating legitimation efforts (e.g. Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott et al. 2000). Legitimacy is not an asset in the sense of a resource to be mined from the organizations’ environment and then employed in pursuit of their goals (although it has been depicted along such lines, especially in older research, cf. Suchman 1995 with references). Instead, legitimacy is by definition an incorporeal phenomenon—a cultural construct that only exists in the interactions between different subjects (e.g. Johnson et al. 2006, with further references) and which has been described as providing an organization with “justification of existence” (Maurer 1971; cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1983).

Such justification, that is, legitimacy, is achieved by cultivating a perception of congruence between an actor’s activities and its surrounding social environment’s norms and values (Suchman 1995; cf. Wæraas and Ihlen 2009; Frandsen and Johansen 2011). (Rhetoricians will here note that there is an overlap with the idea of appealing to the doxa of the audience.) Organizations are thus seen as embedded in wider social environments and structured and understood (as legitimate) relative to the social and cultural standards of these environments (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1991). In short, “legitimacy represents a relationship with an audience, rather than being a possession of the organization”.

In the article from whence this last quote is obtained, Suchman (1995) proposes an analytic with three different kinds of legitimacy, namely, pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. Noting that “[a]ll three types involve a generalized perception or assumption that organizational activities are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”, he goes on to differentiate between them, as they rest on somewhat different behavioral dynamics. Pragmatic legitimacy rests on the self-interested calculations of the organization’s audiences, which means that legitimation efforts can cater to such calculations, inviting decisions favorable to the organization. Moral legitimacy reflects a positive normative evaluation of the organization or its activities, entailing the value of strategic communications signaling moral propriety. Cognitive legitimacy results from an organization’s perceived comprehensibility or taken-for-grantedness. It can be achieved by “naturalizing” the organization or its activities, that is, making it seem like an understandable, coherent part of the chaotic existence of everyday life, or perhaps even as a necessary and inescapable factual entity—a given, a naturalized fact of life (cf., from the field of law, e.g. Fitzpatrick 1992; Schlag and Griffin 2019). This trifold analytic provides means of differentiating between separate aspects of an organization’s relationship with its audiences. Translated to rhetorical terms, the analytic highlights different aspects of ethos construction, all of which can in principle be exhibited to construct a green ethos.

As relationships need work, and as the need for legitimation is constant, the process of obtaining legitimacy requires continual effort. In an idealized chronology, at the outset the challenge is to gain legitimacy. From then on, the organization needs to maintain legitimacy over time, and in the event of legitimacy problems or occurring crises, try to repair it (Wæraas and Ihlen 2009, building on Suchman 1995; Elsbach et al. 1998; Allen and Caillouet 1994; Elsbach 1994). Different stages of the overall legitimation process involve different challenges. For example, maintaining a level of cognitive legitimacy already attained is relatively easy, demanding only limited efforts (e.g. to “stay natural”), whereas repairing moral legitimacy after an occurring crisis can demand efforts both great and long term. As will be further developed in the following section, the different kinds of legitimacy and challenges invite different strategies of legitimation.

The unremitting requirement for legitimation is partly a result of the ever-changing flow of public discourse. The dynamic, polyvocal, and sometimes temperamental discourses of late modern society inevitably put pressure on organizational legitimacy, as discourse affects social values and norms (both in the sense of rules, and of what is considered normal), effectively changing and revalorizing them over time. Legitimation is thus connected to the dynamics of public opinion, which implies that the influencing of public opinion, or sometimes the opinions of a more limited group of organizational stakeholders, can provide avenues of legitimation, or indeed in itself be a compelling indirect means of legitimation. Trying to counteract the public acceptance of climate change, for instance, can make actors otherwise seen as complicit to climate change seem more legitimate, or vice versa. However, such opinion forming is often challenging and generally necessitates coordinated efforts between different actors within a social field (Suchman 1995). There are exceptions (cf. e.g. Scanlan 2017), but, generally, it is difficult to attain the level of coordination necessary. These difficulties partly stem from the fact that actors within a field are often competitors, implementing competitive legitimation efforts (e.g. Wæraas and Ihlen 2009).

As regards the scientific analysis of legitimacy management—or, to deemphasize the strategic managerial perspective, legitimation processes—interesting work has been performed within sociology, not least under the new institutional paradigm of organizational studies (see generally e.g. DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Johnson et al. 2006 with references). Research pursuant to this paradigm tends to view organizations as actors, actively “translating” and adopting the organizational “recipes” received from society to their own local context, rather than passively yielding to the normative pressure from their environments (Røvik 1998; cf. Frandsen and Johansen 2011, 2013). Performing such translations can be a potent way of achieving legitimacy. These recipes, or their “ingredients”, which are central to the idea of organizations as translators striving for legitimacy, are tied to another key concept, namely that of institutions, which in fact has become the common label of this theoretical perspective.

3.2 The Institutional Paradigm

Following Scott (2008), institutions can be defined as “multifaceted, durable social structures made up of symbolic elements, social activities, and material resources”, where the symbolic elements include three basic types: rules, norms, and cultural-cognitive ideas and beliefs (cf. Frandsen and Johansen 2011, 2013; Suchman 1995). Institutions are simultaneously viewed as a product (a specific property or state of an existing social order) and a process.

In the latter, procedural, sense institutions can be analyzed as a series of specific stages, for instance, as stages corresponding to a kind of “Rise and fall” of an institution, such as innovation (pre-institutionalization), habitualization, objectification (semi-institutionalization), sedimentation (full institutionalization), and de-institutionalization. In the sense of being a product, an institution can be exploited, as part of legitimation strategies. The institutions of an organization’s environment are dynamic, in the sense that they are constantly being developed (undergoing change). Despite this, in every given moment, there will be institutions available, in the sense that they can be addressed rhetorically as if they were fixed and stable.

In this context, it is interesting to note that, a decade ago, Frandsen and Johansen (2011) suggested that, from the perspective of organizational theory, the concept of climate change could be defined as:

a set of ideas embedded in a complex process of institutionalization which in the case of private companies materialize in action-producing initiatives such as climate strategies, climate-friendly products or production processes, and new related forms of external and internal communication.

That is, climate change can be defined as an institution influencing organizational practice, or at the very least part of a process of institutionalization—which, a decade later, can credibly be taken to have resulted in a “full”, sedimented institution, diffused throughout many different organizations and fields. Given the current upsurge of green marketing, such a conceptualization seems credible. The conceptualization is also attractive for rhetorical analysis, as organizations appeal to or mobilize the potential of institutions to obtain legitimacy. Described in rhetorical terms: Associating an organization’s image to certain institutions can be a way of constructing a persuasive ethos, and, as of now, green imagery is evidently quite prolific within corporate ethoi construction.

The concepts of ethos and image are connected to that of identity, which, following Røvik (1998; cf. Frandsen and Johansen 2011), can be defined as “the awareness of who you are in relation to how you perceive others are and how you believe others perceive you”. In other words, identity is largely, albeit not necessarily exclusively, about self-image. As identity is thus constructed as a relational phenomenon, it can be assessed and reshaped rhetorically through comparisons that highlight aspects of similarity or dissimilarity with other actors. Such identity construction can often be performed and discussed in terms of imitation of positive exemplars (e.g. actors perceived to be green) or of differentiation from negative exemplars (e.g. massive polluters). As this suggests, institutions can have homogenizing effects, partly due to imitative efforts and partly due to the fact that actors can independently adapt to the same institutions (e.g. implement the same rules), thereby becoming more alike.

These ideas about the institutionalization of climate change, about rhetorical appeals to institutionalized rules, norms, and ideas, and of the possible effects of rhetorical identity-management, are all of interest to our inquiry. They provide a perspective for studying how the external rhetoric of corporations constitutes part of their corporate identity management, among other things raising the question if organizations, in the words of Frandsen and Johansen (2011), do in fact “become what they say they are”. If, for instance, a corporation repeatedly touts its climate friendliness over an extended period, does this influence not only the public image but in fact the self-image of the corporation? Could it contribute to institutionalizing the idea of climate change and thus have a real impact on the self-understanding of the organization concerned? While Frandsen and Johansen do not provide any conclusive answers to these questions, they direct attention to the possible effects of an organization’s external rhetoric on its identity, its internal norms, and its actions. If such questions could be answered in the affirmative, this would entail a possible, and possibly massively important, virtue of green marketing as a vehicle of climate transition.

Present research also gives some cues as to how rhetorical theory can provide means of mediating fractures between different logics and different perceptions of organizational identity, or indeed of combining them in meaningful ways. This is completely in line with a constructive tradition, casting the role of rhetoric not as a mere tool for manipulation, but as a deliberative aid that can help us make better decisions. The capacity to negotiate the friction between various perspectives is of utmost importance, since the very practice of green legitimation and green marketing contains a pervasive, and perhaps key, conflict between two different institutional logics: namely, on the one hand, the institutions of sustainability, planetary boundaries, and climate change and, on the other hand, the institutions of (late) modern capitalism (cf. e.g. Kendall 2008). For example, communications scholars Smerecnik and Renegar (2010) have shown how corporate communication can work to subordinate questions of sustainability to the capitalist paradigm, with its inherent norms, values, and forms of agency. This is a way of taming the transformation and obstructing or at least delaying progress toward sustainability. In light of this, there is need for further discussions on how green legitimation and green marketing can best be understood and possibly reshaped to face the common challenge of climate transition. Rebalancing the opposite interests emanating from these institutions might take a lot of work, but can no doubt prove constructive.

3.3 Some Strategies for Gaining Legitimacy

Legitimacy can be defined as perceived congruence between an actor’s activities and the norms and values of its surrounding social environment and can be achieved in different ways. Several of the aforementioned authors have written comprehensively on legitimacy management and have provided a number of helpful distinctions. As mentioned, Suchman (1995) has proposed distinguishing between pragmatic, moral, and cognitive kinds of legitimacy, highlighting dimensions of interest, evaluation, or comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness, respectively. In addition to this, he has taken inventory of and categorized different strategies for obtaining legitimacy, thereby distinguishing a few main types of legitimation efforts. The different strategies are conceptually tied to the different stages of the “chronology” of legitimation, that is, gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy.

While Suchman provides a broad and integrative overview of the legitimacy research at the time (1995), aiming to establish more stable conceptual moorings for the legitimacy discussions in general, we will need to narrow our focus. For our present discussion on green ethos construction, the most interesting strategies are the ones suited to the effort to gain legitimacy. The strategies for maintaining, and for repairing legitimacy (largely coinciding with crisis management), are relevant for a broad understanding of green marketing and corporate green promises. They are, however, less pertinent to the key process of constructing an environmental ethos, as they largely presuppose that a certain image is already in place and only needs to be conserved or reasserted.

To gain legitimation, then, in essence, an organization can:

  1. A.

    Conform to an environment, if necessary by adapting to the dictates of a preexisting audience within the organization’s current environment (conformative legitimation),

  2. B.

    select a favorable environment, among multiple available environments in pursuit of an audience that will support the organization (selective legitimation), or

  3. C.

    try to change its environment by manipulating the social framework of its environment and creating new audiences and/or new legitimating beliefs (manipulative legitimation).

The different strategies present their respective challenges and opportunities and have their respective strengths and weaknesses. Conformist strategies, for example, signal allegiance to the cultural order, pose few challenges to established constitutional logics (Meyer and Rowan 1991), and do not require breaking with prevailing cognitive frames (Oliver 1991; cf. Suchman 1995). At the same time, conformism requires conformity—it requires fit and thus demands that any less than well-fitting organization changes to adapt to its environment, which can prove challenging given often occurring tendencies of inertia. Manipulative strategies, inversely, do not (in their pure form) require conformity or internal adaptation of the organization. Instead, they require efforts to change the external environment, which can prove to be difficult indeed. Selective legitimation in turn requires the possibility of selection, entailing both the availability of multiple environments of differing favorability, and organizational mobility, in the sense that the organization can move between these environments. However, as the concept of “environment” allows for plasticity (cf. e.g. Scott 2005), selection need not be limited to, for example, change of geographical location or legal jurisdiction. It can also include other selection processes, such as choices regarding positioning within a market, to fall under certain norms rather than others, or to conform to certain rules while evading others.

As the previous discussion suggests, the different strategies (A–C) can be used to gain the different kinds of legitimacy, that is, pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy, respectively. Depending on which kind of legitimacy is sought, the nature of the efforts will need to vary. A standard conformist strategy of gaining pragmatic legitimacy, for instance, is to illustrate how the organization can gratify the needs of the target audience by being responsive to client needs. This strategy is well suited to symbolic action pursuant to a traditional capitalist paradigm, whereas conformity to moral ideals has often been taken to pose challenges to this paradigm—not least regarding environmental sustainability, which has often been perceived to entail a certain level of altruism (a theme we will return to in Chap. 9).

The triad (A–C) is indeed somewhat idealized. It is not a true trichotomy, as a measure of overlap between the different strategies is possible. Nor are the strategies necessarily mutually exclusive, as combined approaches are possible. It is thus quite possible for an organization to adapt to its environment while at the same time trying to manipulate it. Just as it is equally possible to select a fairly favorable environment and then either adapt to it, try to manipulate it, or indeed both, for an even better fit—maximizing organizational legitimacy. It should here be noted that manipulative legitimation, though it can be, is not necessarily “bad or dishonest”; the word “manipulative” in this context merely signifies the attempt to actively change the organizational environment (Wæraas and Ihlen 2009). It should also be noted that seemingly conformist efforts can be purely symbolic, rather than substantive. Organizations regularly assume or incorporate “institutionalized rules” about suitable behavior within their field or within society at large (Meyer and Rowan 1977; cf. Frandsen and Johansen 2011). Such assumptions may well be ostensibly professed, in a “merely rhetorical” fashion. To describe this process, organizational scholars have spoken about the decoupling of the rhetoric professing legitimate behavior from actual corporate praxis (ibid.; Boxenbaum and Jonsson 2008; cf. Wæraas and Ihlen 2009). Such a disconnect between rhetoric and praxis might result from cynical opportunism, which can be a driver of greenwashing (cf. Delmas and Cuerel Burbano 2011). However, it can also be the result of the failures of good faith efforts, such as bona fide attempts at being “more green”. Despite these purely formal deficiencies, on the one hand, and the possibility of cynicism and failure, on the other hand, the triad (A–C) provides a helpful heuristic to understand green legitimation efforts and a useful tool for analyzing strategies of corporate image management in relation to normative frameworks.