Understanding illegitimacy:Cognitive, normative, and regulative dimensions

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3196258

This dissertation explores the concept of illegitimacy, a significant yet overlooked phenomenon in organization theory (OT). Despite the growing interest in social evaluations over the past decade, research has predominantly focused on other macrolevel assessments like organizational stigma and legitimacy, while illegitimacy has continued to receive limited attention. However, with an increasing number of studies conflating the concepts of illegitimacy and stigma, scholars have recently called for a more comprehensive examination of illegitimacy to clarify theoretical ambiguities. In response to these calls, this study attempts to develop a precise understanding of the processes behind cognitive, normative, and regulative illegitimacy evaluations. Specifically, through using an interpretative hermeneutical analysis, the dissertation investigates how arabesk, a cultural and commercial category emic to Turkey, evolved into a long-standing subject of contention among the country’s intellectuals and became a target of the state-backed media company Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) during the period between 1968 and 1999. The findings suggest that contrary to the depictions in conceptual papers on legitimacy, the dimensions of illegitimacy follow their distinct trajectories and are largely influenced by contextual developments than each other. Further, the evaluations do not exhibit a linear progression where the intensity of illegitimacy gradually increases or decreases. Instead, the processes are irregular, fragmented, and disrupted by external factors. The study also indicates that the entanglement between stigma and normative illegitimacy might not be solely due to illegitimacy being an underexplored concept; OT’s exclusive focus on morally sourced stigma may also be an amplifier of the conceptual confusion. iv This dissertation contributes to the research on social evaluations by providing insights into the multi-level processes that lead to the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of cognitive, normative, and regulative illegitimacy judgments. It also reveals how these processes differ from models created for legitimacy evaluations. Additionally, the study acknowledges the overlaps between normative illegitimacy and stigma and presents potential avenues for distinguishing between these related concepts.