Keywords

3.1 Introduction

The concept of legitimacy as a key element of the institutional theory has aroused great interest among the scientific community. One of the reasons is because it allows for better understanding of the behaviour of organizations and their stakeholders . A simple search using the word legitimacy in business journals of major scientific databases, such as the Web of Science, shows more than 2000 articles. Two-thirds of these articles were published in the last decade (2007–2016) in numerous scientific journals , including the most prestigious ones: Organization Studies, Academy of Management Journal or Strategic Management Journal.

Since Suchman (1995) and Scott (1995) provided understanding of organizational legitimacy, great advances have been made in this field of research. Thus, studies have emerged, which analyse the behaviour of legitimacy sources (Bitektine, 2011; Tost, 2011), the actions that companies can develop to gain legitimacy (Cho & Patten, 2007; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) and the effects of legitimacy on obtaining resources (Pollack, Rutherford, & Nagy, 2012; Pollock & Rindova, 2003), the effect on business results (Cruz-Suárez, Prado-Román, & Prado-Román, 2014) and the effect on business success (Díez-Martín, Prado-Roman, & Blanco-González, 2013). All this has led to progress in a great number of lines of research such as the creation of companies (Tornikoski & Newbert, 2007; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002), internationalization (Kostova, Roth, & Dacin, 2008), corporate social responsibility (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007) or management of stakeholders (Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997).

The great number of lines of research that has emerged related to the concept of organizational legitimacy has led to the emergence of some literature reviews . As the knowledge of a research field accumulates, its periodic analysis becomes essential. This type of work is of great value for the progress of science because it groups the main contributions in a field of research. The majority of existing reviews in this field have been qualitative. The most relevant review out of all of them, due to its number of citations , is ‘legitimacy in organizational institutionalism’ (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008), where a summary of theoretical and empirical research on organizational legitimacy is made and suggestions on the elements that make up the process of legitimization are given. This paper was updated recently in a version that responds to six big questions on organizational legitimacy: concept, importance, source, strategies , types and evolution (Deephouse, Bundy, Tost, & Suchman, 2017). Other reviews of interest are ‘legitimacy’ (Suddaby, Bitektine, & Haack, 2017) or ‘legitimation of new ventures’ (Überbacher, 2014).

The progress of science is multiplied with the cooperation between researchers. As a field of research evolves, it undergoes a transition in its collaborative structure , from a small number of disconnected researchers to a much larger network, where a large collaborative group appears connecting the structure (Bettencourt, Kaiser, & Kaur, 2009). The process of scientific discovery and the reorganization of the collaborative structure of emerging fields can be understood in general terms as a process of cognitive and social unification of many initially separated efforts. Since new conceptual findings arise from increasingly close collaboration between scientists, this made us become interested in the knowledge structure among contributors in the field of organizational legitimacy.

Thus, by using a bibliometric study we try to respond to what the main countries and institutions that contribute to research in the field of organizational legitimacy are, the lines of research that have been developed and who share them, how legitimacy investigations between countries and institutions are connected, which countries and institutions represent real turning points in this field and how the dissemination of research on organizational legitimacy between countries and institutions has evolved.

Beyond the objectives of this research, this paper continues with the description of the methodology used to respond to the previous questions. The results of the bibliometric analysis are then presented, and the conclusions of the study are established.

3.2 Research Method

In order to know the knowledge structure of organizational legitimacy between countries and institutions, a bibliometric study was carried out. Bibliometrics helps researchers to understand the origin and evolution of a discipline, as well as complement and extend the results obtained by using more traditional techniques of literature review (Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004). Bibliometric methods have several possible uses: evaluating the performance of publications of scientists and institutions, as well as the mapping of science in order to reveal the structure and dynamics of scientific fields (Zupic & Cater, 2015).

In this paper we use the analysis of co-citations . Unlike the citation analysis, a co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together in a paper (Small, 1973). Therefore, documents are co-cited if they are included in the same paper. So, if two elements are cited together, they will probably have some kind of content related. In addition, the influence of the co-cited paper will be greater on its field of knowledge. In contrast, citation analysis provides information on the relative influence of a paper, so it is not capable of identifying interconnection networks between academics. Co-citation analysis is useful for reporting on paper networks and even detecting changes in paradigms and schools of thought (Zupic & Cater, 2015). However, the major drawback of co-citation analysis is that the frequency of co-citations is not independent of the moment at which the analysis is started, so papers of earlier dates are more likely to be the most co-cited (Vogel & Güttel, 2012).

Currently, the analysis of co-citations can be carried out using some of the numerous software of scientific visualization, such as Pajek, Jigsaw, VOSviewer or HistCite. These tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. However, CiteSpace was used in this work. It is scientific detection and visualization software based on Java, which enables to analyse the critical changes that take place in a field of research (Chen, 2006; Chen, Ibekwe-SanJuan, & Hou, 2010). It is specially designed to support the analytical visualization process and can produce co-citation networks based on citations of articles that reveal the structure of a particular research field. Its results include being capable of extracting the main research clusters in a given field, as well as their connection. In addition, CiteSpace analyses co-occurrence networks not only between authors and keywords but also between institutions and countries.

The elaboration of the database for CiteSpace was done in several steps. First, the documents under analysis were selected. For this, only articles from scientific journals from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) containing the term ‘legitimacy’ in the title, abstract or keywords were analysed. Later we filtered the articles according to the scientific area to which they belonged. In this research, we are interested in articles related to the areas of business and finance . Third, we delimited the period of analysis, and only articles between 1995 and 2014 were selected. A total of 1605 articles were used in four 5-year analysis periods (1995–1999, 2000–2004, 2005–2009, 2010–2014). Each period had 87, 147, 453 and 918 articles, respectively. At this point, using the co-citation method, the literature suggests that its reliability improves when used to analyse past, noncurrent periods. For this last purpose, the use of bibliographic coupling would be more adequate (Vogel & Güttel, 2012).

After elaborating the database, the main paths of the evolution of organizational legitimacy between institutions and between countries were mapped. The analytical process consists of categorizing clusters of countries and institutions in the discipline of organizational legitimacy, identifying the major clusters in the knowledge map, identifying the key countries and institutions that connect knowledge paths and performing a chronological analysis of the evolution of knowledge between countries and institutions. This was done in the four time periods mentioned above. The following parameters in CiteSpace were used: (1) time slice, according to the analysis period (slice length = 1 year); (2) term source, country or institution ; (3) node type, country or institution; (4) pruning, pathfinder/pruning the merged network; and (5) selection criteria, top 50 per slice.

3.3 Results

3.3.1 Organizational Legitimacy Knowledge Structure by Country

Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 show the network of countries that contributed to the study of organizational legitimacy from 1995 to 2014. Countries are represented by nodes, whose size depends on the frequency of citations received. Thus, during the 1995–1999 period, the country that generated the highest frequency of citations in the field of organizational legitimacy was the USA (34 citations), followed by Canada (14 citations) and England (11 citations). These countries represent the core of studies on organizational legitimacy. The ten countries that produced the most citations in the field of organizational legitimacy, in each of the four study periods, are shown in Table 3.1. It is worth noting that during the following study periods (2000–2004, 2005–2009, 2010–2014), the USA continues to be the country that contributes most to the field of organizational legitimacy, generating more than twice as many citations as the second or third country that contributes most to this area. Besides, Canada and England continue to be, behind the USA, the countries that generate the highest frequency of citations in this field. This core of countries is maintained over time. During the 2010–2014 period, Australia achieves a citation level similar to Canada, considered one of the countries with the greatest contribution increase in this field. Between 2005 and 2009, a substructure of countries that generate citations in this area is observed. This substructure is maintained during the following period, which is formed by the Netherlands, China , Spain , France and Germany.

Fig. 3.1
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The network of countries for organizational legitimacy : 1995–1999

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Fig. 3.2
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The network of countries for organizational legitimacy : 2000–2004

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Fig. 3.3
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The network of countries for organizational legitimacy : 2005–2009

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Fig. 3.4
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The network of countries for organizational legitimacy : 2010–2014

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Table 3.1 Top 10 organizational legitimacy research distribution by country
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A more in-depth analysis of the nodes that make up the network of contributing countries to the field of organizational legitimacy enables to observe that some nodes have a purple ring (see Figs. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4). This shows the centrality of the node in the network . Thus, a greater thickness of the purple ring implies a greater centrality of the country. Betweenness centrality measures the degree to which a particular node, which refers to a cited article, is connected to other nodes in a network. Centrality is related to points of intellectual inflection. A very centralized node indicates that it connects many different links. The analysis of the inflection point enables to show the paradigmatic changes and the evolution of a specific discipline. In our case, it identifies those countries that have contributed to the evolution and better understanding of the field of organizational legitimacy. Therefore, countries with high centrality are those that have acted as bridges connecting different research trends in our field of study. They reveal the intellectual transition of a field of study over time (Chen, 2004).

According to the theory of social networks , a centrality greater than 0.10 is considered high (Fang, 2015). During the first two periods under study, the countries with the greatest centrality were the USA, Canada, England and Australia, coinciding with the countries with the highest frequency of citations . However, the passage of time has led these countries to lose centrality to the benefit of new ones, whose research has enabled to connect papers in the field of organizational legitimacy (see Table 3.1). In the 2005–2009 period, China , Jordan and New Zealand stood out due to their centrality, whereas during the 2010–2014 period, Switzerland, Italy and England are the countries with the highest centrality. In this last period, countries such as the USA, Canada or Australia do not appear among the top 10 with the highest centrality.

Unlike the first two study periods, since 2005, countries such as Australia and Canada do not share lines of research in legitimacy with other countries , despite maintaining a high number of citations. For example, from 2005 to 2009 the lines of research of Australian researchers were fundamentally similar to those of researchers in China. The lines of researchers in Spain resembled mainly those of researchers of Colombia or Denmark. On the other hand, the lines of researchers of New Zealand had a relatively broader similarity with other countries, such as China , Germany, Jordan, New Ireland or Sweden. This suggests that research teams in countries like Canada are strong enough to carry out independent research or to generate systems with autonomous lines of research.

The evolution of a research field needs to be based on the accumulation of knowledge. At this point, it is possible to know the main clusters of countries in which similar lines of research are developed. Table 3.2 shows the evolution of the organizational legitimacy clusters by country. We can observe that during the 1995–1999 period, there were two groups of countries, formed by four and two countries, respectively, with similar lines of research of their members. The mean silhouette value is over 0.8. Generally speaking, the values of mean silhouette should be between 1 and 1. Values close to 1 mean that the cluster is consistent and similar in content terms. This indicates a high-quality cluster analysis of organizational legitimacy. One of the clusters formed in this period shows a mean silhouette equal to 1, indicating that the cluster is hardly representative, so it was removed from the results. The section title term by LLR shows the lines of research that make up the cluster.

Table 3.2 Evolution of the organizational legitimacy clusters by country
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The evolution of the concept of organizational legitimacy has led to the emergence of a greater number of contributing countries in this area, as well as the emergence of new lines of research. While in the beginning, the research area had two clusters of countries with similar research; during the 2009–2014 period, we found up to six clusters. However, clusters of countries are not maintained over time, showing that countries alternate their lines of research.

3.3.2 Organizational Legitimacy Knowledge Structure by Institution

Figures 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 show the network of institutions that contributed to the study of organizational legitimacy from 1995 to 2014. During the 1995–1999 period, Emory Univ. and Victoria Univ. were the institutions that generated the highest frequency of citations (three citations) in the field of organizational legitimacy. The institution with the most frequent citations from 2000 to 2004 was Univ. Nottingham (7 citations), while the leader during the following two periods (2005–2009; 2010–2014) was Univ. of Alberta with 12 and 16 citations. Table 3.3 shows the ten institutions that produced the most frequent citations in the field of organizational legitimacy for each of the four study periods. No institution reaches the top 10 of contributing institutions during all study periods. Only two institutions are in the top 10 for three periods: Penn State Univ. and Erasmus Univ., while there are four universities in the top 10 for two periods: Univ. of Alberta, Harvard Univ., York Univ. and Warwick Univ. The universities that produced the highest frequency of citations in the field of organizational legitimacy are Penn State Univ., Erasmus Univ., Univ. of Alberta, Harvard Univ., York Univ. and Warwick University. These six universities are in the top 10 during 2005–2009 and 2010–2014 and form the core knowledge structure in the field of organizational legitimacy. Taking into account the period between 1995 and 2014, the university with the highest frequency of citations was Univ. of Alberta (Canada) followed by Penn State University (USA) and Erasmus University (the Netherlands), respectively.

Fig. 3.5
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The network of institutions for organizational legitimacy : 1995–1999

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The network of institutions for organizational legitimacy : 2000–2004

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The network of institutions for organizational legitimacy : 2005–2009

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Fig. 3.8
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The network of institutions for organizational legitimacy : 2010–2014

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Table 3.3 Top 10 organizational legitimacy research distribution by institution
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A more detailed analysis of the centrality of each institution will enable to identify the inflection points that involve changes in the field of organizational legitimacy, more specifically, those institutions that have acted as bridges, connecting different research trends. However, no institution shows a centrality higher than 0.10. Therefore, it is not possible to claim the existence of institutions that play a critical role, which the research network structure on organizational legitimacy depends on.

Table 3.4 shows the evolution of the organizational legitimacy clusters by institutions. We can observe that during the 1995–1999 period, those institutions where organizational legitimacy was studied followed different lines of research. However, during the 2000–2004 period, the existence of institutions with similar lines of research can be observed. Thus, in this period we find up to 4 broad lines of research grouped into clusters between 12 and 7 institutions (mean silhouette>0.8 and <1). The evolution of the research field led to the emergence of new lines of research, as observed during 2005–2009, where we found 13 clusters with mean silhouette >0.8 and <1 and during 2010–2014, with 14 clusters with mean silhouette >0.8 and <1. The cluster size also increases with time. The section title term by LLR shows the lines of research that make up the cluster.

Table 3.4 Evolution of the organizational legitimacy clusters by institution
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3.4 Discussions and Conclusions

This paper is useful to reveal the structure formed by the countries and institutions that contribute to research on organizational legitimacy. The development and evolution of organizational legitimacy as a field of study over four different periods was shown by a bibliometric study .

The first study period was between 1995 and 1999. It was the beginning of the period of research on organization legitimacy, in which the basis of this field of research is provided through studies by Suchman (1995) or Scott (1995). During this period, there were few countries and institutions that opted for this field of research. This suggests that the discipline was not appealing for most researchers at that time. Some of the countries and institutions that contributed most in the beginning were the USA, Canada and England, as well as Emory Univ. or Univ. Victoria. The lines of research in organizational legitimacy were scarce, and at the same time, they were hardly shared between institutions. The great reference, acting as a broker in the dissemination of this knowledge, was the USA.

During the 2000–2004 period, the USA, Canada and England are still the countries that contribute with more citations . With regard to institutions, contributions increase and new actors appear in the production of citations. Dissemination is fundamentally through the USA, Canada and England, in addition to Australia. The lines of research experience a considerable increase, being possible to recognize up to four large research groups at institutional level: corporate environmental disclosure, entrepreneurship research, institutionalizing identity and high-technology venture.

There was a great increase in contributions in this field during the 2005–2009 period. The number of countries with a citation frequency greater than ten is tripled, and the average frequency of institutions with the most citations doubles. The countries with the most citations are the USA, Canada and England. While in the institutional field, the leading institutions are relatively recent in organizational legitimacy studies (Univ. of Alberta, Harvard Univ.). Regarding the key of dissemination, it ceases to be exclusive of a few countries. In this period, the number of countries that act as a knowledge link triples. In addition, many of the countries that generate more citations are not among the countries that contribute to greater dissemination and understanding of organizational legitimacy (e.g. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands or Spain) . There are nine more lines of research compared to the previous period, related to institutional theory , ecology theory, initial public offering or corporate social responsibility .

Finally, during 2010–2014, in addition to continuing increase of contributions in the area, the structure of contributing countries and institutions starts to stabilize. Nine of the top 10 countries with the highest frequency of citations during 2005–2009 repeat in the top 10 of the 2010–2014 ranking. Similarly, six of the top ten institutions with the most frequent citations also repeat from 2010 to 2014: Univ. of Alberta; Penn State Univ.; Harvard Univ.; Warwick Univ. York Univ. and Erasmus Univ. In this period, knowledge generation poles in organizational legitimacy start to be established. However, in terms of dissemination, there are still countries with a large capacity for generating citations, which are not among the countries that contribute to greater dissemination and understanding of organizational legitimacy (e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia). As for the lines of research that emerged in this period, there are 14 lines, one more than the previous period.

The analysis of these four periods has been useful to understand better the countries and institutions that contribute to research in the field of organizational legitimacy, as well as the evolution and dissemination of this field of research. This study provides a comprehensive review of contributors to the discipline of organizational legitimacy, different schools and lines of research, as well as a starting point for future researchers to continue building a sound theoretical basis.

The results of this research have several limitations. On the one hand, although one of the best-known scientific databases (Web of Science) was used for the study, there are, however, numerous publications in the field of organizational legitimacy that are not found in this database. Future research could complete these results by combining the data from several information bases, such as Scopus. On the other hand, research in English has been analysed, so countries and institutions whose mother tongue is English can benefit from the review of citations . Another limitation is that the results of the bibliometric analysis depend on the thresholds defined in the methodology used. In this study, although we varied the thresholds widely without observing significant changes in the network structures , the final results partly depended on technical decisions that we had to make.