Strategies of Legitimacy Through Social Media: The Networked Strategy
通过纵向案例研究，提出企业利用社交媒体与利益相关者互动、在非层级化平台上共同构建议程来获取合法性的网络化策略，并探讨所需组织转型。
ABSTRACT How can corporations develop legitimacy when coping with stakeholders who have multiple, often conflicting sustainable development (SD) agendas? We address this question by conducting an in‐depth longitudinal case study of a corporation's stakeholder engagement in social media and propose the concept of a networked legitimacy strategy. With this strategy, legitimacy is gained through participation in non‐hierarchical open platforms and the co‐construction of agendas. We explore the organizational transition needed to yield this new legitimacy approach. We argue that, in this context, legitimacy gains may increase when firms are able to reduce the control over the engagements and relate non‐hierarchically with their publics. We contribute to the extant literature on political corporate social responsibility and legitimacy by providing an understanding of a new context for engagement that reconfigures cultural, network, and power relations between the firm and their stakeholders in ways that challenge previous forms of legitimation.