Toward a New Measure of Organizational Legitimacy: Method, Validation, and Illustration
提出一种基于媒体内容分析的多维合法性测量方法（原始合法性向量），并用全球国防工业数据验证其有效性，发现它优于现有指标，且能区分合法性与声誉。
Measures of organizational legitimacy fall in three categories, based, respectively, on the observation of code adoption, firm linkages, and media coverage. Such variety reflects the absence of consensus definitions. Because legitimacy involves perceptions of social congruence, the author argues in favor of a perceptual measure based on media content analysis. The author extends existing media-based indicators by offering a multidimensional measure of legitimacy, the raw legitimacy vector (RLV), which accounts for the heterogeneity of perceptions across space and time. The article details a three-step methodology to compute RLV and illustrates its applicability using data on the global defense industry. The author finds strong support for RLV’s factorial, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity and demonstrates that RLV performs better than alternative measures. The paper contributes to research by identifying four stable dimensions of legitimacy (environment, competition, accountability, and transactions), by distinguishing empirically legitimacy and reputation, and by offering a measure suited for international comparison in both legitimate and contested industries.