The Never-Ending Story: Discursive Legitimation in Social Media Dialogue
基于巴赫金和尼库林的对话理论，通过微观分析组织主导的社交媒体对话，揭示了话语合法化作为异议产物（包括话语授权、话语验证和话语终结三种功能）的过程，对研究组织合法性建构的学者有参考价值。
This paper explores the dialogical dimensions of discursive legitimation in social media sites to understand how organisations produce knowledge of legitimacy in concert with their stakeholders. Drawing on the dialogical theories of Bakhtin and Nikulin, we consider the potential for conceptualising discursive legitimation as a product of dissent: an ongoing ‘allosensual’ dialogue comprising different voices and competing knowledge claims. We explore this through a micro-level analysis of organisation-led social media sites, wherein organisational practices are increasingly subjected to public scrutiny and where knowledge of legitimacy can be significantly shaped. Our dialogical lens highlights three interrelated functions of discursive legitimation. Discursive authorisation represents attempts to assume a credible ‘voice’ in-relation-to ‘other’ voices, within the dialogue. Discursive validation represents attempts to subject truth claims about legitimacy to rational, normative and moral verification. Finally, discursive finalisation represents attempts to harmonise dissent, by either co-opting or antagonising stakeholders towards consensus. Primarily, this paper unpacks the role of social media in legitimation processes, while also elaborating on organisational attempts to control stakeholder dialogue in online contexts.