Justifying Social Impact as a Form of Impression Management: Legitimacy Judgements of Social Enterprises’ Impact Accounts
研究社会企业如何通过构建社会影响陈述来获取合法性，发现这些陈述分别诉诸认知性和评价性两种判断，且企业专业性的正当化几乎完全依赖评价性判断和财务运营数据。
Abstract This paper investigates how social enterprises construct accounts to gain legitimacy from the social impact generated by their products and operations. The paper finds that social impact accounts are framed to appeal to two distinct forms of judgement about legitimacy: cognitive and evaluative. Cognitive forms of judgement qualify how well an enterprise shares attributes with an individual's schemas of established actors or roles in society. Evaluative forms of judgement tend to operate more analytically to make comparisons of the relative appropriateness and desirability of multiple enterprises to achieve an audience's goals. The findings show that although legitimizing the social aspects of an enterprise involved justifications aimed at both forms of judgement, legitimizing an enterprise's professionalism relied almost exclusively on evaluative judgements. Moreover, the justifications created to appeal to evaluative judgements relied almost exclusively on financial and operational data, using operational scale as a proxy.