Organizational legitimacy as a core concept for theorizing on business in emerging economies
探讨了跨国公司在新兴经济体面临的组织合法性挑战，分析了合法性的多面性及现有研究的不足，并提出了未来研究议程，对国际管理学者有参考价值。
Foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in emerging economies (EEs) face major challenges in attaining organizational legitimacy with local stakeholders, a precondition to successful operations in the country. This perspective explores the contingencies and perceptions that cause these legitimacy challenges and the actions MNEs employ to address these challenges, as identified in recent literature. We observe that legitimacy in EEs has many facets. Yet, it is often analyzed in a selective way – focusing on specific events or activities without considering the complexity of the phenomenon of how legitimacy is created, maintained and lost. We argue that organizational legitimacy is a very useful construct for international management research on EEs, and that the concept lends itself to more rigorous theoretical advancement than category-based concepts such as liability of foreignness. However, the IB literature has only partially embraced recent theoretical advances on the concept of legitimacy. We distinguish contingency, agency and judgement views of legitimacy to explore how applications of the concept may enhance our understanding of MNEs operating in EEs. This leads us to develop a future research agenda.