How do organizations respond to the loss of legitimacy in the context of disclosed corruption, and what drives the particular responses adopted? In this article, we study the organizational strategies of three multinational companies before, during, and after legitimacy loss due to disclosed...

Surprisingly, organization and management literature has long tended to regard corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics & compliance (or: anti-corruption) separately, although actors such as the United Nations typically regard anti-corruption as a part of CSR. As a result, CSR and...

Organizations have to manage their legitimacy by conforming with societal expectations. Existing research usually equates conformity with similarity across organizations, referred to as ‘alignment'. However, recent research suggests that, next to alignment, there is another form of conformity...

We explore the dark side of legitimacy, i.e., situations when legitimacy is largely taken-for-granted while negative consequences for society are not revealed. We build on a case study of anti-corruption at small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Normally, SMEs do not receive much public...