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The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations - Book Review
Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 2002 by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
John T. Jost and Brenda Major, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 477 pp. $75.00, cloth; $27.95, paper.
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The psychology of legitimacy is increasingly central to organizations. More and more, firms are characterized by flattened hierarchies, greater individual autonomy and self-management, temporary workers, and control processes guided more by normative codes of conduct than by top-down authority relations and direct supervision. By attaining and maintaining legitimacy, firms can build loyalty and positive and productive work environments, and leaders can effect positive and sustainable change. This raises a number of important questions for managers and organizations in their search for internal legitimacy. What are the psychological antecedents to legitimacy? How can organizations best use these building blocks to leverage the creativity, energy, and dedication of their employees? Conversely, how are individuals able to legitimize discriminatory and prejudicial ideas and actions? Given that organizational control is increasingly shaped by normative group codes of conduct, what are the impacts of these legitimi zing ideologies on firms? And how can managers spot and mitigate the discriminatory processes of legitimation while building on healthy ones?
In the Psychology of Legitimacy, Jost and Major seek to answer these and other questions in an ambitious collection of research on the psychological processes of legitimation and delegitimation. Their chief interest is in uncovering how we construct ideological rationalizations, as individuals and as social entities, so as to better understand the psychological drivers of social inequality. The result is a masterly overview of the latest research on the psychological, sociological, and organizational development theories of legitimacy. Although the volume may be asking more questions than it answers, this collection of theory-based empirical studies will provide students of organizational studies with a valuable introduction to the psychology of legitimacy.
The book's eighteen chapters are divided into six sections, organized around theories and different levels of analysis. In section 1, Jost and Major introduce the conceptual relevance of the psychology of legitimacy. Section 2 provides a broad historical survey of the sociological and psychological theories of legitimacy. In section 3, contributions explore the cognitive and perceptual processes driving appraisals of legitimacy, and section 4 is dedicated to exploring why members of disadvantaged groups tolerate injustice. Integrating insights from social identification, social dominance, and system justification theories, chapters in section 5 examine the role that stereotyping and ideology play in the process of legitimation. The final section, "Institutional and Organizational Processes of Legitimation," focuses specifically on organizational perspectives on legitimation.
In chapter 1, Jost and Major review the sociological and psychological theories of legitimacy and discuss the conceptual relevance of legitimacy for social, organizational, and political psychology. The result is a solid introduction to the field that provides a rich context for the following chapters. Authors in the second section explain why we need a theory of legitimacy and illustrate how the processes of legitimation can help explain radical shifts in social norms and attitudes. Zelditch (chap. 2) provides a sweeping historical overview of the legitimation of social relations. Beginning with Thucydides and Aristotle and concluding with the convergence of sociological and psychological concerns in Gramsci and Habermas, Zelditch explores how we have explained social and political notions of legitimacy throughout history. In chapter 3, Kellman draws from a number of compelling cases, ranging from political assassinations to the use of psychotropic drugs at Harvard, to argue that the legitimization of any gi ven act or actor entails the delegitimization of the opposite set of actors or acts, and vice versa.
Section 3 explores how perceptions shape our appraisals of legitimacy. In chapter 4, Crandall and Beasley argue that appraisals of legitimacy are rooted in social perceptual processes that drive simple justification ideologies of social conduct. They conclude that most of us believe that people should be treated in a manner that is equal to their perceived moral value; that is, bad people deserve bad treatment, good people deserve good treatment. In chapter 5, Yzerbyt and Rogier illustrate how biological or social differences between groups (e.g., a man's nature is to be the breadwinner, a woman's is to nurture) are used to legitimate group stereotypes and grant these differences a sense of inevitability. Lastly, in chapter 6, Robinson and Kray describe the phenomenon whereby people view their own opinions as objective reality and the opinion of their adversaries as ideologically biased. The chapter also indicates that defenders of the status quo tend to misperceive the challengers of the status quo more than vice versa. This suggests that those who benefit from the status quo tend to become complacent in perceiving others and the legitimacy of their cause.
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