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

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Section 4 explores questions of legitimacy and social inequality. In chapter 7, Olson and Hafer explain why systems that distribute outcomes unequally among their members depend on both the winners and losers legitimizing the system's inequalities and why the disadvantaged so often view unequal arrangements as fair. From their empirical studies of working women in Canada, the authors conclude that disadvantaged actors tolerate and legitimize injustice because of (1) a need to believe that the world is a fair and just place; (2) the tendency for people to deny that they are personally discriminated against; and (3) the fact that most believe that speaking out against personal deprivation is socially undesirable.

In chapter 8, Major and Schmader examine the effects of perceived distributions on disadvantaged groups' self-esteem. They found that when members of disadvantaged groups view social distributions as illegitimate, they are likely to attribute their negative outcomes to external factors beyond their control and to devalue the domains in which they or members of their group are disadvantaged. In contrast, when they view social distributions as legitimate, they tend to attribute their unfavorable outcomes to unfavorable qualities about themselves and highly value the domains in which their group is disadvantaged.

In chapter 9, Ellmers suggests that pursuing individual mobility Out of one's disadvantaged group harms rather than helps the future chances of fellow group members and legitimizes existing differences between groups. For example, Ellmers argues that women who are successful in male-dominated organizations are more likely to hold negative stereotypes of other women, and in expressing these negative stereotypes while professing that they are non-prototypical women, they help perpetuate existing gender stereotypes. People's preference for individual mobility over greater social change is one of the most fascinating take-aways of this volume. In chapter 10, Wright takes Ellmers' analysis one step further with a thoughtful look at how tokenism, and the resulting perception of the permeability of intergroup boundaries, legitimates and perpetuates unjust social and organizational constructs. Wright notes that by providing a narrow window for a few successful tokens to ascend into a higher-status group, tokenism cre ates enormous ambiguity and uncertainty in identifying sources of injustice and thereby undermines collective action to change the status quo.

Section 5 examines the role that stereotyping and ideology play in the legitimization of inequality. In chapter 11, Ridgeway explains how consensual status beliefs--defined as widely accepted beliefs that people of one social category are more deserving or competent than those of other social categories--form a fundamental and pervasive form of legitimizing ideology in society. In a series of four studies, Ridgeway explains how repeated interaction, goal-oriented encounters, and a failure of disadvantaged groups to speak out result in status beliefs that transform notions of structural advantages (e.g., poets do not deserve to be paid as much as corporate executives) into legitimate ideologies. In chapter 12, Glick and Fiske build on social dominance and system justification theory to explain how seemingly favorable yet ambivalent prejudices, such as that Mexicans are family oriented or Native Americans are spiritual, propagate malignant stereotypes and legitimize the status quo. Taking a social dominance the ory approach, in chapter 13, Sidanius et al. explore how asymmetrical group hierarchies are maintained through the creation of group-based legitimizing ideologies (e.g., justifying nineteenth-century slavery through "scientific" arguments of Africans' moral and intellectual inferiority) that support and justify the social hierarchy of the advantaged group.