The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations - Book Review

John T. Jost and Brenda Major, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 477 pp. $75.00, cloth; $27.95, paper.

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.

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.

In chapter 14, Spears, Jetten, and Doosje argue that members of low-status groups are more likely to accept their own inferiority and express outgroup favoritism when there is a well-established social reality identifying the separation in status. Conversely, the authors argue that when this "social reality" is in question, low-status groups will reject their inferiority and feel legitimate in displaying ingroup favoritism. In a similar study in chapter 15, from the perspective of social justification theory, Jost, Burgess, and Mosso argue that members of low-status groups are saddled with a troubling choice between supporting their own social mobility, and therefore an unjust system, or supporting their own group.

The last, and most relevant section for ASQ readers focuses specifically on organizational perspectives on legitimation. In chapter 16, building on Tyler's (1990) work on procedural justice, Elsbach identifies what type of verbal explanations are necessary to protect perceptions of organizational legitimacy after a legitimacy-threatening event. Drawing on a case study of public relations mistakes at Sears Auto Centers, Elsbach argues that when organizations are in a position of defending decisions that lead to unforeseeable deleterious outcomes, they should communicate the rationality of their decision-making process, but when the organization is forced to explain negative outcomes that the public views as foreseeable, they ought to communicate consideration and sincere regret. Tyler then summarizes a great deal of his own work on procedural justice in chapter 17, arguing that perceptions of legitimacy are driven more by fair treatment than by distributive concerns over resources. Most interestingly, Tyler ar gues that because most people want to develop and maintain a sense of identity, their relationship with organizations is based less on distributive concerns of how much of the "slice of the pie" the organization allocates, and more on the maintenance of their group-based social identity. Lastly, in chapter 18, Jackman explores how violence is used to maintain unjust social systems.

In the end, this is a fine book. The chapters clearly demonstrate the importance of understanding the psychological processes of legitimacy and provide fresh insights for organizational theorists to build upon. While the collection as a whole does not provide significant practical guidelines for overcoming psychological and institutional sources of inequality, many insights and future research questions can be drawn from the chapters' conclusions. A future research question could be whether the few upper-level positions held by minorities in corporations demonstrate a commitment to the advancement of all classes, based on their performance and knowledge, or perfunctory token advancements to silence potential criticism. Likewise, it may be fruitful to follow up on the insight that members of legitimate groups in organizations tend to defend the status quo and discount challengers of the status quo more than vice versa. Because many of the world's largest companies have recently been overtaken and marginalized by a new set of revisionist companies that have challenged the status quo, like CNN versus CBS, NBC, and ABC, this chapter could provide a strong theoretical lens to examine and make sense of this growing phenomenon. Overall, this book is exhaustively researched and referenced and, as a whole, creates a substantial foundation for future research.

REFERENCE

Tyler, T. R.

1990 Why People Obey the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group