Constructing Moral Legitimacy in Online Corporate Social Responsibility Communication

Drawing upon legitimacy theory, this paper explores the processual and interdiscursive nature of legitimacy construction in a corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social media context. The paper moves away from the managerialist assumptions of legitimacy theory that have traditionally downplayed the role of communications in constructing legitimacy, to investigate how legitimacy is (re)constituted in communicative dynamics between organisations and stakeholders in the Facebook page of a UK retailer, The Co-Operative. Using discourse analysis, findings reveal that interlocutors utilise discursive legitimation strategies, including authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, mythopoesis and normalization, and identify intertextual interconnections between these strategies and broader societal discourses of scepticism, collaboration and protection. In contributing to understandings of communicative legitimacy within management and CSR scholarship, this paper asserts that legitimacy is a fluid, subjective and heterogeneous construct, socially constructed through organisation-stakeholder dialogue.