Power of Paradox: Grassroots Organizations’ Legitimacy Strategies Over Time

Abstract

Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, development, and resolution of an issue, and they address these paradoxes using cognitive, moral, and pragmatic legitimacy strategies. While cognitive and moral strategies tend to be used consistently, the flexible and paradoxical use of pragmatic strategies has important consequences, both for GROs’ legitimacy and for their potential influence over powerful organizations associated with them. We enrich our framework with the help of two illustrative cases and discuss the implications of the framework for GROs’ legitimacy strategies in business and society literature.

Contesting Social Responsibilities of Business: Experiences in Context

“…We frame social responsibilities as the division of labour and accountability between and among actors in a particular context embedded within the associated structural conditions, when aiming at some wider societal good. Corporate social responsibilities have, to date, dominated the discussions of our topics, with some adjustments according to small business social responsibilities (Soundararajan, Jamali & Spence, 2018), consumer social responsibilities (Caruana & Chatzidakis, 2014), employee social responsibility (Babu, Roeck & Raineri, 2020) as well as the roles of national governments (Kourula et al, 2019;On & Ilieş, 2012), NGOs and grassroots organizations (Chowdhury, Kourula & Siltaoja, 2018) and hybrid organizations (Haigh et al, 2015). Whilst there are distinctions between social responsibilities, in this Special Issue, we draw across organizational forms and disciplinary boundaries to capture the concept of social responsibilities in a more useful and cross-cutting way, as well as clarifying distinctive social responsibilities at multiple levels.…”

Critical essay: (In)sensitive violence, development, and the smell of the soil: Strategic decision-making of what?

“…One of the inherent problems of the above argument, though, is that firms can be deceptive or resort to greenwashing (Laufer, 2003) to claim they care about marginalized groups. As firms' claims are not legally bounded, firms' claims of engagement with marginalized groups are mostly strategic (Chowdhury et al, 2018). For example, Asia Energy initially (around 2004 and 2005) told the Phulbari people that they would compensate them by 400 to 500 times more money than the existing value for their resources such as trees and paddy fields, if the Phulbari accepted Asia Energy's compensation offer and relocated elsewhere.…”

“…The time lag between insensitive violence and reaching the mainstream media creates a chasm and, during this temporary period, marginalized groups form collective ideals to resist and make use of protest strategies (Piven and Cloward, 1977). While some marginalized groups are successful in developing resistance during this period (Chowdhury et al, 2018), many also fail because the chasm allows room for powerful actors to intensify emotional wounds to perpetuate systemic violence. In other words, during this period, firms try, for instance, to make use of powerful institutions in a way that furthering of emotional wounds would destroy the confidence of marginalized groups.…”

Boundary Negotiations in a Self-Organized Grassroots-Led Food Network: The Case of REKO in Finland

“…The concept of self-organization has its roots in biology, physics, and cybernetics, where it has been applied to describe complex living systems and computational networks [29], and how elements in complex systems aim to achieve equilibrium without an external force (Ashby 1962 and Jantsch 1980 in [30]). In more recent debates, the concept has been applied to analyze human action in complex social systems, explaining non-hierarchical and non-centralized organizing activities within digital networks [31,32] and social movements [33][34][35], More recently, it has been applied to explain human-induced spontaneous and unpredictable changes in urban environments [6] and the related self-governed participatory processes at the local community level of urban planning [30,36,37].…”