Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Abstract

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

The discursive construction of organizational legitimacy in higher education: Multimodal discourse analysis on Chinese business schools

“…Relied on exemplification strategy, case business schools concretize their legitimacy claims into artifacts and scenes in reality to provide comprehensibility required for legitimacy. This not only greatly enhances the claims’ credibility but also deepens and expands their meanings (Santos, 2023).…”

“…With the development of Internet and the rise of digital media, multimodal discourse (especially visuals) is gradually becoming the mainstream choice for organizational communication (Bell et al, 2013). As a native platform medium of the internet era, benefiting from its multimodal attributes and huge information payload, website plays an important role in communication between organizations and internal and external audiences (Barros, 2014; Pablo and Hardy, 2009), which is highly related to organization legitimization (Santos, 2023). Therefore, we choose the official websites of theses six case business schools as the main data source.…”

“…Images 5-7 convey three legitimacy statements of 'We can provide interesting and challenging university experience,' 'We can provide professional teaching services,' and 'We sincerely welcome you to join us' in implicit manner, aiming to demonstrate the consistency of their competence and attitude with market standards and audience expectations. Due to the lack of verbal logical conjunctions and linear argumentation (Santos, 2023), the information conveyed by the visuals mainly exists in their implicit dimension. Therefore, audiences have to rely on their subjective interpretation of the interpersonal meaning of the images to understand.…”

“…Our research contributes to knowledge in three ways: First, it responds to the call for multimodal discourse analyses on organizational legitimacy research (Lefsrud et al, 2020;Puyou and Quattrone, 2018;Santos, 2019Santos, , 2023 and explores how the affordance, the ideational, interpersonal, and compositional meaning sustain legitimation strategies. Second, by adapting CDA, it investigates how universities use micro-level discursive strategies to construct legitimacy, filling the gap in previous research that 'only focuses on the utility of discourse for organizational legitimation, and ignores how discourse constructs legitimacy cognitively' (Peng and Lu, 2014: 153).…”

“…These studies suggest the significant role of visuals in sustaining legitimation strategies, but research on this topic is still scarce, which leads to a huge gap between ‘this most visually rich era in history’ (Bell and Davison, 2013) and the existing research. Therefore, many organization scholars have called for further research on multimodal discourse (Lefsrud et al, 2020; Puyou and Quattrone, 2018; Santos, 2023; Shao and Janssens, 2022).…”