Tuesday, February 18th - Organizational Legitimacy
I believe the most important concept from this week's readings is actional legitimacy. I learned that actional legitimacy is to organizational legitimacy as issue management is to crisis management. Actional legitimacy is concerned with more regular corporate decisions and issue management. As a communication student who plans on pursuing a career in marketing/communications, this concept resonated with me and will be something I will reference in the future. I appreciated how the Boyd (2000) reading provided practical examples for how actional legitimacy is practiced in the real world.
A current example is the issue of the coronavirus. I will discuss how two different entities handled this and how their responses relate to actional legitimacy. First, there is Purdue. They sent out an email a few weeks ago informing the university population about the crucial details of the virus and describing their proactive measures with patients at PUSH (Purdue, 2020). This action contributes to organizational legitimacy, based on the two tenets of legitimacy: utility and responsibility. Purdue's statement was practically useful and responsible to inform their staff, students, and outside publics.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not handle addressing the coronavirus well. Their statement in declaring this a global crisis was overdue, which many think is due to the close relations between the Chinese government and WHO (Rauhala, 2020). The Chinese government attempted to silence people who wanted to report the issue, in attempt to protect China's reputation and economy from news attributing the origins of a global epidemic to their country. Anecdotes from a Washington Post article were questioning the WHO's credibility and ability to remain politically neutral. In conclusion, the WHO's actions were both not useful and not responsible, on a massive scale. This is an example of how poor actions can lead to threats of organizational legitimacy.
Boyd, J. (2000). Actional legitimation: No crisis necessary. Journal of Public Relations Research, 12(4), 341-353.
Purdue University (2020, January 4) University monitoring novel coronavirus; no reported campus cases. Purdue. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q1/university-monitoring-novel-coronavirus-no-reported-campus-cases.html
Rauhala, E. (2020, February 8) Chinese officials note serious problems in coronavirus response. The World Health Organization keeps praising them. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-officials-note-serious-problems-in-coronavirus-response-the-world-health-organization-keeps-praising-them/2020/02/08/b663dd7c-4834-11ea-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html
A current example is the issue of the coronavirus. I will discuss how two different entities handled this and how their responses relate to actional legitimacy. First, there is Purdue. They sent out an email a few weeks ago informing the university population about the crucial details of the virus and describing their proactive measures with patients at PUSH (Purdue, 2020). This action contributes to organizational legitimacy, based on the two tenets of legitimacy: utility and responsibility. Purdue's statement was practically useful and responsible to inform their staff, students, and outside publics.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not handle addressing the coronavirus well. Their statement in declaring this a global crisis was overdue, which many think is due to the close relations between the Chinese government and WHO (Rauhala, 2020). The Chinese government attempted to silence people who wanted to report the issue, in attempt to protect China's reputation and economy from news attributing the origins of a global epidemic to their country. Anecdotes from a Washington Post article were questioning the WHO's credibility and ability to remain politically neutral. In conclusion, the WHO's actions were both not useful and not responsible, on a massive scale. This is an example of how poor actions can lead to threats of organizational legitimacy.
Boyd, J. (2000). Actional legitimation: No crisis necessary. Journal of Public Relations Research, 12(4), 341-353.
Purdue University (2020, January 4) University monitoring novel coronavirus; no reported campus cases. Purdue. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q1/university-monitoring-novel-coronavirus-no-reported-campus-cases.html
Rauhala, E. (2020, February 8) Chinese officials note serious problems in coronavirus response. The World Health Organization keeps praising them. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-officials-note-serious-problems-in-coronavirus-response-the-world-health-organization-keeps-praising-them/2020/02/08/b663dd7c-4834-11ea-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html
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