To be able to get a grip on how actors engage in legitimating particular organizations, we need to treat legitimation as a contingent social process, and study the cultural work and social performances involved in legitimation. The dominant sociological position of neo-institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio 1991) has theorized in an important way how institutions are “macrolevel abstractions, … independent of any particular entity to which allegiance might be owned” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 15). But the theories are weak when it comes to agency (Jepperson 1991; Hall and Taylor 1996; Schmidt 2008).
In order to understand the process of achieving and maintaining organizational legitimacy, we need to study what kind of actions organizations engage in 1 ;we must study which actors engage in legitimation work, what it looks like in different contexts, what characterizes a successful performance of legitimacy, and what constitutes a failure. In short, we need to study cultural actions.
There are three crucial aspects to be considered in an action-oriented cultural approach to organizational legitimacy. The first aspect is that legitimacy is a social process (Johnson et al. 2006). As has been pointed out by Michèle Lamont (2012, 203) in a review article on the sociology of valuation and evaluation, social scientists have “[i]n recent years … shown growing interest in the study of basic social processes.” 2 Legitimacy is one such process that needs to be studied in more detail.
Secondly, we need to understand that legitimacy is an endless, ongoing, contingent accomplishment (Garfinkel 1967; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Boltanski 2011) of the work of various social actors 3 . We therefore need to study legitimacy as cultural work. The concept of legitimation work, as it is used in this book, is able to capture how publicly funded organizations are being legitimated in a dialogue among the organizations, the funders, the art worlds, and the broader audience.
Thirdly, we need to take seriously the performative aspects of this cultural work. Even though performance is an important part of the neo-institutional theories (Powell and DiMaggio 1991), the actual content of the performances nevertheless remains un-theorized. In order to open up this black box we need to turn to the theories of social performance, as developed within cultural sociology. Due to the limitations of the old theories of rituals, that neo-institutionalists tend to rely on, the performative turn in cultural sociology (Alexander et al. 2006) has advanced a multifaceted framework for studying social performances in complex modern societies.
In conducting the cultural analysis of organizational legitimacy presented in this book, I have been concerned with contemporary cultural sociology in its American and French versions, and in particular the work of Jeffrey Alexander, Michèle Lamont, Laurent Thévenot, and Luc Boltanski. 4 To be able to understand the complex process of achieving and maintaining legitimacy, we must practice a pluralist approach to theories in our empirical analysis (Larsen 2013, 2015; Daloz 2013, 2015; Timmermans and Tavory 2012; Reed 2011), for as Isaac Reed (2011, 162) has rightfully pointed out, “it is impossible to theorize, once and for all, the nature of the social as such. One must use theory to interpret meanings instead.”
Performing Legitimacy in Arts and Media Organizations
As not-for-profit organizations are in need of funding from external non-commercial sources, they have to make themselves visible among potential donors. If we were to study such organizations with a neo-institutional approach, we would treat the organizations as semi-rational actors trying to perform legitimacy in the most effective way in order to gain financial support from donors. 5 Although we would find that the organizations may act in ways that do not produce the optimal result for them, we would nevertheless have to utilize the premise that they seek to mirror their environments in order to secure social approval. As Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell wrote in their highly influential 1983 article: “a theory of institutional isomorphism may help explain the observations that organizations are becoming more homogenous … while at the same time enabling us to understand the irrationality … that are so commonplace in organizational life” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 157). Although neo-institutionalism acknowledges that organizational actions can be non-strategic, it nevertheless explains this by reference to the unreflective, taken-for-granted, and routinized incorporation of scripts and schemas from the organizations environments (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 14–15).
In addition to securing their funding, arts and media organizations are also dependent on artistic credibility. And most important of all, they are in need of being perceived as relevant and inclusive by a wider community of citizens. And this is not only out of strategic interests to achieve legitimacy. The management and employees of arts and media organizations do of course think strategically about their legitimation work, but they do also have a genuine passion for what they do, which is totally missing from the neo-institutional perspective 6 . Many organizational actors have a genuine belief in the value of the work of the organization. This causes their performances to transcend purely instrumental reasons. In fact, a successful performance of legitimacy depends on a combination of instrumental and non-instrumental motivations, as the best way to fuse the elements of social performance (Alexander 2004) 7 is for actors to truly believe in the values and ideas making up the foundation for the organization when seeking to (strategically) achieve legitimacy on its behalf. In order for non-profit arts and media organizations to achieve legitimacy, they must be perceived in their performances as authentic in their dedication to serving the democracy, the arts, and the society of which they are a part.
Emphasizing myths and rituals (Meyer and Rowan 1977) was an important move for taking organizational sociology in a cultural direction. 8 And the increased interest in the analysis of legitimacy over the last 20 years (Greenwood et al. 2008) has made this important field of sociology more attuned to culture. But it has yet to undergo proper cultural turn 9 . In order to advance a truly cultural approach we need to study organizations with tools developed in cultural sociology, where one has a premise that “societies are not governed by power alone and are not fueled only by the pursuit of self-interest” (Alexander 2006, 3).
In order to analyze how arts and media organizations engage in legitimation work we need to understand how they make use of the cultural resources available in the particular contexts where the work takes place, and also how these contexts constrain what is perceived as successful ways of performing legitimacy, both by the actors performing and their audiences. As Michael Schudson has pointed out, “[t]he study of culture is the study of what meanings are available for use in a given society from the wider range of possible meanings; the study of culture is equally the study of what meanings people choose and use from available meanings” (Schudson 1989, 159) 10 . Similarly, Michèle Lamont and Ann Swidler (2014, 5) “are rooting for a … conception of causal processes that makes room for considering how social and cultural structures and resources enable and constrain human actions.” 11 To be able to capture both of these dimensions, we need theory that helps us determine the influence of culture on how actors engage with the world, and also how actors use the culture available to them in specific contexts. In the following sections, I will present the main theoretical schools and analytical tools employed in the empirical studies that are to follow in the subsequent chapters.
Pragmatic Sociology as Cultural Sociology
With their pragmatic sociology of critique, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1999) have developed a theory of justification. When engaging in public deliberation and trying to reach an agreement on how to define a situation, legitimate one’s own arguments and critiquing those of others, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) argue that we relate to one of six common worlds: the Inspired World, the Domestic World, the World of Fame, the Civic World, the Market World, or the Industrial World. 12 Each world corresponds to an order of worth, with its own grammar, and structure, in addition to tools that actors can use when engaging in legitimation work. The orders represent something bigger than the actual situation; they each represent a common good.
The orders are systems of logics structuring what is considered worthy within a repertoire of evaluation. Boltanksi and Thévenot (2006, 67–71) compare their notion of orders of worth to the notion of “topics” (topoi) within rhetoric, as a study of “commonplace arguments.” What unites the six is that they as regimes have created economies of worth, which render them legitimate. “An economy of worth is achieved when a conflict c...