Manufacturing Dissent: Exploiting the Gap Between Legality and Legitimacy

Transgressing norms may trigger processes of legitimacy disruption, which are likely to spread through an organizational field. However, the extant literature within institutional theory provides little guidance in terms of how social order is reestablished after legitimacy disruption and how individual and collective actors in an organizational field respond when an entire field’s legitimacy is put at risk. This blind spot is extenuated in terms of the repercussions of a multinational corporation acting in a field according to an alien cognitive frame, institutional logic and set of normative standards. How do local actors collectively react to legitimacy disruption catalyzed by foreign firms and what affect does this reaction have on the field? To investigate this question we examine processes of disruption, legitimacy suspension, re-negotiation and domestication instigated by an alien institutional logic. Specifically, we analyse the disruptive consequences of an Anglo-American private equity consortium acting according to cognitive frames and normative commitments which contradict Danish standards of appropriateness.