The Narrative Construction of Internal Organizational Legitimacy

Abstract

Organizations torn by significant contradictions may struggle to maintain internal legitimacy. Taking a narrative perspective, and drawing on a case study of Walgreens, a Fortune 500 retail pharmacy, we develop a process model that shows how organizations with an entrenched conflict in their official narratives manage the resulting polyphony of members' personal narratives through the development of myths that sustain internal legitimacy by making the contradiction ‘liveable’. The model reveals how myths that represent contradictions as temporary and project a future in which they will be satisfactorily resolved help people to cope with inconsistencies in processes of organizing and support the status quo . Our theorizing suggests that internal legitimacy is constituted by the narratives that individuals author about the desirability, propriety, and appropriateness of their organization and its practices. From a narratological perspective, rather than existing on a continuum from high to low and being a resource that can be stockpiled, internal legitimacy may be theorized as a polyphony of distinctive narratives that while discursively dynamic is also generally durable.