Legitimation in Times of Crisis: How International Organizations React to Challenge.

Do international organizations (IOs) under challenge change their legitimation? Organization studies show that the vitality of organizations depends on their legitimacy. Organizations thus have a strong incentive to legitimize themselves to enhance their normative acceptability with key stakeholders. Besides adopting legitimacy-boosting institutions and practices, one important way in which organizations seek legitimacy is by espousing a specific legitimation discourse. We theorize that legitimation discourses fulfill the function of providing important organizational stakeholders with narratives that justify an IO’s authority in terms of stakeholders’ shared beliefs about valid sources of authority and its appropriate exercise. Specifically, we hypothesize that organizations whose vitality is in decline will change their legitimation discourse, boosting the intensity of legitimation and shifting the focus towards procedure and purposive arguments. To examine these expectations, we analyze the legitimation discourse of 13 regional organizations from across the world, whose vitality has been threatened over the past decades. We gauge the intensity, type, and plurality of discursive legitimation as contained in annual reports and the final communiques of meetings of heads of state and government – two sources that represent the views of two critical actors, the organizations’ general secretariats and the member states respectively. In contrast to our expectations, both legitimation intensity and plurality are lower for less vital organizations. In line with expectations, we find a stronger focus on performance for vital IOs, while their less vital counterparts focus more strongly on procedural legitimation discourses. These findings suggest that those IOs most in need of intensive legitimation seem to have difficulties to mobilize. Despite low vitality, these IOs do not stand out by a legitimation intensity and plurality. Instead, their specific legitimation strategy in times of crisis seems to be limited to highlighting the normative appropriateness of their procedures.