Legitimation strategies

The first empirical paper (Paper 2) explores how a multinational corporation (MNC), both as individual employees through discourse in interviews, and on a collective level, through policy documents, legitimates English as an organisational language. Early contact with the case organisation indicated that English holds a strong position, while the management of internal language use did not appear to be high on the agenda of HR and communication professionals. As several studies have found English to be applied as a default and taken for granted functional language (Lønsmann, 2015; Sanden and Kankaanranta, 2018), in an abductive fashion, I re-focused the research question on how the legitimation of English, as well as the format and content of the language policy, reveal ideological thinking related to language. Given the explicit focus on legitimating micro strategies, Vaara et al.’s (2006) adaptation of Van Leewen and Wodak’s (1999) framework for discursive legitimation strategies is applied.

Sociological research of institutions and organisations has long recognised legitimacy as a central concept in the understanding of organisational activity (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Kostova and Zaheer, 1999). Although varying, conceptualisations of legitimacy, to a certain extent, converge on a notion of recognition, or “appraisal”, of action, according to a set of shared norms and values in the wider social system of the organisation (Parsons, 1960). In other words, for an organisation to be regarded as legitimate, its actions need to correspond to the expectations of members of the organisation’s social context. Dowling and Pfeffer (1975) outline three interdependent, but distinct, areas (legal, economic and legitimate) of organisational behaviour. They also note that, although an organisation’s adherence to legal requirements and participation in the competition for economic resources are components of legitimate behaviour, an organisation’s alignment with the social system’s norms and values is still a key source of legitimacy.

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Furthermore, achieving and maintaining legitimacy has been found to be challenging, as the different pressures for legitimacy may contradict one another, and each organisation and its environment may offer unique constellations of norms.

Kostova and Zaheer (1999: 66) point to three groups of factors which influence organisational legitimacy: “the characteristics of the institutional environment, the organisation’s characteristics and actions and the legitimation process by which the environment builds its perceptions of the organisation”. Finally, scholars have explicated the key role of legitimacy in the structure of organisations by outlining a bidirectional relationship between legitimacy and institutionalisation. The legitimacy of ideas and practices is a necessary precondition for their institutionalisation. On the other hand, their institutionalisation may have a legitimating effect, as it establishes the ideas and practices in organisational routines, meaning that they will require less legitimation (Vaara et al., 2006).

Paper 2 focuses on the final group of factors which Kostova and Zaheer (1999) outline – legitimation strategies. As organisations commonly face challenges with legitimacy, they have been argued to take specific action, both intentionally and unintentionally, in order to build and maintain the perception that the organisation acts in accordance with the norms and values of the social system. The target for legitimation may be specific organisational practices or the very organisation itself. Dowling and Pfeffer (1975: 127) point out that organisations have three options in legitimation:

“First, the organi[s]ation can adapt its output, goals, and methods of operation to conform to prevailing definitions of legitimacy. Second, the organi[s]ation can attempt, through communication, to alter the definition of social legitimacy so that it conforms to the organi[s]ation's present practices, output, and values. Finally, the organi[s]ation can attempt, again through communication, to become identified with symbols, values, or institutions which have a strong base of social legitimacy.”

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The first and last option are presented as most accessible, due to the difficulty associated with changing social norms. Organisations may thus accommodate their activity to correspond to accepted standards in their environment, or may use communicative measures, here conceptualised as discourse, to influence the perception of their activity. In practice, organisations are likely to pursue several strategies simultaneously, where organisational activities and output are adapted to the environment, but at the same time, discursive elements are applied to influence perceptions of the organisational activity.

As practical examples may diverge from black-and-white perceptions of legitimacy, certain practices may be considered legitimate in some contexts and for some purposes, but require legitimation in others. Legitimation theory is suitable for comprehending the use of English as an organisational language. On the one hand, the extended use of English in international business climates within and between organisations makes the internal use of English legitimate for an organisation which operates in this environment (Lønsmann, 2015; Tietze, 2004).

English language policies and the continued use of the language may institutionalise this practice as an aspect of organisational communication which is taken for granted (Sanden and Kankaanranta, 2018). However, organisations stemming from, or operating in, non-English speaking markets may have internal and external environments where the use of another national language is considered equally or even more legitimate (Fredriksson et al., 2006). Thus, the organisation may, through discursive practices, aim to associate English as an organisational language with other values, symbols ideas or even legitimate practices.

In order to shed light on the strategies applied in legitimation and to make them more empirically accessible, Vaara et al. (2006) propose a framework for analysing the discursive micro-practises of legitimation. Although the general legitimation literature has shed light on the nature of organisational legitimacy and its link to legitimating action, they argue that there is room for a more detailed

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analysis of the different discursive argumentation strategies. Vaara et al. (ibid.) draw on Van Leeuwen and Wodak’s (1999) analysis of rejection letters for family reunion applications of immigrant workers in Austria. Van Leeuwen and Wodak (ibid.) integrate discourse-analytical and discourse-historical approaches to evaluate how the public administration legitimises rejection decisions in a historical context where humanitarian human rights considerations conflict with anti-immigration attitudes and stereotypes in Austria and Europe more generally. Their proposed framework outlines four categories of textual argumentation strategies:

authorisation, rationalisation, moral evaluation and mythopoesis.

Vaara et al.’s (2006) adaptation and extension of the framework is based on a discursive analysis of the legitimation of international industrial restructuring in the media. While Van Leeuwen and Wodak’s (1999) framework emphasises the socio-historical context in documents issued by the public administration, Vaara and colleagues adapt the final list of legitimation strategies to media texts. Their framework has five essential features, which are consistent with the approach to the qualitative case study in this thesis. First, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is applied to analyse taken for granted assumptions at social, societal, political and economic levels, while investigating the power relationship between the actors.

Since discourse produced by employees and displayed in corporate documents is analysed here, the organisation becomes a key context for the ideas about language which interact with legitimation on the individual level. However, the discourse, like the organisation as a whole, is also embedded in a globalised context. In this context, English as a lingua franca has assumed the status of a global language, is used as a first and second language by the largest demographic group, and is a frequent working language in the domains of supranational institutions, NGOs and private organisations (Moran Panero, 2017).

Secondly, the contextuality of discourse is considered critical. I have applied a single-case study methodology, while aiming to immerse myself through

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prolonged physical and virtual stays in the organisation, in order to position the interviews and documents in an organisational context and analyse their contingent interrelation with structural factors. Thirdly, Vaara et al. (ibid.) emphasise intertextuality and the need to link different discursive acts, in order to understand them. Here, the different interviews are considered in relation to each other and the language policy documents. Fourthly, and perhaps most crucially in the context of this thesis, this approach to CDA considers discursive legitimation in relation to ideological content. The case study in this thesis treats the legitimation of English as an organisational language as both the embodiment, but also the reproduction of English language ideology. Finally, interdiscursivity is highlighted as the ‘order of discourses’ and the relationship between different discourses. Here, given the narrow focus on English language legitimation on one side of an international merger, other ideologies and discourses are not treated in parallel, but analysed as variations and components of the overarching English language ideology.

Vaara et al. (2006) base their framework on five different legitimation strategies which they identify in their data. The primary and most common type of legitimation is normalisation, where a phenomenon is explained as natural by the logic of exemplarity. Normalisation may occur by “rendering something normal”

according to taken for granted points of reference (Vaara et al., 2006: p. 798). The strategy may be retrospective and refer to the past as a point of reference, or prospective, in reference to future expectations. Second, rationalisation is a legitimation strategy which refers “to the utility or function of specific actions or practices” (Ibid.: p. 800). Here, the appropriateness of the object of legitimation may be explained as an instrument to achieve certain desirable outcomes. Third, moralisation legitimates through reference to perceived shared values. Thus, actions may be rendered as the “right” or “moral” course of action. Vaara et al. (ibid.) note that rationalisation rests on moral assumptions, making it challenging to separate the category from moralisation. However, in this study, legitimation by reference to

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common moral values form a distinct strategy from references to utility. Fourth, authorisation is legitimation by reference to an authority or instance believed to have a legitimate position of decision-making. Finally, through narrativisation, also referred to as mythopoesis (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), actors use storytelling with characters and plots resembling dramatic fiction, in order to provide compelling evidence for acceptable behaviour. The single case study in this thesis found that three of these strategies were used – normalisation, rationalisation and moralisation.

Vaara et al. (2006) analyse a selection of written media texts and consider them as discourse. In the case of this thesis, I apply CDA to interview data and official corporate documents. The corporate documents, despite being in a different genre and performing a different function than the media articles in Vaara et al.’s (ibid.) study, can be considered as a similar instance of written text legitimation.

However, the analysis of interview data, which is the majority of data material in the case study, carries different implications. The interview situations of the case study in this thesis consist of communicative interaction between me, as an interviewer, and employees in the case company, as interviewees. Their responses to my semi-structured interview guide are considered as legitimation where I, as a researcher, inquire or even question, an organisational practice which the interviewee takes for granted. Although a situation occasioned by my project and framed by my research motives, the interview situation requires the interviewee to explain how they perceive the organisational use of English. Thus, the interviewees’

discourse is treated as the individual legitimation of practice to an outsider, both in terms of organisation and profession. Collectively, the shared tendencies and themes in each interview are seen to make up a discourse present in the studied part of the organisation.

Although a significant portion of research on legitimation and critical discourse analysis in general is grounded in interpretivist and social constructivist

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ontology, I apply a critical realist reading of the method (see Fairclough, 2005).

While the theoretical framework for legitimation strategies (Vaara et al., 2006) is a strong asset in the critical realist framing of the present thesis, Fairclough’s and other critical realist theorisations of discourse reflect the ontological foundation of this dissertation more closely. Scholars have argued that discourse analysis and the relationship between discourse and ideology does not require researchers to analyse the phenomenon at hand as exclusively socially constructed. Although discourses may form the process of talking structure into being, structure is more than solely discourse (Fairclough, 2005). This is a critical point of departure between postmodernist and critical realist views of the organisation, as there is also emphasis on other structures besides discourse. Thus, a major distinction between a critical realist and poststructuralist view of discourse is the theorised relationship between discursive and non-discursive entities. Critical realist scholars have argued that discursive practices and text are not to be conflated with social practices (Fleetwood, 2005). Discourses do not only make up social structures, but may rather be argued to have intricate cyclical formative and transformative relations with them. Furthermore, contextual structural factors may form the enabling conditions for the generative power of discourse. This ontological position has also inspired several other scholars who have engaged in a discussion of the critical realist view on discourse and discourse analysis (Newman, 2020; Sims-Schouten, Riley and Willig, 2007; Sims-Schouten and Riley, 2014; 2019). In a similar fashion, here, organisational policy texts and employee speech in interviews are analysed as discursive practices which are in a bidirectional relationship with the organisational structure and established practices.

I also draw on Fairclough’s (2005) view on organisational change and its relationship to discourse. Here, an analytical dualism is adopted in order to theorise the relationship between structural change (i.e. mergers and acquisition) and the discourses which support and enact this change. Thus, discourse and changing

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structure are not conflated, but are attributed distinct characteristics, properties and generative potential. For instance, a corporate merger may be regarded as more than the discursive act of legitimising it. The practice of acting (besides producing discourse) in accordance with the newly introduced organisational structure may thus stabilise over time and create a constant frame, which in turn generates individual action. Fairclough’s (2005) account of the relationship between discourse and structure is particularly potent in the qualitative case study in Paper 2, since a post-merger context is analysed as a key enabling condition for the generative relationship involving discourse.