Individual Organizational Legitimacy vs Online Organizational Legitimacy

Organizational legitimacy is determined by individuals who observe and evaluate the organizations according to social models. Individuals validate their judgments according to their beliefs, values, and ethical norms, even if they privately disagree with them. However, society relies on the opinions of others to make decisions, looking for shared and common standards with which to compare their evaluations. Advances in the field of organizational legitimacy suggest that this is a multilevel variable, which depends on individual perception (at the micro level), as well as on the influence of collective actors (at the macro level) such as government, media, organizations’ social norms, trade associations, or opinion leaders. Nowadays, the most common way to measure legitimacy (at the macro level) has been based on the most relevant newspapers’ content analysis. However, the ever-changing new environment characterized by new media and online user-generated content affected the traditional media “authority” and influence in organizations’ legitimacy. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the measurement of legitimacy to the evolution of the media, to the emergence of social networks and the large data generated on the web. Therefore, the objective of this research is to analyze the legitimacy at the micro level through surveys and at the macro level through the news published on Google.com . The results provide a more complete measurement of organizational legitimacy, allow the comparisons between the levels of individual and online legitimacy, and quantify how digitalization may influence variables related to ethics, such as legitimacy.