Legitimacy is widely accepted as an important resource for an organisation, strategy,
or individual to possess. However, the process of gaining legitimacy has received
limited attention in the academic literature. This thesis examines the strategies and
actions that individuals employ in the process of legitimising their sustainability
strategy within an organisation. Based on semi-structured interviews with 51 Heads
of Sustainability, the research extends the existing ‘conformance, selection,
manipulation’ legitimising strategy model, becoming one of the first to demonstrate
how these legitimising strategies are interrelated both concurrently and temporally.
It finds that multiple legitimising strategies are used simultaneously by individuals.
Moreover, a pattern emerges whereby individuals begin with conformance-only
legitimising when sustainability has limited integration, but employ all three
legitimising strategies where sustainability integration is extensive. In addition to
this, the research articulates two specific categories of actions that are used by
individuals in the process of deploying these umbrella legitimising strategies:
framing and developing coalitions of support. Framing actions comprise micro-reframing,
disassociation, contextualisation, analogy, and differentiation and
personalisation. Developing coalitions of support actions comprise leveraging
sponsorship, networking, enhancing employee engagement, and continually
promoting. From this empirical research a generalised legitimising pathway is
proposed which demonstrates the progression of legitimising from using
conformance-only through to using all three legitimising strategies, and the actions
employed by the individual in these different stages
