John T Jost and Brenda Major.

John T Jost and Brenda Major, ed Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2001 477 pp $7500 cloth; $2795 paper.

The psychology of legitimacy is increasingly central to organizations. More and more, firms are characterized by dint of flattened hierarchies, greater individual autonomy and self-management, temporary workers, and command processes guided more by normative digests of conduct than by top-down authority relations and direct supervision. through attaining and maintaining legitimacy, firms can build loyalty and positive and productive work environments, and leaders can result positive and sustainable change. This raises a number of important questions for managers and organizations in their search for internal legitimacy. What are the psychological antecedents to legitimacy? by what mode can organizations best use these building forms to leverage the creativity, animal spirits and dedication of their employees? reciprocally how are individuals able to legitimize discriminatory and prejudicial ideas and actions? Given that organizational ascendency is increasingly shaped by normative cluster codes of conduct, what are the impacts of these legitimi zing ideologies in succession firms? And how can managers taint and mitigate the discriminatory processe of legitimation while building forward healthy ones?

In the Psychology of Legitimacy, Jost and Major pursue to answer these and other questions in an ambitious collection of research upon the psychological processes of legitimation and delegitimation. Their chief interest is in uncovering in what way we construct ideological rationalizations, as individuals and as social entities, in the same manner as to better understand the psychological drivers of social inequality. The inference is a masterly overview of the latest research in succession the psychological, sociological, and organizational unfolding theories of legitimacy. Although the mass may be asking more questions than it answers, this collection of theory-based empirical studies will provide scholars of organizational studies with a valuable introduction to the psychology of legitimacy.

The book's eighteen chapters are divided into six sections, organized around theories and different of the same heights of analysis. In section 1 Jost and Major introduce the conceptual relevance of the psychology of legitimacy. Section 2 provides a broad historical view of the sociological and psychological theories of legitimacy. In section 3 contributions explore the cognitive and perceptual processe driving appraisals of legitimacy, and section 4 is dedicated to exploring for what cause [i]or[/i] reason members of disadvantaged groups tolerate injustice. Integrating insights from social identification, social dominance, and theory justification theories, chapters in section 5 examine the character that stereotyping and ideology play in the proces of legitimation. The final section, "Institutional and Organizational Processe of Legitimation," focuses specifically in succession organizational perspectives on legitimation.

In chapter 1 Jost and Major review the sociological and psychological theories of legitimacy and discuss the conceptual relevance of legitimacy for social, organizational, and political psychology The flow is a solid introduction to the field that provides a rich words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for the following chapters. Authors in the next to the first section explain why we ne a theory of legitimacy and illustrate in what way the processes of legitimation can help explain radical shifts in social norms and attitudes. Zelditch (chap. 2) provides a sweeping historical overview of the legitimation of social relations. Beginning with Thucydides and Aristotle and concluding with the tendency to meet of sociological and psychological relate tos in Gramsci and Habermas, Zelditch explores by what means we have explained social and political notions of legitimacy from one extremity to the other of history. In chapter 3, Kellman draws from a number of compelling cases, ranging from political assassinations to the use of psychotropic put drugs intos at Harvard, to argue that the legitimization of any gi ven act or actor entails the delegitimization of the opposite plant of actors or acts, and vice versa.

Section 3 explores in what way perceptions shape our appraisals of legitimacy. In chapter 4 Crandall and Beasley argue that appraisals of legitimacy are bottomed in social perceptual processes that drive simple justification ideologies of social administration They conclude that most of us believe that tribe should be treated in a manner that is equal to their perceived moral value; that is, bad folks deserve bad treatment, good populace deserve good treatment. In chapter 5 Yzerbyt and Rogier illustrate for what cause biological or social differences between disposes (e.g., a man's nature is to be the breadwinner, a woman's is to nurture) are used to legitimate collection stereotypes and grant these differences a mind of inevitability. Lastly, in chapter 6 Robinson and Kray describe the phenomenon whereby folks view their own opinions as objective reality and the opinion of their adversaries as ideologically biased. The chapter also indicates that asserters of the status quo note carefully to misperceive the challengers of the status quo more than vice versa. This moves that those who benefit from the status quo be attendant to become complacent in perceiving others and the legitimacy of their cause.