Maintaining legitimacy in contested mature markets through discursive strategies: the case of corporate environmentalism in the French automotive industry

Alain Debenedetti (), Déborah Philippe (), Damien Chaney () and Ashlee Humphreys
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Alain Debenedetti: Université Gustave Eiffel, IRG - Institut de Recherche en Gestion - UPEM - Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée - UPEC UP12 - Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne - Paris 12
Déborah Philippe: HEC Lausanne - Faculté des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC Lausanne)
Damien Chaney: Groupe ESC Troyes en Champagne
Ashlee Humphreys: Northwestern University [Evanston]

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Abstract: Market-level studies based on institutional theory have gained prominence in recent marketing research seeking to investigate legitimation dynamics. Although these studies have paid particular attention to how organizations build legitimacy in new markets, they have rarely explored legitimations strategies in mature markets, which mostly remain the prerogative of organizational theory. Such emphasis on new markets is thus limiting our understanding of legitimation dynamics in general and legitimacy maintenance in particular, especially since new and mature markets have different characteristics. When markets are well established, they tend to become the target of a growing number of contestations by actors seeking to introduce new societal issues. Once these issues have been institutionalized, organizations must address them to maintain their legitimacy. In this study, we investigate the discursive strategies used by the French carmakers when environmental considerations gained prominence between 2006 and 2008. In contrast to prior works in organizational theory which assume that organizations respond to institutional pressures in an undifferentiated way, our results show that organizations adopt differentiated legitimation strategies by adapting their discourse to their different stakeholders. Paradoxically, we find evidence of industry-wide isomorphism, where rather than developing idiosyncratic discourses, organizations adopt conventional discursive strategies.

Keywords: Legitimacy; Discursive strategies; Environmentalism; Contested markets; Mature markets; Institutional theory 2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02493108v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Industrial Marketing Management, 2021, 92, pp.332-343

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02493108

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