The intellectual structure of organizational legitimacy research: a co-citation analysis in business journals

As a result of growing interest in the relationship between organizational legitimacy and survival, the flow of publications in the field makes it difficult to maintain a birds-eye view of the multiple lines of research. The purpose of this study is to map the intellectual structure of current scholarship on organizational legitimacy. Through the study of bibliometric co-citations, we identify the most active research areas in organizational legitimacy, their sub-disciplinary composition, patterns of interrelationship, the most influential subject matters and transformative discoveries. This paper contributes to the literature on organizational legitimacy by facilitating quick understanding of the intellectual structure of the field and identifying future lines of research.