Legitimacy spillovers between organizational populations: Private secondary schools in Turkey, 1993-2004

The aim of this study is to investigate how legitimacy spillovers between private and public high schools affect the evolution of private high schools in Turkey. The basic problematic of this thesis is to explore how organizational form identity and status affect legitimacy spillovers between organizational populations. For this aim a reseach was designed which explores the effects of organizational form identity and status on legitimacy spillovers between sub-populations of private high schools, namely Science Schools, Foreign Language Schools, and Regular Schools, and also the effects from other educational subpopulations, the public Anatolian and Science Schools between the years of 1993-2004. The findings reveal that organizational identity similarities and status differences have considerable effects on legitimacy spillovers. According to the findings of the study legitimacy spills over from established to evolving populations which have similar organizational identitities, however, depending on the status of the organization, legitimacy also spills over from high status evolving populations to low status established populations.