An examination of the relation between organizational legitimacy and organizational language in terms of institutional theory

This study deals with the relationship between 'legitimacy' that the organizations need to survive in the environment they exist and 'organizational language' which is created by the organizations in order to communicate with the environment, in the context of institutional theory. According to institutional theory the organizations gain legitimacy through adapting themselves to their institutional environment. However, there usually is a contradiction between institutional expectations and organizational benefits. In this case the organization protects both its legitimacy through pretending to be adapted and it's benefits by not satisfying the expectations of institutional environment. In this process the image of adaptation, which is created by falsifying the reality, is reflected to the environment, and this reflection is carried out by institutional language. So the aim of this study is to explain in the context of institutional theory how the organizations gain their legitimacy in cases where they are actually not adapted to institutional environment, the effects of institutional and cultural environment on creating this institutional language, and the claim that the organizations present a different reality to institutional environment. For this purpose, a model is established through the factors such as the organizations which desire to obtain legitimacy, the social environment actors who evaluate and adjudge about the organization, and the institutional language that provides communication and interaction between mentioned factors. So, the relations between these factors are discussed and explained within the framework of institutional and cultural context which the organizations, the social environment actors and the organizational language are effected and shaped in. In the research section of the study, the press releases of 5 selected holding companies from Turkey are analyzed by qualitative content analysis through the legitimacy categories which are obtained by developing and extending the available categories in literature. It is concluded that the discourses of the holding companies are in concordance with their institutional and cultural environments in terms of the forms, the contents and the emphasized points of the discourses which are created in order to generate a positive perception in the social environment and to gain legitimacy to the organization. When taking in to consideration the encoding concentration in discourses, it is evaluated that the Turkish holding companies prefer to use the discourses which reflect the normative beliefs and therefore they aim to gain moral (normative) legitimacy which corresponds to mentioned discourse in legitimacy matching.