做得好更要说得好!——组织合法性的话语建构研究回顾与展望

Well Done,Better Said! —A Review of DiscourseApplication in Organizational Legitimacy Construction

本文讨论了管理情境下话语建构组织合法性的形成机制和过程。合法化是话语重要的社会功能,组织可以利用话语策略建构合法性认同。本文首先采用文献计量研究梳理了组织使用话语建构合法性的发表成果,其次剖析了话语视角与组织合法性的关系和相关研究方法,厘清了建构组织合法性的话语策略以及话语施事结果,并在此基础上提出了话语建构组织合法性的机制模型。本文在一定程度上拓展了人们对话语建构组织合法性的认识,提出了未来的研究方向,为企业有效利用话语资源建构合法性提供了指引和借鉴。

Purpose:Discourse can expand the soft power and influence of organizational culture,and organizations can use discourse strategies to construct legitimate identity.The discourse action of organizational legitimacy needs more theoretical guidance,and academic research needs to further integrate legitimacy and organizational discourse.Therefore,this paper discusses the formation mechanism and process of discourse construction of organizational legitimacy under the management context.Approach:Firstly,we selected 152 important studies from leading management journals through keyword screening.Secondly,we used the Citespace software tool to scientifically measure and visualize the collected documents,revealing the research focus and evolution trend of discourse construction of organizational legitimacy.Thirdly,through intensive reading,this paper analyzes the relationship between discourse perspective and organizational legitimacy and related research methods,and clarifies the legitimized discourse strategy and illocutionary results.Finally,the mechanical model of discourse construction of organizational legitimacy is put forward.Findings:First of all,the integration of discourse theory and organizational legitimacy has gone through different stages of development.Multi-dimensional research methods and research data from various sources are helpful to deepen the research in this field.Secondly,the process of organizational legitimization is a discourse construction process.Organizations can effectively use narrative strategies,rhetoric strategies and visual strategies to stimulate changes of stakeholders’values and social cognition,and enhance their legitimacy.Thirdly,the application of legitimacy discourse strategy can help organizations to obtain resources,change their image and improve their competitiveness.Value:Firstly,this paper points out the relationship between discourse and legitimacy construction,and the mechanism model of discourse construction of organizational legitimacy is presented.Organizational discourse analysis breaks the auxiliary,subordinate and instrumental position of discourse in traditional legitimacy research,enables scholars to analyze the dynamic process of organizational legitimacy construction in combination with context,and is beneficial to the integration of language turn and traditional research.Secondly,it points out that there are certain situations in the use of legitimized discourse,which will produce different results in different situations.This will help broaden the thinking of organizational legitimacy research,and promote legitimacy discourse to pay attention to different levels of situational characteristics.Finally,this paper points out the role of legitimized discourse in business management.Enterprises need to improve their discourse use ability,so as to ensure the realization of their goals and vision by implementing legitimized discourse strategies.Limitation:Firstly,although this study pays more attention to the publishing trend in the past 20 years,less attention has been paid to compare the differences of various research streams in this field,especially the development and changes of research topics,research theories and research levels.Secondly,visual analysis and quantitative analysis are adopted in this study,but there is still a lack of deep mining of research data,which is one-sided to some extent.Thirdly,this paper does not analyzed the combination of this research streams with other research streams.Therefore,there are still many important problems that can be solved through literature analysis,so that researchers can have a more comprehensive understanding of the research objectives,theoretical perspectives,research methods and research topics in this field.Future research:First of all,from the perspective of organizational legitimacy,we can pay attention to the classification and connotation of legitimized discourse,especially to further clarify the boundary and significance of legitimized discourse of enterprise,so as to distinguish it from impression management strategies.With regards to the process of legitimization,we can further explore how legitimized discourse can promote the theorization of future practice and the identification and classification of corporate identity.From the results of legitimacy,the role of legitimized discourse of organizational deserves further study.Secondly,from the perspective of research context,researchers can compares similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign enterprises in the application of legitimized discourse strategies,and explores more suitable discourse strategies in the Chinese context.We can further explore the conditions under which Chinese enterprises are more suitable to use discourse strategies to gain legitimacy,the ways and scenarios that the combination of narrative strategies,rhetorical strategies and visual strategies can maximize the effectiveness of enterprises in gaining legitimacy,and what resources enterprises need to support the use of discourse strategies.Thirdly,more perspectives of illocutionary discourse,semiotic and legitimacy judgment can be integrated into the theory.Multi-case analysis and quantitative analysis can be used.Visual communication symbols such as PPT and pictures are also important methods of meaning construction and legitimacy acquisition.We can also collect different types of materials from various sources to improve the research reliability and validity.