Legitimacy in contested issue fields: How type-based validity cues, cue congruence, and personal values shape propriety

Abstract

Contested business practices are often difficult to evaluate because they send multiple, often conflicting signals about their appropriateness. Some cues may suggest that a practice is useful, legal, or widely accepted, whereas others may suggest that it is risky, harmful, or socially opposed. Existing legitimacy research has typically examined validity cues through source-based classifications, namely, authorization and endorsement, and has more often considered such cues in isolation than as part of wider evaluative arrangements. This study shifts the analysis of validity cues from source-based to type-based classifications by focusing on cues corresponding to four major legitimacy types: normative, pragmatic, regulatory, and cognitive. It argues that when evaluators confront multiple validity cues simultaneously, propriety judgments depend not only on the presence of those cues but also on their relative weight, on whether they are consistent or contradictory, and on whether they align with evaluators' personal values. These dynamics are examined in the context of fracking through four heterogeneous cues: public opinion, economic impact, regulatory setting, and venture longevity. Using conjoint analysis in a novel application to microlevel legitimacy research, the study analyzes 3,952 evaluations by 247 participants in France and Spain. Findings show that evaluators assign different weights to type-based validity cues, with economic impact exerting the strongest influence, followed by public opinion and regulatory setting. We introduce cue congruence to legitimacy theory, defined as the extent to which multiple validity cues convey aligned evaluative signals about the legitimacy of a subject, and show that positively congruent combinations generate higher propriety judgments, negatively congruent ones generate lower judgments, and incongruent combinations generate more intermediate ones. Moreover, we introduce cue-value congruence, that is, whether cue combinations align with evaluators' personal values, and show that evaluators high in environmentalism are less influenced by cues that conflict with their values. The study therefore explains how legitimacy judgments emerge from multiple cues considered jointly and shows that conflicting cues generate intermediate propriety beliefs, consistent with a gray area between clear legitimacy and clear illegitimacy at the microlevel.