Koç Sociology Talks: Eric Schoon, Ohio State University, Legitimacy: A Relational Perspective

Legitimacy fundamentally implies a relationship between an object of legitimacy and an audience that evaluates the object. While the relational nature of legitimacy is evident in  diverse definitions of the construct, empirical research routinely treats legitimacy as either an attribute of the object, a perception of observers, or a characteristic of a social environment. These disparate approaches to conceptualization (and, consequently, measurement) have fostered substantive and theoretical fragmentation both between and within areas of study. In this talk, Eric Schoon outlines a relational alternative for conceptualizing and measuring legitimacy. He details how this relational perspective resolves long-standing debates surrounding the effects of legitimacy. He also discusses how it bridges the conceptual divide between the way legitimacy is invoked as an analytic category in the social sciences versus a practical category in everyday life. Schoon is Associate Professor of Sociol