The Sweet Spot of Legitimacy: A Manager’s Guide

This book provides an overview of legitimacy-related challenges at hybrid organizations and demonstrates legitimacy’s importance for the strategic development of organizations. In a reader-friendly way, it addresses the question of how hybrid organizations can gain legitimacy from the perspectives of key stakeholders.

To do so, the book examines legitimacy management in the context of two real-world hybrid organizations - the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine and the Swiss Center for Design and Health in Bern, Switzerland - from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It shows why the systematic combination of three types of legitimacy has the potential to optimize the level of legitimacy in emerging hybrids, contributing to their success. It also explains how organizational legitimacy can be operationalized using governance legitimacy, purpose-rational legitimacy, and value-rational legitimacy.

This book equips managers and executives working at hybrid organizations with useful guidance and hands-on strategic tools to develop legitimacy management strategies. It also offers a source of inspiration for academic research and teaching in this field.

Christian Rosser is Chief Operating Officer at the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine and a Lecturer at the Center of Competence for Public Management (KPM) at the University of Bern, Switzerland. As an expert on public management and administration, he has considerable experience in the management of hybrid organizations as well as research and teaching. His research on hybrid organizations, bureaucracy, and public administration has been published in various respected journals including Public Administration Review, Public Administration, The American Review of Public Administration, and Administration & Society. In 2009 he won the Marshall Dimock Award for the best lead article in Public Administration Review.

Conradin Pfaff is Deputy Head of a policy advising and analysis unit and Head of a Regional Analysis Team at the General Secretariat of the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports. He spent over a decade as a civil servant at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and the Federal Department of Defence. In his various public administration roles, he accumulated extensive work experience in the fields of strategic analysis, geopolitical research and policy advising. At the same time, he developed a thorough understanding of the inner workings, decision-making processes and governance structures of Swiss public administration.