英文摘要 |
This article offers a new understanding of the emergence of legitimacy through the development of a multilevel model connecting micro-, meso-, and macro processes. We emphasize that the formation of legitimacy depends on the ongoing negotiations and interactions between innovators and evaluators. Drawing on the communicative institutionalism perspective, we conceptualize communication as the mutual cognitive activities that connect innovators’ framing strategies with evaluators’ contextual judgment. This connection is important for transforming individual attributes into collective cognition. Thus, communication constitutes legitimacy, defined as a process of moving toward new institutional logic and cognitive frames that shape evaluators’ minds. We propose that the more effective the management of a medium’s phaticity, cognitive reference point strategy, and affiliated text management in institutional logic metalanguage, the more likely the emergence of legitimacy. |