Consumer construction of the agricultural biotechnology industry's legitimacy: An empirical test of values congruency as institutional and actional legitimacy formation.

摘要

The assumption that legitimacy is related to the similarity of values that publics see between themselves and an organization (i.e., values congruency) has been stated frequently in scholarship but never empirically tested. To expand the empirical depth of legitimacy scholarship, survey research was conducted using a convenience sample of consumers (N = 358). A coorientational measurement approach was used to assess the relationship between legitimacy and values congruency regarding how consumers perceived the rights of the agricultural biotechnology industry to exist as a big business entity (an instance of institutional legitimacy) and to market drug-producing crops called Plant Made Pharmaceuticals (an instance of actional legitimacy called "output"). The consideration of output was intended to expand the breadth of legitimacy scholarship. There was no significant relationship between the perceived right of the industry to exist as a big business entity and the perceived values congruency of biotech consumers (r = .141). Further, there was no significant relationship (r = .312) between legitimacy and values congruency as calculated using (1) consumer responses to how much they valued a statement and (2) how much they thought the biotechnology industry would value the same statement. These results challenge the long-standing assumption of a strong relationship between legitimacy and the similarity of values as perceived by members of it publics. It also suggests that the actual difference between consumer values and the values consumers perceive between themselves and the industry may be a better predictor of an organization's legitimacy than the perceived difference by consumers between these value sets. This research was also an initial attempt to analyze output as a specific type of organizational legitimacy. Consumers were more slightly more likely to acknowledge the industry's right to market Plant Made Pharmaceuticals (r = .257) than they were to recognize the industry's right to exist as a big business (r = .141). The results of this research are also significant because they explain which values in particular are related to the rights of the biotech industry to exist as a big business entity and to market Plant Made Pharmaceuticals.