Justifying social impact as a form of impression management: Legitimacy judgments of social enterprises' impact accounts

This paper investigates how social enterprises construct accounts to gain legitimacy from the social impact generated by their products and operations. The paper finds that social impact accounts are framed to appeal to two distinct forms of judgment about legitimacy: cognitive and evaluative. Cognitive forms of judgment qualify how well an enterprise shares attributes with an individual’s schemas of established actors or roles in society. Evaluative forms of judgment tend to operate more analytically to make comparisons of the relative appropriateness and desirability of multiple enterprises to achieve an audience’s goals. The findings show that although legitimizing the social aspects of an enterprise involved justifications aimed at both forms of judgment, legitimizing an enterprise’s professionalism relied almost exclusively on evaluative judgments. Moreover, the justifications created to appeal to evaluative judgments relied almost exclusively on financial and operational data, using operational scale as a proxy.