Achieving Regulatory Legitimacy in Volatile Institutional Contexts: The Case of Russian Non-Profits"

This paper examines organizational legitimacy within an uncertain and hostile socio-political context. Drawing on qualitative data from non-profit organizations (NPOs) in the Russian Federation, we focus on regulatory legitimacy as a key tenant of organizational legitimacy. The study presented highlights that in a context where the state fails to grant clear regulatory legitimacy to NPOs, those NPOs seek to achieve it in other ways, using symbolic acts and a range of substantive activities. We demonstrate how this results in the interrelatedness of regulatory legitimacy for NPOs and the state’s own legitimization efforts. Thus, our paper contributes to legitimacy theory by exploring how a key aspect of organizational legitimacy are conditioned and constituted by the socio-political context.