Does Accountability Influence Organisational Legitimacy?
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Marty Wareman ANR: 901645 Supervisors: Name supervisor 1: Dr. T. Göβling Name supervisor 2: Dr. J. Raab November 2013 Legitimacy of Semi- public Does accountability influence organisations in the organisational legitimacy? Netherlands 1 2 PREFACE This is the final work of my master Organisation Studies. Writing this final chapter means that the struggle to finish the thesis has ended, doing research is somewhat challenging. Especially for me, focusing on just one aspect of the more general topic that had my interest was difficult. How can you study just a part of what you’re interested in when your interest is broader? Due to this difficulty, I kept changing my subject and focus just to make sure the subject of interest would be studied the best as possible. For the people that were watching this struggle, this could not always have been easy. Therefore, I would like to thank my supervisors, Tobias Goessling and Rob Jansen. Furthermore I would like to thank Jörg Raab, who made time available to (re) asses the thesis that is in front of you in the absence of Rob Jansen. I would also like to thank the students of the circle, Carlijn Quaarts en Michel Robben, thank you for your feedback and encouragement. After the last version of this thesis, some changes were implemented. I realised that the dataset of legitimacy did not have to be amended for the amount of readers per article (see chapter 3.2) As this research uses newspapers as a proxy of moral legitimacy, and cannot determine how many people actually read and approve of the news articles written. This change also came thanks to the feedback of my supervisors. With this new insight the results of this research differs with the last version. More on this will be explained in the thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for supporting and distracting whenever necessary. I hope the journey described above doesn’t keep you from reading. There were unexpected and very interesting results found along the way, as I’m about to present next. Marty Wareman November 2013 3 ABSTRACT Due to increasing criticism on semi-public organisations in the Netherlands, the legitimacy of these organisations is challenged. Prior research indicates that organisations that are being accountable, acquire more legitimacy. This triggers the research question: ‘To what extent does accountability have an influence on semi-public organisations in the Netherlands’. To answer this question, a data sample of 136 semi-public organisations has been gathered. Legitimacy has been measured using content analysis. To analyse accountability, annual reports have been studied. The results show that in spite of the hypothesis, higher levels of accountability are negatively associated to legitimacy. These findings trigger questions for further research; are organisations in the semi-public sector, by disclosing their activities also disclosing issues that might be viewed as negative by the general public? The second explanation for the findings however, would include a time dimension. Organisations, that have their legitimacy challenged, apparently answer to this challenge by disclosing information about their activities, in order to further understand these semi-public organisations, more research on these ‘in-between’ organisations is necessary. Keywords: semi-public organisations, organisational legitimacy, (public) accountability, conventional media, organisational behaviour 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface........................................................................................................................................ 3 Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 4 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 7 1.2 Research context of the Semi-public organisations in the Netherlands .......................... 8 1.3 Research Problem and research question ......................................................................... 9 1.4 Relevance ....................................................................................................................... 10 1.5 Thesis Structure.............................................................................................................. 10 2. Theory .................................................................................................................................. 12 2.1 Semi-public organisations.............................................................................................. 12 2.2 Legitimacy...................................................................................................................... 14 2.2.1. Theory of legitimacy .............................................................................................. 15 2.2.2 Legitimacy management ......................................................................................... 16 2.3 Accountability ................................................................................................................ 17 2.4 Theory mechanism ......................................................................................................... 18 3. Research Method.................................................................................................................. 20 3.1 Sample Strategy........................................................................................................ 20 3.2 Measuring Legitimacy.................................................................................................... 21 3.2.1 Data collection on legitimacy.................................................................................. 21 3.2.2 Making Legitimacy suitable for statistical analysis ................................................ 22 3.3 Measuring Accountability.............................................................................................. 23 3.3.1 Data collection on accountability............................................................................ 24 3.3.2 Making accountability suitable for statistical analysis............................................ 25 3.4 Data analysis .................................................................................................................. 25 4. Results .................................................................................................................................. 28 5. Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 31 5.1 Limitations ..................................................................................................................... 33 5.2 Recommendations .......................................................................................................... 34 5.3 Conclusions .................................................................................................................... 36 5.4 Reflection on the research .............................................................................................. 37 6. References ........................................................................................................................ 38 7. Appendices ....................................................................................................................... 43 Appendix 1.1 code content analysis legitimacy* ................................................................. 43 5 Appendix 1.2 Janis fadner coefficient of media endorsement ............................................. 44 Appendix 1.3 Accountability criteria ................................................................................... 45 Appendix 1.4 List of newspapers......................................................................................... 50 Appendix 1.5 Random selected semi-public organisations ................................................. 51 Appendix 1.6 Intercoder reliability test Accountability....................................................... 53 Intercodertest 1................................................................................................................. 53 Intercoder test 2................................................................................................................ 55 Appendix 2.0 SPSS Output .................................................................................................. 57 2.1 Descriptive Statistics .................................................................................................. 57 2.2 Kolmogorov Smirnov Statistic................................................................................... 57 2.3 Normal Q-Q Plot ........................................................................................................ 57 2.4 Correlation Output...................................................................................................... 57 Appendix 3.0 Excell Sheets, coding of Legitimacy............................................................. 57 3.1 Excell Sheet Accountability all criteria...................................................................... 57 3.2 Excel Legitimacy more endorsing> challenging........................................................ 57 3.3 Excel legitimacy more challenging> endorsing........................................................ 57 6 1. INTRODUCTION ‘Organisations