Justifying Social Impact as a Form of Impression Management: Legitimacy Judgements 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 judgement about legitimacy: cognitive and evaluative. Cognitive forms of judgement qualify how well an enterprise shares attributes with an individual's schemas of established actors or roles in society. Evaluative forms of judgement 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 judgement, legitimizing an enterprise's professionalism relied almost exclusively on evaluative judgements. Moreover, the justifications created to appeal to evaluative judgements relied almost exclusively on financial and operational data, using operational scale as a proxy.