SaveDisney.com and Activist Challenges: A Habermasian Perspective on Corporate Legitimacy

Abstract

This study develops a Habermasian framework for evaluating and generating challenges to organizational legitimacy. The launch of the SaveDisney.com web site represents an innovative example of an Internet-based activist public successfully challenging a corporation's legitimacy and advocating for changes in corporate governance. Legitimacy research has focused on strategies used by organizations to build legitimacy (e.g., Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Metzler, 2001), but scholars rarely address how publics challenge legitimacy claims. Using Habermas' conceptualization of communicative action and legitimacy to explore the SaveDisney.com case offers insight into ways that activist publics successfully challenge and reject the legitimacy claims of powerful corporations.

Notes

¹ Botan and Taylor (2004) described this kind of assumption about publics as tied to a functional perspective, which “sees publics and communication as tools or means to achieve organizational ends” (p. 651).

²Habermas (1979) earlier discussed four validity claims. The fourth claim is to the intelligibility of the claim, deciding whether the listener can hear and understand the utterance. Leeper (1996) included all four in his brief analysis of claims used by Exxon in the Valdez incident, but since (a) all examples discussed under intelligibility were also discussed and part of consideration of the rightness and sincerity claims, and (b) Habermas (1984, 1987) dropped the intelligibility claim in his later development of validity claims, we do not develop it as a separate claim in this analysis.

³The primary author downloaded the entire web site as it existed on May 1, 2006. In addition the authors used the web archive, waybackmachine.org, to access all versions of the SaveDisney web site. All dates listed in this text for web site materials reference the dates posted on the material on the SaveDisney web site. We believe this indicates the date the material was published.

Hoover's (2007, July 24). The Walt Disney Company. Hoover's Company Records - In-Depth Records. Retrieved July 27, 2007, from LexisNexis Academic database.

Walt Disney Company (2006b). Form 10-K September 30, 2006. Retrieved July 25 2007, from Thomson ONE Banker database.