Semantic Surprise and Semantic Congruence as Antecedents of Legitimacy

Contradictory evidence ties organizations’ language to their legitimacy to audiences. Some findings show that evoking meanings that conform to audiences’ expectations may lead to legitimacy, while others find the opposite. In this paper, we propose a simple theoretical framework to solve this seeming contradiction. Specifically, drawing on distributional approaches to meaning, we argue that the meanings that organizational representatives evoke to audience members result from the word associations used by organizational representatives when interacting with external audience members. We distinguish semantic surprise – that is, using word associations which are not commonly used by peers within a particular market – from semantic congruence – that is, using word associations evoking meanings which align with an audience's theory of value. We develop propositions stating that across organizations and audiences, semantic congruence is conducive of greater legitimacy, but that within-organization and within-audience changes in legitimacy result from semantic surprise during interactions between organizational representatives and audience members. Finally, we discuss possible measures of semantic surprise, semantic congruence and legitimacy leveraging recent advances in natural language processing and the implications of our theory for research on language and legitimacy in organization studies.