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Egholm, Liv/Heyse, Liesbet/Mourey, Damien (2020)In: Voluntas  31, pp. 1-18.ABSTRACT“The concept of legitimacy—i.e., being regarded as “lawful, admissible, and justified” (Edwards in NGO rights and responsibilities: a new deal for global governance, The Foreign Policy Center, London, 2000)—is pivotal within civil society research. Recently, the concept has applied to wider notions concerning the civil sphere and civic action. The introductory article of this special issue aims to provide an overview of conceptualizations of legitimacy within civil society research and to point at new avenues for future research. We depart from Suddaby et al.’s (Acad Manag Ann 11(1):451–478, 2017) configurations of legitimacy within management literature: as property, perception, and process. While these configurations are also reflected in civil society literature, with legitimacy as property being prominent, they do not capture the full scope of civil society literature on legitimacy, given its multidisciplinary nature, its inclusion of multiple levels of analysis, and the presence of complementary conceptualizations of legitimacy. We posit that the legitimacy-as-relations-in-processes perspective is valuable for advancing research in civil society organizations.”EXTRACT“The concept of legitimacy within CSOs has been linked to a “lawful, admissible, and justified organization” (Edwards 2000) and more recently discussed in the context of Alexander’s division between the civil and uncivil sphere (2006) and Lichterman and Eliasoph’s (2014) identifications of civic action. Historically, the legitimation of CSOs’ actions and existence is intertwined with stakeholder accountability, contemporary “regimes” of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), and the range of available institutional and organizational forms. Indeed, the emergence of legitimacy as a pivotal and popular concept speaking to so many different empirical and theoretical fields within the field of CSOs has often caused confusion when it comes to its conceptualization and its following empirical and theoretical claims.” (p. 1/2)