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Examining an Individual’s Legitimacy Judgment Using the Value–Attitude System: The Role of Environmental and Economic Values and Source Credibility

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Abstract

We view an individual’s legitimacy judgment as an attitude. It is influenced by a personal belief system composed of global values and domain-specific beliefs, consistent with the value–attitude system in marketing. Our context is the legitimacy of the Canadian oil sands industry. We hypothesize that an individual’s legitimacy judgment may be influenced by three domain-specific beliefs: the credibility of the industry, environmental non-government organizations, and the mass media. We also examine two global values associated with sustainable development: concern for the environment and concern for economic development. These are expected to have negative and positive effects, respectively, on an individual’s legitimacy judgment and on industry credibility. We also examine if these relationships are influenced by proximity to the oil sands. We test our theory using a mixed methods research design and a structural equation analysis on a survey of 853 residents of Edmonton and Toronto, Canada. We find support for most of our hypotheses.

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Notes

  1. Peer networks are another important information source used for evaluating legitimacy (Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Zimmerman and Zeitz 2002). We did not use them in this paper because each individual has a unique peer network and we were unable to measure the content of what each peer network was saying about the oil sands.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bissett School of Business, Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada

    David Finch & Paul Varella

  2. Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    David Deephouse

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  1. David Finch
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Correspondence to David Finch.

Appendix: Content Analysis of Mass Media

Appendix: Content Analysis of Mass Media

We conducted a content analysis of daily newspapers distributed in Toronto and Edmonton to create a directional hypothesis for mass media credibility. The analysis focused on tone, the expression of positive or negative sentiment toward the oil sands industry and its representatives.

We collected all articles published from April 1 to July 10, 2008 in the cities’ major daily newspapers: Edmonton Journal (circulation 102,000); Edmonton Sun (46,000); Toronto Star (384,000); and Toronto Sun (187,000). We also sampled the two national newspapers: The Globe and Mail (313,000) and the National Post (160,000). Based on their marketing statistics, we assume these papers had some readership in each city, yet we recognize that these papers are oriented toward readers of higher socioeconomic status. We collected any article published during this period that included the words oil sands, oilsands, tar sands, or tarsands. The time period was chosen because it was the 3-month period before our survey was administered, consistent with agenda-setting effects of mass media (Ader 1995; Carroll and McCombs 2003). The Appendix Table below shows that 72 articles appeared in Edmonton, 14 in Toronto, and 148 in the national newspapers. The latter had a large number of articles about the oil sands because they have much more coverage of business and investment news; there were many stories about changes to stock prices of companies in the oil sands in response to the changing price of oil on commodity markets. The fact that more articles appeared in Edmonton than Toronto is consistent with the role of proximity as a criterion of newsworthiness in journalism (Shoemaker and Reese 1996).

We used three levels of tone at the article level of analysis, following Deephouse and Carter (2005). A favorable rating was assigned when the overall impression of the article toward the oil sands industry was positive. An unfavorable rating was given when the overall impression of the article toward the oil sands industry was negative. Finally, a neutral rating was given if the story lacked positive or negative sentiment toward the oil sands industry or if the article contained both positive and negative components, but left the overall impression of being balanced. The results show that the daily print media had a negative tone toward the oil sands. This supports our decision to hypothesize that the individual’s perception of media credibility has a negative effect on the individual’s legitimacy judgment.

See Table 6

Table 6 Content analysis of daily newspapers
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Finch, D., Deephouse, D. & Varella, P. Examining an Individual’s Legitimacy Judgment Using the Value–Attitude System: The Role of Environmental and Economic Values and Source Credibility. J Bus Ethics 127, 265–281 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-2031-5

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