In Search of Legitimacy: Managerialism and Legitimation in Civil Society Organizations

In this article, we investigate the changes in the legitimating accounts used by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), in the
context of spreading managerialism—one of the most powerful institutional practices of our time—in the Third Sector. We first
introduce the concepts of legitimacy and legitimating account, before showing how managerialism manifests itself in CSOs and
presenting three managerialist accounts used to legitimate such organizations: efficiency and effectiveness (E&E), stakeholder’s
needs, and innovation. We then examine empirically how the use of these accounts changed between 1995 and 2008. In order to
do so, we analyze quantitatively the contents of a sample of annual reports produced by Austrian CSOs over the stated period,
and apply discourse analysis to a smaller group of reports to reveal more fine-grained developments. Our results show significant
changes: of our chosen accounts, the one most tightly linked with managerialism, E&E, had come to be taken-for-granted by
2008, whereas the more generic and subtle concepts of stakeholder’s needs and innovation featured more strongly than in 1995.