Toward a Theory of Social Judgments of Organizations: The Case of Legitimacy, Reputation, and Status

The proposed theory extends research on cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status by advancing an evaluator's perspective on these concepts as forms of social judgment, each addressing a different evaluator's question about the organization. I describe how evaluators make their social judgments under conditions of bounded rationality and how cognitive and social factors influence this process. The proposed process model of social judgment formation highlights the complex and nondeterministic nature of this process.