Corporate legitimacy across cultural contexts: Mapping the cultural schemata of religio-institutional actors.

摘要

The broad and complex relationship between religion and global businesses is investigated using the theoretical lens of institutional theory and methodological techniques of discourse analysis. Specifically, I examine the relationship between the corporation and the religio-institutional environments in which they transact by mapping the cognitive schematic elements of religious leaders in three countries: Egypt (Islam), Israel (Judaism), and Sweden (Secular Humanism). Semi-structured participant interviews are used to generate a focused discursive corpus which is then analyzed. The result of this analysis is (1) a thick description of the discursive relationship between religion and business for each national environment, (2) an identification of critical concepts and themes in the religious cognition of corporate legitimacy, and (3) proposed maps for the evaluation of corporate legitimacy in each national context.