Legitimacy is a sustained scholarly topic of interest across many disciplines – including library and information science (LIS). That does not mean all is well. It is the thesis here that LIS replicates problems that scholars have identified from the broader literature in deploying legitimacy without grounding it. This is another example of Wiegand’s (1999) argument: when appropriating a concept, LIS scholarship inadequately considers provenance or meaning, producing “tunnel vision and blind spots” and a literature that cannot connect or contribute to broader intellectual fields and scholarship, leaving it isolated.
The concept of legitimacy in its originating fields is surveyed, followed by a sampling of LIS peer-reviewed publications. Those bibliographies were checked for publications in English; those unconnected to LIS were excluded; they must be cited 20+ times in Google Scholar, resulting in 13 items. When those bibliographies were checked, only two additional publications were identified, confirming data saturation of the sample. The resulting 15 publications were analyzed specifically concerning the definition and deployment of the concept of legitimacy against the more established literature, with three conclusions developed.
“Legitimacy” is invoked more than described and ill-defined in LIS, which replicates earlier critiques of the legitimacy literature: “papers simply” deploy the term legitimacy “before moving on to discuss whatever particular type of legitimacy was studied.” Only a few cited Suchman’s landmark 1995 study. Second, a few of the LIS works sampled here do, however, attempt some definition, opening the possibility of dialog about the divergences with the broader legitimacy literature. Third, some theoretical clarifications are proposed to LIS concepts in light of the urgent issues LIS faces, making LIS legitimacy theory efforts highly relevant.
LIS has a clear conceptual path to address the many challenges the field faces in the contemporary political landscape by cleaning up its conceptualization of legitimacy to drive scholarship in a more practical, productive direction.
As noted, no systematic approach to the concept(s) of legitimacy has been attempted in the LIS literature, replicating the conditions of Wiegand’s 1999 critique of that literature as having “tunnel vision and blind spots.” The beginnings of that work are attempted here.
