The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy

• Main Author: Gabriel Rossman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Society for Sociological Science 2014-03-01
• Series: Sociological Science
• Subjects: Categories; Compatability; Diffusion; Institutions
• Online Access: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume%201/march(2)/The%20Diffusion%20of%20the%20Legitimate%20and%20the%20Diffusion%20of%20Legitimacy.pdf

This article models the implications of innovations being nested within categories. In effect, social actors assess the legitimacy of innovations vis-à-vis conformity to categories such that a sufficiently legitimate innovation may be adopted without direct reference to the behavior of peers. However, when innovations lack categorical legitimacy, actors default to proximately peer-oriented heuristics such as information cascades. Eventually, if enough similarly novel innovations achieve widespread popularity, their conventions will become accepted as a legitimate category. Thus density creates legitimacy, but this density can be at the level of the particular innovation or of the category within which it is embedded.