This thesis explores a relationship between democratic self-determination, universal human rights, and democratic legitimacy. States are democratically legitimate when they satisfy the first two terms of this relationship. However, these two terms are in tension. This tension is between the universal and particular natures of the terms and requires democratic procedures to provisionally resolve it. A universal human right can be interpreted and contextualized through such procedures to resolve this tension. I argue that the human right to free movement cannot be adequately contextualized in nation-state fora, but instead require an international democratic institution to perform this act. As a result, nation-states, in order to be legitimate, must give up control of their borders to the international institution so that they recognize the human right to free movement. A consequence of this is that Canadian immigration policy is insufficiently democratic and does not recognize the human right to free movement. / SSHRC

Are Aboriginal rights defensible within the framework of liberalism? Liberalism's commitment to individual equality seems to preclude Aboriginal rights insofar as these rights are exercisable by only a sub-set of the Canadian population and not by all Canadians equally. Instead of asking how Aboriginal rights can be justified within the liberal state, we need to question the legitimacy of the state's assertion of sovereignty over Aboriginal peoples and territories. Of the four potentially applicable modes of acquiring sovereignty - discovery, conquest, cession and prescription - only treaties have the potential to provide a liberally-compelling basis for the legitimacy of Crown sovereignty. But historical treaties did not purport to transfer sovereignty. As such, Canadian sovereignty suffers from a normative lacuna. Aboriginal rights, as set out in mutually consensual treaties addressing the sharing of sovereignty, have the potential to fill this lacuna and thereby to ground the legitimacy of Crown sovereignty.

When it comes to improving tax revenues in developing countries, we do not have a clear understanding of whether it is more important to have democracy or state effectiveness. Two theories have prevailed in the literature; one is to focus on building strong states that can have financial autonomy, the other is to promote democracy with the assumption that democracy brings about economic growth. Yet, for over four decades, developing countries’ tax to GDP ratio is still desperately low. On average, developing countries ‘tax to the GDP ratio is less that half that of the OCDE countries. This article contends that greater taxation outcomes result from the synergistic combination between democracy and state effectiveness. Empirical evidence from a time-series-cross-sectional dataset covering up to 120 countries during the 2003-2012 time period supports the conclusion that the two attributes working together increase tax revenue by 16% because they force political leaders to focus on citizens by improving their political participation (democracy) and by meeting voters’ basic needs (performance).

Through practices of assessment and consultation, information gathering and analysis, social workers, in the field of child protection, build understandings about children and families. Social workers actively construct knowledge as they engage in assessments of children referred to them as potentially 'at risk'. Their work is always informed by explicit or implicit theories about risk and protection. The active engagement with risk by social workers is the central focus for this inquiry. This thesis presents an exploratory inquiry into the work of child protection in Aotearoa/New Zealand as experienced by social workers employed at the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS). The primary focus is on their understanding of risk and their active construction of risk discourses. I am interested in how children are identified as potentially at risk, and how risk is identified, worked with, managed and woven into the assessments of social workers as they engage in child protection work. This inquiry took, as its starting point, narratives of 70 social workers about specific child protection cases. They were asked to describe both straightforward and more complex assessments, and, as a result, provided a rich and detailed range of narratives about how risk is defined, assessed and managed by social workers. This qualitative study employed a critical incident technique as a data collection method, and applied a grounded approach to the analysis of these practice stories. The focus for the interviews was on the day-to-day work as experienced by social workers, that is, the practices of assessment in child protection. Probes were used to solicit further information when risk was discussed by the workers. This research also involved spending time in different branches of CYFS around the country and informal conversation with social workers. Field notes made during these periods of immersion in different practice settings were also analysed to provide understandings of the contexts in which social workers engage in individual and collective knowledge production about children and risk. This is the first detailed investigation of how New Zealand statutory social workers of different ethnicities engage with, and draw on, risk discourses in their assessment work. For the social workers in this study, risk discourses were actively and strategically used in the legitimation of their practice interventions. The practices of socially constructing knowledge about 'risk' are a continuing focus of this thesis, and the wider implications for social work practices of 'risk' assessment are discussed.

This thesis argues that within political philosophy, property rights deserve closer attention than has been paid to them recently because the legitimacy of a state rests upon their definition and enforcement. In this way property rights differ from the right to liberty or equality. A state may or may not have liberty or equality, but it has no meaning at all if it does not enforce the rights of property. This is not to suggest that normative arguments for property rights are ‘nonsense upon stilts’. Morality may provide many reasons for an individual to exclude other members of a political community from a property. However, the function of property rights is to enforce that exclusion and this suggests that the normative legitimacy of a state is closely bound both to its ability to enforce whatever property rights it already has granted, and its justification of decisions taken when property rights are granted within its borders. My argument is that a proper political philosophy of property rights should acknowledge that a state depends upon its treatment of property rights for justification, not as a matter of justice, but as a matter of its existence.

Purpose: This purpose of this thesis is to investigate a company’s understanding of ‘sustainability’ and how this concept is integrated into organisational processes and decision making. Firstly, the internal sustainability systems which lead up to external social and environmental reporting will be examined. Secondly, the role of reputation management and legitimacy in driving company response behaviours around short-term and long-term environmental issues will be explored. Prior research is mainly limited to studies on external social and environmental reporting. The present study adds to the literature by exploring the internal mechanisms and behaviours which underlie external reporting practice. New theoretical insights are provided into legitimacy theory by presenting a framework linking aspects of reputation, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory. Design and methodology: Research is conducted through an in-depth case study at a wholly-owned foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection was extensive, including semi-structured interviews and non-structured talks with 26 participants from top management executives through to production workers. Access was also granted to confidential reports, participation in the company’s annual environmental seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting. Analysis was conducted in a number of phases, framed around research questions and themes drawn from prior literature. Findings: Findings and discussion are presented on three major research questions. Findings on the first research question about internal sustainability systems in the company suggest that senior management are incorporating sustainability issues into strategic planning. However, concerns over the environment have not fully cascaded down to the lower levels of the firm. Although Management Control and Environmental Management Systems are well integrated, these systems are relatively decoupled from the external reporting process. The second and third research questions focus on the distinction between the concepts of “reputation” and “legitimacy” in the case company. Three short-term issues and a long-term strategic decision in the company are outlined to illustrate how company response behaviours change according to: 1) the visibility of the issue, 2) stakeholder salience, and 3) the interconnectedness of stakeholders around the problem. The case company prefers direct action to contain problems where possible, and external reporting only features in some scenarios. Ultimately, it is proposed that reputation and legitimacy must be understood in terms of behaviours as well as external reporting outcomes. Originality/value: There has been a considerable focus on external reporting in corporate sustainability research, particularly in the accounting literature. The work that has been done on internal systems has been largely limited to case study work focused on characteristics and preconditions of sustainability processes together with limitations in current practice. The purpose of this research is to produce an in-depth case study looking at company responses to sustainability issues. It provides some new perspectives on the well researched concept of legitimacy along with some potential avenues for further theory development.

The thesis examines European legitimacy and regulatory governance. The research analyzes the link between regulatory governance and legitimacy in EU regulation and evaluates whether governance tools in the form of qualitative administrative criteria can contribute to European regulatory legitimacy. Governance here refers to the exercise of delegated regulatory powers by the European Commission. The question of whether the adoption of qualitative regulatory governance practices can enhance the supranational regulatory legitimacy of the European Commission has been underexamined in the literature typically without distinguishing the analysis from the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU. Using a case study from the telecommunications sector, the thesis conducts such an examination using a documentary method. To create the analytical context, the thesis distinguishes the theoretical concept of legitimacy for a transnational regulator from that of a national regulator of a sovereign state. The choice is made to use a form of normative regulatory legitimacy drawn from the scholarship on regulatory governance theory. An analytical model is constructed that reflects criteria and values that bear upon legitimacy so as to constitute a meaningful alternative to democratic forms of regulatory accountability. Regulation was defined in the research to cover policy instruments, in the form of measures of positive and negative integration, adopted for the EU single market under Article 106(3) and Article 114 TFEU. The analysis evaluates the regulatory governance used by the European Commission over a twenty-three year time period in which the telecommunications sector was entirely liberalized and harmonized. Analysis revealed that, while the Commission has improved the quality of its regulatory governance in principle, its use of normative regulatory governance in practice requires further attention, notably in respect of improving the evidence base for policy proposals and in creating a meaningful form of empirical feedback in evaluating regulatory outcomes, corresponding to an ex post accountability mechanism. On the other hand, the research validated the premise that a transnational regulator could purposively use regulatory governance as a tool with which to construct a defensible form of regulatory legitimacy.

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This thesis presents a study of intra-organisational legitimation of the Human Resource function in a large Australian airline. Major changes in senior management and strategy, under tumultuous circumstances for the industry and the firm, saw a repositioning of human resources in the organisation. The study draws on empirical ethnographic research conducted within a large global airline over approximately fourteen months, focusing on 2001. Using a longitudinal and processual research strategy, the study adopted enabled the close examination of the interrelationships between institutional structures and organisational action, embedded in an organisational setting. In particular, it considers the loss of legitimacy and agency of managers in a corporate human resources department and their response in re-establishing legitimacy in a new institutional context. Legitimacy implies the actions and existence of these actors and their sub-unit are both valued and considered valid by their constituencies. In the analysis of the unfolding multi-layered processes of legitimation, I employed elements of neo-institutional theory and critical realist ontology and applied this analysis to a modified conception of structuration, mapping out the HR managers' experience of the inner context and how it came to position their practices and constrain their agency. The study found that the human resource actors in the airline were able to re-form and regain the legitimacy of their sub-unit and of their major strategic initiative, by drawing on their stock of political relationships and on the plurality of logics, values and norms available within the large, diverse firm" Their reflexive awareness of their contextual positioning enabled them to alter their legitimation strategies and regain legitimacy" This thesis makes a contribution to our understanding of processes of deinstitutionalisation and legitimation and ongoing structuration in organisational settings. It also expands our conceptualisation of legitimacy, by focusing on legitimation as an act of becoming, and developing the notion of legitimacy struggles as institutional politics. Finally, the thesis contributes to critical human resource management research and our understanding of human resource managers' capacity for agency within broader institutional contexts.

This thesis presents a study of intra-organisational legitimation of the Human Resource function in a large Australian airline. Major changes in senior management and strategy, under tumultuous circumstances for the industry and the firm, saw a repositioning of human resources in the organisation. The study draws on empirical ethnographic research conducted within a large global airline over approximately fourteen months, focusing on 2001. Using a longitudinal and processual research strategy, the study adopted enabled the close examination of the interrelationships between institutional structures and organisational action, embedded in an organisational setting. In particular, it considers the loss of legitimacy and agency of managers in a corporate human resources department and their response in re-establishing legitimacy in a new institutional context. Legitimacy implies the actions and existence of these actors and their sub-unit are both valued and considered valid by their constituencies. In the analysis of the unfolding multi-layered processes of legitimation, I employed elements of neo-institutional theory and critical realist ontology and applied this analysis to a modified conception of structuration, mapping out the HR managers' experience of the inner context and how it came to position their practices and constrain their agency. The study found that the human resource actors in the airline were able to re-form and regain the legitimacy of their sub-unit and of their major strategic initiative, by drawing on their stock of political relationships and on the plurality of logics, values and norms available within the large, diverse firm" Their reflexive awareness of their contextual positioning enabled them to alter their legitimation strategies and regain legitimacy" This thesis makes a contribution to our understanding of processes of deinstitutionalisation and legitimation and ongoing structuration in organisational settings. It also expands our conceptualisation of legitimacy, by focusing on legitimation as an act of becoming, and developing the notion of legitimacy struggles as institutional politics. Finally, the thesis contributes to critical human resource management research and our understanding of human resource managers' capacity for agency within broader institutional contexts.