The traditional monopoly of politics and international relations on theorizing power, authority and legitimacy has eroded in the late modern era. The complexity of these domains has been compounded in a strongly interconnected, post-Westphalian world, where sovereignty and statehood are increasingly negotiated, where centres of power and authority have shifted and where new configurations of governance have come to the fore. The conventional conceptual toolbox of inter-national relations has been slow to adapt, and so the need to embrace insights from other disciplines never greater. The study of legitimacy in particular has been hamstrung by conventional drawings of both sovereignty and authority. Public authority, in the Weberian idealist sense, is the legitimated exercise of power. The study of power has broadened considerably in this timeframe; legitimacy, or rather the practice of legitimation, must mirror power's analytical expansion. Even where the need to broaden our conceptualization of legitimation has been conceded, its empirical content has remained woefully thin. The question of how political actors legitimate their authority to act thus remains under-theorized and under-researched. This thesis contributes to contemporary debates regarding power, legitimation and authority in two key respects. The first is in theorizing legitimation as practice: the everyday 'socially meaningful patterns of action' (Adler & Pouliot 2011, p3) that render power authoritative. This practice-based approach, benefitting in particular from the legacies of Foucault and Bourdieu, moves firmly away from accounts of legitimacy as 'inputs' and 'outputs' towards a more processual account. The second is in locating these everyday practices beyond formalized institutions, undertaken by a range of actors in a range of forums. The increasingly blurred 'non-state' operates in the margins between global and local; national/international; public/private and indeed state/non-state, whilst nonetheless sustaining a claim to publicness. These 'twilight' institutions (Lund 2006a) include the non-government organizations in Tanzania on which this thesis is focussed. It draws on extensive critical ethnography in locating everyday governmental and non-governmental legitimation practice, whilst linking the local to the global. This is not solely about facilitating the travel of international relations to its hitherto geographical and theoretical margins, but to return with rigour to the centrality of legitimation as experienced in 'most of the world' (Chatterjee 2004). It asks, in short, how NGOs, as non-state actors, legitimate their authority to act in the everyday, within today's interconnected world.

This research explores how an open strategy approach can be used to manage organisational legitimacy in a pluralistic context, characterised by the competing demands of key stakeholders. Open strategy demonstrates an interest in strategising processes becoming more inclusive and transparent (Hautz et al., 2016). Open strategy work to date has focused on its uses and implications, and how strategic inclusion and transparency are being displayed in different organisational contexts. Much open strategy literature also associates the central purpose of open strategising activity with organisations seeking to manage legitimacy (e.g. Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007; Whittington et al., 2011; Tavakoli et al., 2017), particularly through ensuring that their actions are desirable in the opinion of key stakeholders (Suchman, 1995). Whilst a small number of studies have explicitly focused on open strategy and legitimacy, these do not go beyond illuminating legitimacy as a potential effect (Gegenhuber and Dobusch, 2017) or outcome (Luedicke et al., 2017). Absent has been research attempting to specifically understand open strategy as a process of legitimation (Uberbacher, 2014), and there remains a need to unpack and elevate the significant potential of open strategy approaches for managing legitimacy further. To address this gap, this research presents an in-depth single case analysis of an organisation undertaking the development of a new four-year strategic plan using an open strategy approach. A number of data collection methods were used, including completion of 30 semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and collection of significant social media and documentation data, to explicate the concepts of open strategy and organisational legitimacy, addressing the question; How does an open strategy approach represent a process of legitimation for managing the competing demands of organisational stakeholders? . A pluralistic context, a UK-based professional body, is the basis for the empirical work. It is acknowledged that interrogating the intricacies of strategising in pluralistic contexts, and the inherent competing demands of stakeholders, might offer new perspectives, and a useful means of expanding the contextual base of practice-based strategy work (Jarzabkowski and Fenton, 2006). However, studies of open strategy in pluralistic contexts remain near non-existent in the literature (Lusiani and Langley, 2013). In the organisational legitimacy literature, there is much discourse on how legitimacy is managed and gained through specific legitimation processes and strategies, and increasingly such a focus has been adopted to recognise how organisations might manage legitimacy demands in contexts defined by plurality, amidst diffuse power and divergent objectives (Denis et al., 2007). In this study, a practice-based activity theory framework is used (Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wolf, 2015) to explore legitimacy in relation to organisational direction and priorities, and as a means of redefining the organisation s core goals in an enactment of strategic openness. The work here conceptualises how the case organisation has adopted a plethora of open strategising practices for legitimacy effects (Suddaby et al., 2013), providing a detailed account of how different dynamics of open strategising activity connect to specific forms of legitimation over time. The findings indicate that different open strategy dynamics represent the case organisation switching between distinct approaches to legitimation, as a means of managing the competing legitimacy demands of organisational stakeholders in a flow of activity. Through this narrative, a greater perception of legitimation as a core purpose of open strategy is provided. Overall, this research offers an important contribution by accentuating the principal relevance of organisational legitimacy in open strategising, particularly through elevating legitimacy beyond being understood as an effect or outcome in open strategy work. Further, this more explicitly brings open strategy into close alignment with the organisational legitimacy literature and its theoretical conceptions (Lawrence et al., 2009; Suddaby et al., 2013), which is imperative for understanding the potential importance of open strategy as a means of legitimation.