Legitimacy is widely accepted as an important resource for an organisation, strategy, or individual to possess. However, the process of gaining legitimacy has received limited attention in the academic literature. This thesis examines the strategies and actions that individuals employ in the process of legitimising their sustainability strategy within an organisation. Based on semi-structured interviews with 51 Heads of Sustainability, the research extends the existing ‘conformance, selection, manipulation’ legitimising strategy model, becoming one of the first to demonstrate how these legitimising strategies are interrelated both concurrently and temporally. It finds that multiple legitimising strategies are used simultaneously by individuals. Moreover, a pattern emerges whereby individuals begin with conformance-only legitimising when sustainability has limited integration, but employ all three legitimising strategies where sustainability integration is extensive. In addition to this, the research articulates two specific categories of actions that are used by individuals in the process of deploying these umbrella legitimising strategies: framing and developing coalitions of support. Framing actions comprise micro-reframing, disassociation, contextualisation, analogy, and differentiation and personalisation. Developing coalitions of support actions comprise leveraging sponsorship, networking, enhancing employee engagement, and continually promoting. From this empirical research a generalised legitimising pathway is proposed which demonstrates the progression of legitimising from using conformance-only through to using all three legitimising strategies, and the actions employed by the individual in these different stages.

UK policy-makers, politicians and practitioners over the past few years have based the narrative of competitiveness around the idea of 'rebalancing the economy'. This entails viewing competitiveness as a rational process (through the Porterian lens) and identifies strategies from a top-down perspective. However, there is generally a lack of understanding of how competitiveness is practiced from the bottom-up. Therefore, this study adopts a practice-based perspective to investigate competitiveness from a practitioner's perspective. In this thesis, Bourdieu's habitus and reflexivity is used along with Maclean, Harvey and Chia's notion of life history storytelling through the lens of sensemaking and legitimacy. The thesis employs a constructivist perspective to collect and analyse qualitative evidence from 41 practitioners during the two phases of data collection. The data was analysed using thematic analysis, codes generated and inferences made. In the pilot-study (Delphi-study and semi-structured interviews), senior strategists (20) practicing in local enterprise partnerships (LEP's), universities, regional development agencies, manufacturing associations and various manufacturing firms confirmed the initial assumption that policy is prescriptive and rationalistic. The second phase consisted of semi-structured interviews (21) with senior, middle and lower level practitioners belonging to various types of manufacturing firms and allied services. The main contributions of the thesis are that (1) reflexive practitioner's past experiences shaped existing practices and perceptions of competitiveness and (2) three distinct thresholds of competitiveness inform the position of the practitioner and their desire to be competitive. This has implications for policy and practice.