Legitimitet i allmännyttiga ideella föreningar

: en kvalitativ studie om skapandet och bevarandet av legitimitet genom årsredovisningen

Abstract

Public non-profit organizations are groups of people with common interests working towards specific goals. To be able to operate, the organizations require resources generated by the society through gifts and donations. Therefore, the organizations are dependent on the stakeholders to be able to survive the market. Organizations also require that the society assumes the non-profit organizations to be legitimate. Legitimacy can be created and maintained through various strategies, including annual reports as one of the tools to do so. The purpose of the study is to create an understanding of how public non-profit organizations uses annual reports to create and maintain legitimacy. A qualitative content analysis is adapted on ten annual reports of public non-profit organizations through a research model to identify codes, keywords and meaningful components in an encoding scheme. The research model is based on previous research on four different strategies; inform, adapt, modify and manipulate. The results of the study indicate that public non-profit organizations inform, adapt, modify or manipulate in order to create and maintain legitimacy through the annual reports. The study’s theoretical contribution is a further developed theoretical model for future research. The study’s social contribution is to contribute with an understanding of how the public non-profit organizations in Sweden create and maintain legitimacy through annual reports.