Abstract
Taking into consideration the welfare of collectivities in which individuals are embedded, interrelated justice and legitimacy processes draw attention to social stability and the potential conditions giving rise to social change. To explicate these dynamics, the chapter offers a detailed conceptualization of legitimacy. Two perspectives—one focused on procedural justice and the other on distributive—demonstrate how justice processes contribute to the emergence of legitimacy. Legitimacy processes, however, also color perceptions of justice and constrain responses to injustice. Given the bidirectional relationship between justice and legitimacy, emphasis rests on the nature of the social context and underlying cognitive, identity, and comparison processes to signal when legitimacy may dampen responses to injustice to maintain social stability or when such responses might challenge existing so-called legitimate inequalities.
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Hegtvedt, K.A., Johnson, C., Watson, L. (2016). Social Dynamics of Legitimacy and Justice. In: Sabbagh, C., Schmitt, M. (eds) Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3216-0_23
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