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Legitimation creates new implications that serve to coordinate the implications officially appended to divergent institutional procedures. The capacity of legitimation is to make impartially accessible and subjectively conceivable the first-order objectivations that have been institutionalized. While we characterize legitimation by this capacity, paying little mind to the particular intentions rousing a specific legitimating process, it ought to be included that reconciliation, in some frame, is likewise the run of the mill reason spurring the legitimators.
Integration and the topic of subjective believability allude to two levels.
First, the totality of the institutional order should sound good to the members in various institutional procedures. Here the topic of believability alludes to the subjective acknowledgment of a general sense behind the situationally dominating however just incomplete institutionalized intentions of one's own and in addition of one's fellowmen.
This, at that point, is a horizontal level of combination and believability, relating the total institutional order to a few people taking an interest in it in a few parts, or to a few fractional institutional procedures in which a single individual may take part at any given time.
Second, the totality of the person's life, the progressive going through different orders of the institutional order, must be made subjectively significant. At the end of the day, the individual account must be invested with an implying that makes the entire subjectively conceivable. A vertical level inside the life traverse of single people must, in this manner, be added to the horizontal level of coordination and subjective believability of the institutional order.
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Legitimation isn't fundamental in the first period of institutionalization, when the institution is just a reality that needs no further help either intersubjectively or personally, it is self-evident to all concerned. The issue of legitimation definitely emerges when the objectivations of the institutional order are to be transmitted to another age.
By then, as we have seen, the self-evident character of the institutions can never again be kept up by methods for the person's own recollection and habitualization. The solidarity of history and life story is broken. In order to reestablish it, and along these lines to make coherent its two parts, there must be clarifications and supports of the remarkable components of the institutional custom.
Legitimation is the procedure of:
- Explaining
- Justifying
Explaining
Clarifies' the institutional order by attributing psychological legitimacy to its objectivated implications.
Justifying
Legitimizes the institutional order by giving a standardizing pride to its handy goals.
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Understand that legitimation has a psychological and a regulating component. At the end of the day, legitimation isn't simply a question of values. It generally suggests knowledge also. For instance, a family relationship structure isn't legitimated simply by the morals of its specific inbreeding taboos. There must first be knowledge of the parts that characterize both right and wrong actions inside the structure.
The individual may not wed inside his clan. Be that as it may, he should first know himself as an individual from this clan. This knowledge comes to him through a custom that clarifies what clans are in general and what his clan is specifically. Such clarifications are as much legitimating instruments as moral components of the convention. Legitimation not just explains to the person why he ought to perform one action and not another, it additionally reveals to him why things are what they are. At the end of the day, knowledge goes before values in the legitimation of institutions.
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References:
Legitimation
The Social Construction of Reality
Society as a Human Product