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The salience of global issues initiates a shift in legitimacy that puts organizational fields and their legacy incumbents under pressure to engage in substantial change efforts. Yet, a multiplicity of expectations prevails that might contrast each other and threaten different dimensions of legitimacy. Through an inductive, longitudinal analysis of field and organizational-level data in the Norwegian oil and gas (O&G) industry (2007 to 2022), we develop a model of frame inversion that illuminates how contested field incumbents can balance contradicting legitimacy dimensions through discursive and substantial business changes. Specifically, we show how O&G incumbents acknowledge the issue of climate change by integrating it into an issue-induced 'low-carbon' frame alongside the established 'profitable growth' frame. Our findings suggest that organizations navigate issue salience by serving both contested and sustainable business areas, legitimated by frame inversion. Frame inversion employs the issue-induced frame to re-legitimate contested lines of business while inversely rewiring the pre-existing frame to sustainable ones. Our findings contribute to a dynamic perspective of framing by highlighting dynamics around symbolic and substantial change efforts and the management of opposing legitimacy dimensions during times of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on core stigma that affects an entire organizational category has often focused on category members' individual coping tactics. Only little work has shed light on how category members join forces to cope with category stigma. Through a qualitative study of the increasingly stigmatized oil and gas industry in Europe because of climate change concerns, we find that category incumbents conjointly engage in seemingly contradicting strategies to confront the stigmatic threat. We identify two stigma compliance strategies targeted at reinventing the devalued category in a favorable light. Yet, employing these strategies, a temporal void is created between category relabeling in the present and categorical promises that pertain the future. Filling this void, the incumbents deploy two stigma defense strategies in support of the stigmatized category as is. We derive a theoretical model of how seemingly contradicting stigma management strategies foster category reinvention as a subtle form of category maintenance when facing stigmatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How organizations legitimate their actions under conditions of institutional change is a central yet little understood question. To address this gap, this paper investigates how incumbent firms legitimate investments into both established and novel technologies during transitional periods between the disruption of an established technological regime and the prospect of a new one. The on-going contestation over renewable and non-renewable energy technologies offers a fruitful context to study this question. We examine the rhetorical strategies that energy incumbents use to gain legitimacy for their investments into non-renewable (legitimacy-losing/established) and renewable (legitimacy-gaining/novel) technologies. Employing a mixed-method content analysis of 483 press releases on strategic energy investments made by the world's largest energy firms during the time period 2010-2015, we find that instead of a purely technocratic language, incumbents appropriate the rhetoric of sustainable and clean technology typically associated with new and renewable technologies to justify investments into established and polluting technologies. We also observe that the rhetoric that incumbents use to justify non-renewable investments is substantially more pronounced and blended than the one for renewables. Our study contributes to research on rhetorical institutionalism and legitimization under institutional change by showing how incumbents, in their effort to continuously hold on to established technology, engage in innovative behavior by blending rhetorical frames and recombining institutional templates in novel ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]