Legitimation in contested industries : The role of argumentation

In order to be permitted to carry out their operations, companies need to be perceived as legitimate. Legitimacy is awarded as a result of a deliberation process whereby the members of a society come to agree that a company's operations can be considered beneficial (or at least not harmful) both in principle and in practice. For companies operating in contested industries, such as mining and agri-biotechnologies, gaining, and maintaining, a 'social licence' to operate can be problematic, and requires extensive engagement in discursively mediated legitimation practices of an argumentative nature. This chapter seeks to identify the prototypical argumentative patterns deployed in these industries in the service of corporate legitimation, concluding that they rely on varieties of pragmatic argumentation based on strong sustainability-framed objects of agreement to which are applied inferential processes ultimately resting on the locus from final/instrumental cause.