A Research On The Legitimacy Strategy Of Publicity On The Public Universities’ Website

Since the birth of the New Institutionalism in sociology of organization by Meyer and Rowan in1970s, more and more researchers have switched their study from the efficiency to the legitimacy of organization mechanism. As an institutional organization, the university becomes the original research objective of the New Institutionalism in sociology of organization. In China, the website of the university, a very important way to publicity, displays the structure of the institutional organization well. Based on the strategic research of the legitimacy of university by Wu Chonghan and the theory of organizational legitimacy in the New Institutionalism, this paper collected the columns and news reports on the websites of59universities in Jiangxi province. Through data analysis, this paper is aimed at shedding some light on the characters and strategies of the publicity of universities and dealing with the reasons.It showed that generally speaking, the content in different universities’websites is similar, which is due to the similar organizational environment and evaluation system in universities. In pursuing different types of legitimacy, most of the university websites for publicity prefer cognitive legitimacy in order to realize the legitimacy, effective legitimacy and moral legitimacy; in establishing and maintaining legitimacy strategies, both the vocational schools and universities will deploy the way of imitating the institutions with high prestige, generating new models and reserving contact to acquire cognitive legitimacy; they build their reputation, image and refer to the authorities to pursue the effective legitimacy; they try to acquire the moral legitimacy in the way of repaying society and manipulating symbolic signs. At the same time, the vocational schools are different from universities over their needs, policy guarantee and moral surveillance; in news report, universities pay more attention on their quality image. This paper extends the application of the theory of organizational legitimacy and displays the nature of the strategies and deeds of website publicity in universities, which will shed some light on the website publicity in the universities.