Identity dysphoria: Queerness thinking to expand futures studies on legitimacy and corporate behaviour

Third Sector of Social Action (TSSA) organizations operate in environments characterised by high levels of uncertainty, dependence on external resources, and multiple social expectations that are often contradictory and have profound effects on how they experience and manage change. These aspects represent a unique challenge to trust and credibility in this type of organisation which, due to their distinctive characteristics, seem to instantly deserve legitimacy, as they enjoy great social support due to the principles and values they defend. But do they deserve it? Studying, from a Queerness approach, and stretching its scope towards legitimacy and corporate behaviour, in this work we aim to understand whether this supervening legitimacy is understandable and justifiable enough to make them credible and trustworthy organisations. Finding out whether the TSSA ethical values are equally valuable for the internal operations of the organisations and for the external operations of the sector, will allow us to identify its potential identity dysphoria as a result of the lack of alignment with the socially accepted discourse. By opening up to a queering process for the transformation of identity narratives for future research, this paper offers an integrative framework to analyse the coherence of discourses issued at the individual (organisations) and global (sector) levels as key elements for understanding legitimacy and organisational behaviour through the concept of identity dysphoria, taken from Queer Theory; that is, whether or not there is alignment, or otherness in Queer terms, when confronting individual oneself and sectorial interpretation and the bidirectional frictions of companies attempting to stand out and belong at the same time to justify their legitimacy. • Expanding queer thinking into the boundaries of business identity • Identity Dysphoria or alignment between individual and sectorial discourses as the backbone of legitimacy • Process of identity de-transition to deconstruct the reality of the Spanish TSSA • Corporate Dysphoria: organisational dysphoria, sectorial dysphoria and social dysphoria