Legacy as Evaluative Authorization: A Process Theory of Divergent Organizational Trajectories

Abstract Strategic reorientation entails justifying new directions in light of the past. While organizations invoke their past when facing strategic shifts, these invocations can yield divergent outcomes, enabling renewal in some cases while constraining change or producing stagnation and even decline in others. Why do organizations that invoke their past in similar ways follow different trajectories? We develop a process theory of organizational legacy that locates the answer in evaluative authorization. Rather than treating organizational legacy as inherited historical content, we conceptualize it as a socially enacted process through which (re)interpretations of the past are activated, evaluated, and settled as normatively binding guides for action. This process determines whether and which interpretations acquire normative authority, remain contested, or fail to stabilize direction. By identifying evaluative settlement as the mechanism through which the past becomes binding, our theory explains why and how organizational legacy can enable adaptive renewal, constrain reinterpretation, or fail to organize action. This perspective repositions history as an active site of normative adjudication and clarifies how organizations make their pasts binding in ways that shape their futures. Organizations do not diverge because they inherit different pasts, but because they make those pasts binding in different ways.