Social Structure and Global Governance Legitimacy

This chapter considers how—alongside and in combination with individual and institutional sources—social structure can shape legitimacy beliefs vis-à-vis global governance. The discussion has two main parts: the first metatheoretical and the second theoretical. The metatheoretical part examines broad ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues regarding social structure, its power, its changes, and its spaces—all as these matters relate to legitimacy dynamics around global governance. The second part then explores a range of possible specific social-structural sources of legitimacy vis-à-vis global governance institutions. These postulated world-ordering forces include norms, hegemonic states, capitalism, discourses, modernity/postmodernity, and social hierarchies. Throughout, the chapter assesses promises as well as challenges of incorporating social-structural sources into empirical research on legitimacy in global governance.