With increasing private sector involvement in public service delivery, organizational legitimacy has become an important dimension in public management and governance. Prior studies have investigated the tradeoffs between efficiency and legitimacy in network modes of governance (Lieberherr, Klinke and Finger, 2012; Lieberherr, 2015; Peters and Pierre, 2010) or organizational attempts to construct legitimacy (Cashore, 2002; Wood, 2015).Yet, the interactive and discursive dimensions of legitimation have not been considered to a great extent. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive strategies used in the legitimation of profit in the context of public service delivery. These issues are studied in the case of Tallinn Water, an Estonian water company owned by a multinational water firm and the City of Tallinn. The analytical framework comprises five discursive strategies of legitimation: authorization, rationalization, normalization, moral evaluation and mythopoesis (van Leeuwen, 1996; Vaara, Tienari and Laurila, 2006), which are applied to a wide variety of documentary material. The paper contributes to extant literature by identifying the dynamics involved and the strategies used in (de)legitimation. The main findings are that 1) the (de)legitimation of Tallinn Water’s profit takes place through a mix of strategies, the most of effective of which is the emotionally charged narrativization strategy; 2) Tallinn Water’s counter-strategy is mainly fact-based normalization, which fails to alleviate the stakeholders’ concerns and perpetuates the discursive struggle over profit.
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