Resumen

Intangibility assets are part of the public sector, whose essence lies in public value. Legitimacy is an intangible asset that can be activated through communication and is defined based on the perceptions that its stakeholders have about whether the organization’s actions and behaviors are desirable, correct and proper. This article reviews the concept of organizational legitimacy as a factor of institutional sustainability; that is, legitimacy as a survival factor, as a supply for social support, as a guarantee for obtaining resources and as a resource itself to build the organization as a sector reference. Specifically, the article focuses on the role of the media in identifying the legitimacy of an organization. Through the review, some methodologies for measuring legitimacy emerge. For instance, media access from news sources, coefficients of media support, and attributes and variables associated with the typologies of legitimacy proposed by Suchman (1995). In conclusion, the studies on legitimacy applied to the public sector have not yet eswtablished a methodological corpus that allows to know the dynamics of legitimacy and to evaluate the influence of communication when activating the exercising legitimacy related to a public organization.