Research on strategic management highlights the critical role reputation plays in the survival and expansion of organisations. However, no models or frameworks currently address cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy and status as key elements of social evaluations used to measure reputation.

A systematic literature review will be used to identify items for the scale development and questions for semi-structured interviews. The item-sorting exercise for the scale development and semi-structured interviews will be held with key airport stakeholders and form the qualitative part of the research project to produce the final refined list of potential items that will be sampled from the wider population through a quantitative survey. The survey results will then be analysed and evaluated against existing measures such as Elsbach’s (1994) legitimacy scale and the reputation quotient developed by Fombrun, Gardberg, and Barnett (2000).