A relevant question to consider is whether there is any difference in strategy between building up legitimacy on one hand and repairing or maintaining it on the other. If legitimacy needs to be restored then a number of relatively simple acts may be all that is necessary. In this sense a company which has lost some legitimacy because of a single misdemeanour may try to recover it through disclosure. For example, Milne and Patten (2002), through the use of an "experimental decision case", illustrated that positive disclosures can sometimes serve to restore or repair a corporation's legitimacy. If a company is thought to be producing an otherwise desirable product which may also give rise to some undesirable by-products, then social and environmental disclosures may be used to communicate legitimacy-restoring messages. Here, legitimacy may be indicated by the organisation doing the best it can to repay or compensate society for the damage caused and this is made manifest by social and environmental actions which are disclosed in, say, the annual report. If, however, the ethical violation is more serious (in the judgement of the conferring publics), restoring legitimacy may actually be as difficult as the gaining of legitimacy in the first instance.