The problem for legitimacy theory in contributing to our understanding of accounting disclosure specifically, and as a theory in general, is that the term has on occasion been used fairly loosely. This is not a problem of the theory itself, and the observation could be equally applied to a range of theories in a range of disciplines (see for example Caudill (1997) on the abuse of Evolutionary Theory). Failure to adequately specify the theory has been identified by Suchman (1995, p. 572, emphasis in original), who observed that “Many researchers employ the term legitimacy, but few define it”. Hybels (1995, p. 241) comments that “As the tradesmen [sic] of social science have groped to build elaborate theoretical structures with