Taking a narrative approach, this paper explores how in the face of contradictory official narratives members negotiate the legitimacy of their organization’s practices. Based on an in-depth interview study of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) we show that actors instantiated a contradiction between corporate narratives that championed healthism and pro-nicotine product sales. We analyze how members supported, contested, and adopted positions of silence and ambivalence in relation to the sale of tobacco products to make three sets of contributions to theory. First, this paper analyzes how contradictions are narratological formations that once constituted may raise significant issues of internal legitimacy. Second, we argue that the internal legitimacy of organizational practices and the official narratives that support them is negotiated discursively by members in their personal narratives in which they position themselves as moral agents. Third, we outline the implications of a narrative conception of internal legitimacy which suggests that it is talked into existence in a polyphony of competing discursive processes. Our theorizing suggests that internal legitimacy is more contested, and a more potentially fragile accomplishment than previously considered, but nevertheless often relatively stable and enduring.
