Appendix: Definitions
As commonplace words used differently in different contexts, several key terms require a brief definition to clarify how they are used in this book.
The complexities of the term legitimacy are evident from the first elements of its Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘1. Conformity to the law, to rules, or to some recognized principle; lawfulness. Also: conformity to sound reasoning; logicality; justifiability.1 The ‘also’ draws attention to the fact that there is more than one road to legitimacy. One route is that of conformity to laws or rules (as with a ‘legitimate government’), but another is conformity to logic, in the sense of a position that can be soundly argued from first principles (as with a ‘legitimate viewpoint’). The definition embraces respect for convention, yet also respect for the kind of critical reasoning that makes it possible to innovate, and in turn inaugurate new conventions. In this book, I use this conception of legitimacy as a destination that can be reached by more than one path, and acknowledge the role of communities as well as individuals in judging whether the destination has been reached or not. Explorations of legitimacy in social science frequently draw on Max Weber’s 1924 argument that the legitimacy of a social order depends on whether ‘action is approximately or on the average oriented to certain determinate “maxims” or rules’.2 Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway, examining definitions of legitimacy from across social psychological and organisational literature, find differences in emphasis of various aspects, but identify some ‘fundamental similarities’, among them that ‘(b) Although legitimacy is mediated by the perceptions and behaviours of individuals, it is fundamentally a collective process. It comes about through and depends upon the implied presence of a social audience, those assumed to accept the encompassing framework of beliefs, norms, and values, and, therefore, the construal of the object as legitimate’.3 In this book, I use the term legitimacy to describe such collective processes mediated by individuals, ones in which readers are neither all-powerful, passing judgement in a vacuum and unaffected by any implied social audience, nor powerless, passive observers of a process that does not involve them. (This differs from Bourdieu’s use of the term in distinctions between ‘legitimate’, ‘middle-brow’, and ‘popular’ taste, where ‘legitimate’ still very much describes orientation towards rules and maxims, but specifically refers to categories more and less associated with elite audiences.)4
Reputation, in contrast, is frequently defined as a phenomenon in which the individual is less directly involved. Reputation is generally understood to be a meta-belief, a ‘belief about beliefs’.5 An individual may decide that a reputation is undeserved and choose to defy it (as with a customer buying a novel on Amazon despite one-star reviews), or attempt to ignore it, but that is not the same thing as denying that the reputation exists and matters. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of reputation further foregrounds the relative aspect of reputation – that it encompasses not merely esteem but also whether it is more or less esteem than enjoyed by others – and ‘good name’, or the role reputation plays in marking out an individual or organisation as suitable for future relations: ‘1. a. The condition, quality, or fact of being highly regarded or esteemed; credit, fame, distinction; respectability, good report. b. The honour, credit, good name, or fame of a particular person or thing 2. The general opinion or estimate of a person’s character or other qualities; the relative esteem in which a person or thing is held.’6 This also emphasises that reputation is a ‘general opinion or estimate’: it need not be a consensus view to have a meaningful effect. This conception of reputation is particularly visible in Publishing Studies, where one instance of suspected client poaching can cost a young agent her ‘good name’ or where Picador’s ‘reputation as a publisher of upmarket literary writing’ does not mean that every novel on its list will automatically be seen as upmarket.7 Management research, a field in which the study of reputation has increasing prominence, identifies a ‘triad of identity, image and reputation’ where ‘these concepts are related to but still different from each other’.8 In my usage of the term in this book, I similarly draw a distinction between identity, which implies authenticity and truth, and reputation, which only implies reasonably wide recognition. I also draw a distinction between image, which even when shared by many individuals, or actively communicated by an organisation, is construed directly,9 and reputation, a meta-belief.
Credibility also involves belief, but in a much more direct way. Credible is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘able to be believed’ or ‘believed in’.10 As Rieh and Danielson point out in their examination of credibility in a multidimensional framework, researchers in different fields use diverse methodologies to study characteristics of source, comparisons between media, and evaluation of information (the latter typical of their own fields of Information Studies and Human–Computer Interaction) but ultimately there is an individual at the end of the process: a person who is convinced or not convinced.11 While credibility can be a component of reputation,12 and the judgement of the many is inarguably a factor in one person’s ability to trust, the individual is directly involved. In this book, I use ‘credible’ and ‘credibility’ to indicate actors and objects that have convinced individuals or endeavour to convince individuals, whether as ‘honest, principled or authentic’ (as an author may be) or ‘effective or operational’ (as an app or device may be).
E-novel and e-book are, as discussed in the overview of prior research, contentious terms that have been applied at different times to many varieties of artefacts and humanistic knowledge objects.13 In this book, I use the terms broadly and inclusively. Rather than attempt to police usage or to exclude any given artefact from the definition (e.g. if it were conspicuously short, or comprised video as well as text, or presented as a Microsoft Word file rather than PDF or .EPUB), if a survey, focus group, or interview participant chose to describe an artefact as an e-book, I have classed it as an e-book and included it in the analysis. Similarly, if a participant described an artefact as an e-novel, I have classed it as such, rather than vetting it for length, platform, and so on (or, indeed, applying an attempt at criteria of fiction versus non-fiction). This means that forms such as interactive literature and Wattpad- or AO3-distributed fan fiction are discussed by some participants alongside e-books that remain within bounds of what could be represented in a mainstream-published print novel, but by other participants held apart. Policies of breadth and inclusivity have the obvious effects on the results, making them more authentic to respondents’ experience, but not automatically generalisable to e-books or e-novels when defined more narrowly in other studies.
Finally, this book defines reader broadly and inclusively. Rather than limit this to some variation of ‘non-professional’, in the sense of a person not employed in some manner in the publishing industry (a very problematic definition for an industry with porous borders) or impose criteria regarding frequency of reading, I use ‘reader’ to mean any person who reads, whatever their background, knowledge base, or experience.
Open access