Abstract
Migrant women’s leadership careers are often theorised through additive accounts of gender disadvantage, overlooking how migration restructures the institutional conditions under which legitimacy is defined, conferred, and withdrawn over time. Drawing on 40 interviews with migrant women leaders in Australia and the United Kingdom, we develop a five-stage process model of legitimacy reconfiguration under shifting institutional logics. We identify a temporal cycle comprising: (1) Embedded Legitimacy, (2) Institutional De-Legitimation, (3) Strategic Re-Legitimation, (4) Provisional Stabilisation, and (5) Generative Re-Definition. Rather than depicting leadership progression as linear advancement, our findings show how migrant women’s careers unfold as an evolving negotiation across family, community, state, market, corporate, professional, and moral logics that define what counts as merit, who is recognised as legitimate, and how careers are expected to unfold. The state, society and markets logics produce entry exclusion through credential devaluation, visa-constrained vulnerability, and biased labour-market signalling. Legitimacy can be actively reclaimed through hyper-performance, credential re-signalling, and strategic network building, often under intensified visibility constrains and “local-first” leadership norms. Even after securing senior roles, authority remains fragile, contingent on care infrastructures and subject to organisational restructuring and selective valuation of cultural capital. In later stages, community, family, and moral logics reorient leadership toward generative contribution, though migrant-led initiatives remain structurally undervalued and dependent on conditional institutional endorsement. We contribute to careers and institutional theory by reconceptualising migrant women’s leadership as a dynamic process of legitimacy construction and redefinition under intersectional institutional reordering.