An Experimental Study on How SEs Build Rhetorical Legitimacy and Its Effects on Consumer Responses

Abstract

Legitimacy has long been a central construct of interest by organizational scholars. The burgeoning research on legitimacy has increasingly seen the importance of legitimacy building for emerging and novel organizations, especially social enterprises (SE) that embrace a hybrid organizational logic. However, little is known about how SEs can build legitimacy effectively, particularly legitimacy as it is assessed by consumers, and whether the legitimacy-building efforts will translate into favorable consumer responses. Drawing on cultural entrepreneurship theory, we designed a scenario-based experiment to examine whether using different rhetorical strategies will help SEs acquire legitimacy as assessed by consumers and to what extent legitimacy drives positive consumer responses. Our experiment results reveal that the use of social and membership discourse in SEs’ identity building will effectively enhance SEs’ legitimacy as perceived by consumers. More importantly, this legitimacy will further catalyze desirable consumer responses on both social and commercial sides. This research offers novel contribution by addressing “legitimacy-consumer” gap in organization and SE literature, enriches consumer studies in SE by bringing the social dimension of consumer responses into the field, and demonstrates the use of experiment as a promising method in advancing SE studies. This research also provides practical implications for SE practitioners and policymakers to harness the rhetorical tools for SEs’ legitimacy building.