How Nascent Organizations Overcome Unfavorable Legitimacy Judgments to Form Partnerships

Abstract

Collaboration amongst stakeholders is imperative to addressing grand challenges. However, nascent organizations, that are often the source of new ideas, suffer from unfavorable legitimacy judgments by incumbent stakeholders which can impede partnership formation. How do nascent organizations that adopt new practices and build legitimacy to partner with incumbents? We address this question through an inductive examination of online platforms in an Asian country for crowdfunded donations––which are often perceived negatively by mainstream social services––and how the crowdfunding platforms eventually form collaborative partnerships with incumbent social service organizations. Our findings reveal how case workers in crowdfunding platforms improved legitimacy judgments towards crowdfunded donations by enacting three interrelated practices that differentiated and replicated aspects of incumbent social workers’ practices––(1) enacting value complementarity, (2) upholding professional values through differentiated practices, and (3) replicating governance practices. These legitimacy-enhancing practices enabled case workers to introduce a new way of social welfare provisioning, while also reducing sanctioning by incumbent social services organizations and fostering interagency collaboration.