Legitimizing through entrepreneurial networking

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents an entrepreneurship-as-networking perspective on new venture legitimacy. New ventures are more likely to survive and perform when various audiences and stakeholders perceive their activities as legitimate. This is especially true when new ventures are pursuing something novel and innovative. Therefore, it is crucial for new ventures to gain legitimacy. In this chapter, viewing legitimacy predominantly as a process and concurrently distinguishing processes related to types of legitimacy, the authors theorize how entrepreneurs incorporate various audiences and their judgments into their active networking, thus shaping the legitimacy process. The interactions between various audiences and the entrepreneur take form through different legitimacy strategies—that is, identity-seeking strategies, associative strategies, and networking strategies—resulting in legitimacy judgments by audiences. Under conditions of high uncertainty, the legitimacy judgment as the outcome of the social interactions is co-created by audiences and entrepreneurs and is diffused outside local networks to the broader society through distributed brokerage.