Legitimacy for innovation through interacted perception

Authors

  • Bennet Schwoon University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL, Scotland, UK

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu12.2019.101

Abstract

The paradox of innovation as the problem to be innovative while also gaining legitimacy is the underlying idea of this paper. How are innovative entrepreneurs and their ideas affected by the need to find the legitimacy of their audience to have customers? Through qualitative interviews, this paper discusses the importance and influence of legitimacy for innovative entrepreneurship. This paper investigates the importance of legitimacy processes for entrepreneurs and points out enhancing, as well as, impeding factors that legitimacy gathering process have on innovations. It finds understanding as the main source affecting legitimacy processes and shows the different strategies for entrepreneurs to gather legitimacy. Furthermore, the work provides insight about the context-specific elements of the legitimacy gathering processes, as well as, an illustration and differentiation of the audience as the second group involved in legitimacy processes. This paper provides a new framework that discusses legitimation processes as an interplay between the entrepreneur and individuals of the audience. This new framework is an attempt to solve the long-lasting debate concerning the locus of control in legitimacy processes between institutional and cultural entrepreneurial scholars, by placing the locus of control in between a circle of influence and a circle of understanding.

Keywords:

legitimacy, innovation, entrepreneurship, interaction, strategy

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References


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Published

2019-04-15

How to Cite

Schwoon, B. (2019). Legitimacy for innovation through interacted perception. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Sociology, 12(1), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu12.2019.101

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2019): Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Sociology.

Section

Economic Sociology

License

Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Sociology" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.