Three essays on social enterprises’ legitimacy building

Abstract

Legitimacy is central for the interaction between social enterprise (SE) and its primary audience: the consumers. Although there is a growing interest in legitimacy in SE scholarship, little research has investigated how SEs can strategically build legitimacy and how consumers respond to such legitimation in natural and experimental settings. In a series of three essays, I aim to investigate SE's legitimation strategies and consumer's legitimacy judgment. In the first essay, I adopted unsupervised topic modeling to examine what drives SEs' legitimacy evaluated by consumers. In the second essay, I drew on the theory of cultural entrepreneurship and conducted two scenario-based experiments to investigate the effectiveness of SEs' rhetorical legitimation strategies and consumer responses towards the legitimacy of SEs. In the last essay, I employed an automated image clustering method and used SEs' Instagram images seeking to explore how SEs use visuals to build legitimacy. The essays make important contributions to organization and SE scholarship by bringing consumers into the front and center and demonstrating the potential of computational and experimental methods in advancing organization and SE research. The essays also offer implications to SE practitioners and policymakers for constructing organizational and institutional legitimacy for SE.