New entrepreneurial ventures face a “liability of newness”; their risk of failure is much higher than for established organizations (Stinchcombe, 1965). This uncertainty and lack of operating history make it difficult for them to access needed resources to exploit opportunities (Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). To overcome this liability, entrepreneurs strive to establish organizational legitimacy: a “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman, 1995, p. 574). Although organizational legitimacy attainment and management is relevant for all organizations (Suchman, 1995), it is in the early phases of venture development - when a venture is still young, resource constrained, and extremely uncertain (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006) - that legitimacy hurdles and challenges are greatest (Fisher, Kotha, & Lahiri, 2016). For entrepreneurs, establishing and maintaining new venture legitimacy is complex; research has highlighted various specific contingencies that complicate this process. There is tension between fitting in with market norms, values, beliefs, and definitions, and standing out from others in the market to gain a differentiation advantage (Gehman & Grimes, 2017; Navis & Glynn, 2010, 2011; Zhao et al., 2017). There is a need to establish legitimacy with different groups of stakeholders (Fisher et al., 2017) and to account for different market contexts in which a venture operates (Navis & Glynn, 2011; Tracey, Dalpiaz, & Phillips, 2018; Soublière & Gehman, 2019; Younger & Fisher, 2020). And all this takes place in a processual way over time; legitimacy is not something that is established quickly or simply (Suddaby, Bitektine, & Haack, 2017; Tracey et al., 2018).
The main objective of this edited book is to generate a collection of theoretical and empirical chapters dealing with issues related to entrepreneurial legitimacy, and to provide new answers in this research perspective. Its chapters can follow a qualitative or quantitative approach. They can relate to different epistemologies as long as the implications and research issues are clarified. They must show rigor in the conceptual and theoretical framework and in the methodology used.