International New Venture Legitimation: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

There is limited theoretical understanding and empirical evidence for how international new ventures legitimate. Drawing from legitimation theory, this study fills in this gap by exploring how international new ventures legitimate and strive for survival in the face of critical events during the process of their emergence. It is a longitudinal, multiple-case study research that employs critical incident technique for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Following theory driven sampling, five international new ventures were selected that were operating in the software sector in the UK, and had internationalized and struggled for survival during the dotcom era. Grounded in data, this study corroborates a number of legitimation strategies yielded by prior research and refutes others. It further contributes to our understanding of international new venture legitimation by suggesting new types of legitimation strategies: technology, operating, and anchoring. Studying international new ventures through theoretical lenses of legitimation is a promising area of research that would contribute to the advancement of international entrepreneurship theory.

International entrepreneurship from emerging to developed markets: an institutional perspective

“…Twelve additional external informant interviews were collected from institutional informants, academics and consultants which gave us the outsider perspective and reality check (Santos and Eisenhardt 2009). Combining entrepreneurial experiences with manager insights and expert informant perspectives helped us to learn as much as possible about the entrepreneur, the company and institutional influences before the interviews and also helped to corroborate the consistency of information reported by the entrepreneurs (Turcan, 2013). The twentyeight interviews in total yielded approximately 240 pages of interview data in the main data collection stage.…”

What happens to international new ventures beyond start-up: An exploratory study

“…Legitimacy liesas a type of dynamic capability -could be linked to impression management that "…refers to the process by which individuals attempt to control the impressions others form of them" (Leary & Kowalski 1990, p. 34). Employing this type of dynamic capability, entrepreneurs may gain legitimacy for their ventures faster (see e.g., Turcan 2013). At the same, data suggest that entrepreneurs may also ease the above tensions by improvising (Bingham 2009) with the dimensions of organizational gestalt at various levels to reach a threshold of entrepreneurial activitymade-it point.…”

“…The data suggest that entrepreneurs may mitigate the above liabilities by telling legitimacy lies. Indeed, to legitimate, entrepreneurs may employ a number of legitimation strategies, 3 for example anchoring legitimation strategy (Turcan 2013) in the form of legitimacy lies (Rutherford et al 2009) whereby entrepreneurs tend to misrepresent intentionally the facts about their venture.…”

An ethnographic study of new venture and new sector legitimation

“…To the above, INVs may pursue technology legitimation strategy to validate a technology or know-how; market legitimation strategy to better understand the market; operating legitimation strategy to have an optimal organizational gestalt; locational legitimation strategy to overcome the disadvantages of foreignness; alliance legitimation strategy to mitigate the risk of newness and smallness; and anchoring legitimation strategy to intentionally misrepresent the facts (Turcan, 2013).…”

“…At the same time, MDsoft aggressively pursued a technology legitimation strategy (Turcan, 2013) in order to overcome the liability of origin (Ramachandran and Pant, 2010), with reference to the country-of-origin effect. Of all the other internal and external legitimation strategies available to international new ventures (Turcan, 2013), the data point to technology legitimation strategy as the strategy that contributes to rapid and successful internationalization of the new venture.…”