The Life Cycle of an Internet Firm: Scripts, Legitimacy, and Identity
通过纵向民族志研究一家互联网创业企业从创立到倒闭的全过程，分析组织成员如何利用脚本构建合法性与身份，并揭示竞争性脚本的制度化如何导致组织冲突与失败。
We study, longitudinally and ethnographically, the construction of legitimacy and identity during the life cycle of an entrepreneurial Internet firm, from inception to death. We utilize organizational scripts to examine how social actors enact identity and legitimacy, maintaining that different scripts, both contested and consent–oriented, become the source of action for acquiring legitimacy and creating organizational identity. We show that scripts enable entrepreneurs and other social actors to invoke a set of interactions within and outside the organization. Scripts construct values and interests, form social bonding and consented actions, and eventually shape and reshape the individual and institutional contexts of identity and legitimacy. We found that the strategic action of organizational members in pursuing and enacting their preferred scripts depends on their position and role in the organization. We observed that the institutionalization of simultaneously competing scripts created a path–dependent process leading to organizational conflict and eventual failure.