Intermediated Legitimation: How Founders Build New Venture Legitimacy among Make-or-Break Audiences
通过对澳大利亚加速器中三家新创企业的民族志研究，揭示了创始人面对关键中介受众时建立合法性的三种路径：顺从、务实和反叛，并分析了受众期望、创始人情感与感知绩效如何共同塑造这些路径。
Many new ventures enter relationships with intermediaries, thereby ceding control to an organization that becomes a make-or-break audience for them. These settings foster intense experiences, suggesting that participating founders are likely to face a distinct set of challenges as they seek to build their venture’s legitimacy. Yet we lack a systematic analysis of new venture legitimation processes in the context of this critical audience type. To build new understanding of these important dynamics, we conducted an ethnographic study of three ventures in an Australian accelerator. Our study reveals three distinct legitimation pathways that ventures may follow when seeking legitimacy from a make-or-break audience—the obedient, pragmatic, and rebellious paths. We find that these pathways are jointly shaped by the expectations of the audience, the emotional experiences of founders, and founders’ reactions to these emotions in the context of perceived venture performance. We contribute to organizational scholarship by identifying a novel set of new venture legitimation pathways that incorporate emotion, conceptualizing “venture work” as a distinct type of social-symbolic work designed to legitimate startups and shedding new light on the role of new venture support organizations in entrepreneurial ecosystems.