Abstract
This article explores possible legitimacy-building mechanisms for social enterprises with difficult-to-measure outcomes and hostile contexts. Interviews were developed with managers of enterprises offering complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) services, taken as an example of social enterprises in a hostile context. Our findings indicate that CAM enterprises rely on relationship building and consumer education to establish pragmatic legitimacy; the quest for moral legitimacy is expressed through the hybrid organizational form, human capital and professionalization attempts, formalization of procedures, and strategic alliances. Building on Suchman’s (Academy of Management Review 20:371–610) three levels of legitimacy, we propose a mechanism through which enterprises use pragmatic legitimacy to enhance moral legitimacy and to create a feedback effect between moral and pragmatic legitimacy so that ultimately cognitive legitimacy can be achieved.
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Notes
- 1.
The British Health Chief, Jeremy Hunt, was called “Minister of Magic” in the UK media (Cheng 2012). Another exemplary quote attacks the UK Science Minister Greg Clark: “Clark has not made obvious or public endorsements of homeopathy since 2007. But his appointment has drawn criticism online from those who maintain—along with the overwhelming peer-reviewed consensus—that homeopathy, or the practice of diluting medicine to the point of absurdity in order to inspire the body to heal itself, has zero grounding in medical science” (Huffington Post UK 2014).
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Bicho, M., Nikolaeva, R., Lages, C. (2019). Social Enterprise Legitimacy in a Hostile Market. In: Rossi, P., Krey, N. (eds) Finding New Ways to Engage and Satisfy Global Customers. AMSWMC 2018. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02568-7_46
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