Legitimacy Deficits and Legitimation
By legitimacy, we refer to 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). Theories of crisis management (Boin, 2009; Quarantelli, 1988), and disaster recovery (D. P. Aldrich, 2012b; Tierney, 2007) have noted the importance of emergent groups, consisting of individual citizens collaborating in response to a crisis in and between organizations or systems, but whose collective actions are not yet institutionalized (Stallings & Quarantelli, 1985). As local entrepreneurs acting collectively to fill voids (Drabek & McEntire, 2003), these groups are embedded in their communities and often have fluid organizational designs lacking clear boundaries (Williams & Shepherd, 2021). However, because they are relative newcomers to the institutional field and relatively unknown to dominant actors, their legitimacy is often questioned. They may lack both cognitive and socio-political legitimacy (H. E. Aldrich & Fiol, 1994).
Even though many maker spaces have operated in their communities for years, their involvement in widescale community-level action represented a first for many of them. They entered the fray without clear precedents as recognized contributors to community welfare. We thus anticipated that they would suffer from a variety of legitimacy deficits: lack of trust and support from other key players in the community, lack of access to the resources they need, and suspicions regarding the quality and reliability of their contributions. In our research, we explored the conditions surrounding perceptions of makers’ legitimacy and the legitimation processes they developed to overcome local institutions’ skepticism (Suddaby et al., 2016).