Learned Legitimation
We found that makers not only learned how to be resourceful to improve their crisis response efforts but also adopted a repertoire of legitimation practices. Our data revealed the process through which makers moved from varying states of legitimacy depletion to eventually challenging norms and generating social change through collective action (Suddaby et al., 2016). Although institutional limitations were formidable obstacles for the makers in our cases, we found that they learned several legitimation strategies in the network evolution stage: seeking, circumventing, matching, pressuring, and leveraging.
Seeking. The makers in all our cases purposefully sought legitimacy for their artifacts and for themselves as actors in two ways: demonstrating their prototypes and branding their PPE. Makers demonstrated prototypes of their PPE to hospital executives, clinicians, and other potential recipients. This form of legitimation seemed intuitive and familiar to makers because it followed the principles of iterating prototypes based on user feedback. The challenge for some was finding the right types of users to provide feedback. A network organizer in Triport describes an approach their organization took to boost the legitimacy of their face masks:
[Hospitals] said, ‘If you can get us the NIH [National Institute of Health] model, we can get more official approval for it.’ So, we started putting the NIH model on for those situations, but we kept printing [a different] model as well because it’s faster. It takes like three times less to make.
Makers who became aware of recommended designs from an institution like NIH might elect to produce less efficient designs because they improved legitimacy, even though they hampered the speed and scale of production.
Makers also sought legitimacy for their organizations through branding efforts: websites, form letters for outreach, and press packets. In all four cases, even established organizations with relatively high embeddedness renamed their PPE initiatives. In several examples from Stilton, Triport and Edgeville, makers named their cluster to encompass multiple partner organizations. These naming efforts also served to clearly signal PPE activities to potential recipient institutions, rather than approaching recipients under idiosyncratic maker space names. In Midburg, members of one maker space disagreed strongly about whether to rename themselves for this reason, or whether it was important for their maker space to “get credit” and recognition for their efforts even if their name seemed less likely to be perceived as legitimate. Secondary documents show the evolution of these naming initiatives over time as networks formed, corresponded, and decided how to refer to each other and themselves.
Circumventing. Multiple producer informants characterized their legitimation activities in subversive terms. A network organizer in Stilton said:
We’re a guerilla organization. …If you try to go through the front door, there’s just lawyers’ arms akimbo. You just can’t make any headway that way. So, what we’re doing is reaching out to our friends saying, ‘Hey, do you know any people in the health care field who need PPE?’ We made those relationships to get our stuff in the back door.
Makers who adopted circumventing as a legitimation strategy were not concerned with conforming to institutional norms. Rather, they perceived that the norms impeded effective crisis response and therefore institutional processes could justifiably be bypassed for the greater good. Another maker in the same cluster in Stilton affirmed this perspective regarding government institutions as well, “Regulatory agencies… we ignored them, and they ignored us.”
Many front-line workers in need of PPE supported the perception that alternate norms applied in a crisis. An informant in Triport conveyed a common theme:
Individual nurses or doctors who worked within the hospital said, ‘You know what? We’re going to ignore the supply chain and I’m going to reach out for help directly because the hospital isn’t helping me get what I need. I’m gonna go to these people who can get me what I need directly.’ I know that happened a lot.
Some clinicians urged secrecy about these activities, while a few were vocal, even posting supportive messages about maker PPE on social media. Stories like these provided feedback that greatly motivated makers, who not only perceived them as legitimizers, but also cast their efforts in heroic terms. Thus, circumventing helped makers address the perceived legitimacy of their actions in addition to the legitimacy of their artifacts and themselves as actors.
Matching. As makers’ learned resourcefulness helped them focus and configure their resources to match their PPE production capabilities to recipient needs, they also learned to match to recipients based on legitimacy. Initially, each maker group learned about its legitimacy relative to other nodes in the maker network. A maker space member in Midburg explained how other clusters with direct university and hospital ties focused their efforts on producing disposable PPE in large quantities to help serve the needs of large hospital systems, “The disposable ones were being handled by other organizations that had a bigger mission to solve. And ours was kind of smaller in some ways, but just as important for the right people.”
Additionally, makers learned to match based on the institutional legitimacy of recipient organizations as reflected in purchasing power and access to supply chains and government assistance. A volunteer maker space member in charge of hospital outreach in Midburg described their group’s evolution to match their efforts with a middle tier of underserved organizations:
There’s this small business middle ground where you have retirement facilities, you have dentist offices, you have salons who are struggling… Then you have this institutional level of your [large hospitals] … It was not as effective for us to just make [PPE] to order for the public and we would be a drop in the ocean for the bigger tier… There really is this middle tier where we can give PPE to people serving the public and trying to stay in business. They don’t have access to the same places that the hospitals do.
Several informants described changing strategies to “right-size” their target recipients based on less prominent institutions. An informant in Triport explained how a group of medical students developed five tiers of clinical facilities. Importantly, when makers matched their relative legitimacy to that of their intended recipients, they experienced improved fit between their mission and their environment (Naman & Slevin, 1993). In this way, legitimacy matching helped makers decide which local needs to customize their efforts for (Williams & Shepherd, 2018).
Pressuring. Faced with urgent needs and institutional obstacles, some makers applied social pressure in attempts to help their group’s PPE efforts break through. Several informants described aggressively pursuing new social ties to overcome structural holes, essentially forging new boundary spanning roles for themselves (Burt, 1999). For example, a medical student with ties to multiple clusters in Triport used “brute force” to contact hospital supply chain managers. In Midburg, a small business owner who formed a cluster to make face shields characterized his behavior in contacting hospital purchasing managers, “I am very obstinate. I would call and call and not take no for an answer and tell them I’ll be there in 30 minutes.”
An institutional maker space manager in Triport described bypassing institutional channels to contact an influential donor to apply pressure on administrators to release equipment for PPE production:
I did some social engineering on a really heavy level… Then getting the release of the equipment cascaded into [a university] released their equipment… Because of the social pressure, they couldn’t say no at that point… That’s a known technique – social engineering in the hacker community… We did social hacks in order to force equipment because we believed it was very important to get this PPE out.
Thus, makers used social pressure to overcome multiple institutional constraints, not just hospital access. This example regarding equipment also illustrates the interplay between learned legitimation and learned resourcefulness.
Leveraging. Makers also leveraged the legitimacy of other organizations to boost their own legitimacy. The “obstinate” small business owner in Midburg recited a sales pitch to show howpressuring worked in combination with leveraging to push one hospital to engage others:
‘We’ve already got six different major hospitals in your area that have approved these and say they are the best things they’ve ever seen. I really think you need to see one of these at a minimum… I will get in the car right now. I’m already making another drop to [another hospital] right down the street from you… How many do you need?’
By “name-dropping” the names of other area hospitals served, makers sometimes successfully leveraged the reputation of those institutions to overcome their own access limitations.
Makers not only leveraged the legitimacy of recipients to which they provided PPE but also leveraged the legitimacy of other clusters in the maker network. A sewing cluster organizer in Midburg explained how ties with the PPE production efforts within a reputable institution opened doors for the sewing community, “We had the COVID response team from [a university hospital], which was really helpful in legitimizing. So, we can say, ‘[This hospital] is working with us.’ Then [another hospital] asked… which felt like I could launch the whole thing…” Examples such as these illustrate how makers perceived increases in legitimacy vicariously based on the legitimacy of other organizations they interacted with. They then leveraged that perception for further legitimation of crisis response activities (Suddaby et al., 2016).
Summary of learned legitimation under institutional limitations. What the organizations in each case learned about legitimation influenced their response effectiveness. The legitimation strategies we identified functioned as a complement or substitute for brokering behaviors used by makers to bridge structural holes between their organizations’ networks and targeted institutions (Burt, 1999). Makers thus acted entrepreneurially to increase the legitimacy of their artifacts, their actions, and themselves as actors. Still, makers learned to accept their limits. A clinician in Stilton who acted as both PPE recipient and producer reflected, “I think back to nursing homes. I don’t even know what I could have even done because, even if I sound the alarm or told the media, no one’s gonna believe me… At the end of the day, we tried our best to really help these places.” While legitimation strategies helped makers improve the magnitude, speed, and customization of their response efforts, the outcomes of their efforts were still constrained by their resource and institutional limitations during a crisis of overwhelming scale.
The feedback maker networks received regarding legitimacy varied according to each institution. In Triport, one university’s administration acted quickly to approve the use of institutional resources such as equipment for makers to produce PPE. Another university in Triport was reluctant until administrators saw what medical students were accomplishing with PPE distribution: “Our university paid us no attention until we got up and running. They welcomed us with open arms once they saw what we were doing.” A clinician in Edgeville described the reaction at one hospital:
[My hospital] seems reluctant to formally rely on any of these kinds of supplies. We were receiving donations and they were made available to us. But otherwise, [the hospital] went to great efforts to kind of put together its own PPE supply chains for the face shields and managed at least one way or another to supply everything else pretty well.
Numerous other hospitals, such as those in Stilton, turned a blind eye to the efforts of its various departments to procure PPE by any means necessary. In these instances, makers relied on feedback from the social ties they had with individuals within institutions, rather than on a formalized relationship with the institution itself.
Differing decisions on whether to sell or donate PPE played out depending on recipient institutions. For example, a for-profit business making PPE in Midburg chose to donate its PPE because they found it expedited processes for recipients. Donating supplies helped this maker organization cut through institutional red tape and thus respond with greater speed than other suppliers. In contrast, a non-profit maker space in Edgeville that chose to sell PPE did not encounter those obstacles. A public institution that purchased large quantities from this maker network explained how this arrangement expedited their ability to procure what they needed:
I went with the bird in the hand because [Edgeville’s network] was a non-profit and was easier to deal with… Even though we had emergency procurement authorization, normally I wouldn’t talk to [a supplier] … But because it was a non-profit, it was sort of okay for me to interact with versus if it was a company.
Ultimately, limited feedback from this recipient reached the makers in Edgeville once the informant determined that the PPE “just didn’t really meet our people’s needs” even though “speed was very important in a situation where lives were at stake.” Due to complaints received about the PPE within the institution, the informant wished they had “resisted the temptation to provide an immediate solution.” In this example, we found that despite the efforts of makers to help a public institution respond to the pandemic, institutional norms that were temporarily suppressed during the crisis were reinforced in the aftermath (Bitektine & Haack, 2014).