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).