Institutional Limitations
Legitimacy deficits. The institutional limitations makers encountered in the network emergence stage had critical implications for front line workers in need of PPE. A clinician in Triport described the limitations faced in a hospital, “We had all these homemade masks and [the hospital] just said, ‘No. We can’t [accept them]. These are not certified.’ Instead, then we had to just wear the same certified mask for two weeks and it was disgusting.” For the makers attempting to provide the PPE, these limitations heightened legitimacy deficits related to trust, support, access, quality, and reliability. Table 2 lists examples of institutions informants reported as a help or a hindrance to their efforts.
First, having few or no social ties with institutions such as hospitals meant makers began with low levels of trust . Informal social ties to individual hospital employees, for example, did not typically confer upon makers the type of trust that comes from experience with established relationships, such as those enjoyed by traditional suppliers with contracts. An informant who brokered between hospitals and a maker space in Midburg described the lack of trust:
There was a perception that we were this ragtag bunch… vigilantes trying to solve this problem. We weren’t really established… Supply chain managers are like, ‘Are you just a bunch of people… knitting in a garage together making face masks? …We don’t know who the f— you are. …I don’t know if we can trust you.’
For a maker space like this, desiring to build a more open crisis response network was insufficient to increase trust and cooperation with institutions outside the network if makers were not linked to those institutions prior to the pandemic (Burt et al., 2021).
Second, makers were limited by a lack of support from other institutions such as corporations and government. A corporate maker space manager in Edgeville told us that makers with ready access to corporate resources were nonetheless often stymied because the company did not “fully support” their efforts to utilize company equipment and space. A clinician in Stilton who acted as recipient and producer of PPE perceived a lack of government support:
None of these [PPE designs] were ever being evaluated in terms of a design that would be supported by these agencies. They kind of just were mum about the situation. And this goes to a state and federal level… they appreciate these efforts, but I noticed that they weren’t exactly supporting them outright.
Thus, makers faced legitimacy deficits as they attempted to engage the structures, procedures, and policies of various complex bureaucratic institutions.
Third, makers encountered obstacles related to access to potential recipients for the PPE they produced. An individual maker in Triport who ordered a 3D printer specifically to be able to make PPE from home said, “[Hospitals] were not returning calls. Here I am producing things with nobody to get them to.” This informant continued, “I couldn’t get through to find somebody to take these things. I was stuck with red tape.” Makers generally understood that institutions like hospitals have processes for acquiring supplies and that they represented atypical vendors that were off contract. A representative from a maker space in Stilton spoke cautiously about how one health care system restricted access by not permitting employees to openly ask for PPE and that stories circulated of people being fired for violating those policies. Another clinician in Stilton described the same access restrictions in nursing homes at a point in the pandemic when nursing homes were already hot spots for a highly vulnerable population.
Fourth, the PPE that makers produced also presented a legitimacy deficit regarding quality . An informant from Midburg commented, “Some hospitals… were like, ‘What have you done to show that these are up to a certain quality?’ And we didn’t have anything, really, to show or to prove… Nothing about longevity or efficacy testing. I don’t think that we were able to do those things.” In dealing with sophisticated purchasing managers accustomed to dealing with rigid product specifications, makers lacked the demonstrated ability to produce according to recipient quality requirements and expectations.
Fifth, the cumulative effect of these legitimacy deficits can be encapsulated in concerns over reliability . Makers faced reliability challenges in terms of not only dependability – their ability to reliably deliver what was needed when and where it was needed – but also in terms of not introducing security risks to organizations. Producers and recipients alike in our cases expressed paramount concern over liability risks. A maker network leader in Triport described his effort to broker across numerous entities to overcome this challenge, “[Another maker space leader] and I talked to the lawyers at [institutional maker space]. Even after we had the state’s department of public health tell us they would provide blanket indemnity to anybody who made things, their lawyer still didn’t want to get involved.” Willing actors in producer and recipient organizations often lacked institutional support for their PPE efforts because of concerns over reliability. Many institutional leaders feared that even well-intentioned entrepreneurial and resourceful actions would cause more harm than the repercussions of the pandemic.
Embeddedness. As emergent maker networks encountered institutional limitations early in their crisis response efforts, they experienced varying combinations of these deficits based on their community and institutional embeddedness (Williams & Shepherd, 2021). In our cases, embeddedness was a property of individual nodes – actors, groups, or organizations – not a property of entire clusters or the broader network. Nodes with a greater degree of embeddedness tended to possess greater social capital as brokers and organizers (Burt, 1999).
We found Edgeville to have a relatively high degree of embeddedness, which translated well to fewer legitimacy deficits. Led by an independent maker space, Edgeville had established numerous relationships with the city, the small business development association, the state manufacturing association, local universities, and charities. In combination with its relatively higher network coordination among a tighter cluster of actors, Edgeville’s embeddedness helped boost the legitimacy of the many nodes concentrated around the three main organizations.
Makers in Triport experienced moderate embeddedness that was distributed across many institutions, including universities, public health agencies, public libraries, and the city and state governments. Most makers faced “pushback” from the institutions they participated in, while a few actors were able to break through to garner institutional support, boosting initial legitimacy for actors within the emerging decentralized network in the early weeks of crisis response.
Midburg exhibited a more polarized picture of embeddedness among its independently coordinating nodes. Several hospitals and universities in Midburg were directly involved in PPE design and production activities of their own, but maker spaces and small businesses in our study found it difficult to participate in those clusters. Thus, parallel network efforts emerged and the independently coordinating clusters with lower embeddedness faced legitimacy deficits on their own. The parts of a network that faced lower deficits were able to spend less effort on legitimizing and more effort on coordinating resources for an effective response to the crisis.
An unexpected finding, given our initial sample selection criteria, was that data for Stilton indicated it had a relatively low degree of pre-pandemic embeddedness to go along with a higher incidence of parallel network initiatives, despite glowing depictions of a high degree of coordination and centralized PPE efforts on websites. Nevertheless, legitimacy deficits existed in all four of our cases. Further, makers across all cases encountered resource and institutional limitations simultaneously, further stressing their already strained collective action efforts.