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This study conducts a comparative analysis of social enterprise intermediaries in China and India to better understand how they mediate the influence of external institutions to help legitimize and institutionalize social enterprises in new settings. Drawing on data collected from surveys, interviews and websites in each country, this study finds that intermediaries are important legitimizing actors for social enterprises but their specific strategies can vary in the different contexts due to differences in institutional pressures. Such an understanding is key to building intermediaries' capacity to institutionalize and ease the entrance of social enterprises as new institutional actors in these settings. This paper contributes theoretically by uniquely combining three theoretical strains to more fully capture legitimizing processes in situations of institutional innovation.

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