Ecosystem Legitimacy Emergence: A Collective Action View

Abstract

Ecosystems—communities of interdependent yet hierarchically independent heterogeneous participants who collectively generate an ecosystem value proposition—often emerge through collective action, where ecosystem participants interact with each other and the external environment. When such organizational forms are emerging, they require legitimacy to overcome the “liability of newness.” Adopting a collective action lens and taking a legitimacy-as-process approach, we propose a process model of ecosystem collective action, where an orchestrator, complementors, users, and external actors together drive ecosystem legitimacy. We identify three key legitimation processes—discursive legitimation, performative legitimation, and ecosystem identity construction—and demonstrate how these three processes together facilitate the emergence of ecosystem legitimacy and reduce the liability of newness of emerging ecosystems.

A bibliometric review of service ecosystems research: current status and future directions

“…Some recent research has, however, started such integration, where users' activitesalong with those of ecosystem orchestrator and complementorsare seen to contribute to the ecosystem and its evolution (see e.g. Thomas & Ritala, 2021).…”

“…Relatedly, scholars have recently advocated adopting legitimacy lenses to ecosystems, which could help to show how and why ecosystems and their actors become legitimate or illegitimate in their institutional environments (Thomas & Ritala, 2021).…”

“…How are service ecosystems legitimized and delegitimized? Institutionalization Vargo et al, 2015) Institutional embeddedness (Johannisson et al, 2002) Ecosystem legitimacy and identity (Thomas & Ritala, 2021) (Complex adaptive) systems approach to service ecosystems Can complex adaptive system lenses explain the emergence of service ecosystems? How does value co-creation co-evolve among actors and their environment over time in service ecosystems?…”

Circular economy ecosystems: a typology, definitions, and implications

“…Similarly, some actors are cospecialized leading to technological complementarities (Jacobides et al, 2018), and economies of scale and scope result in other ecosystem actors having economic interdependencies (Thomas, Autio, & Gann, 2014). Yet other actors have cognitive interdependencies, such as socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, identities, beliefs, and rules (Thomas & Ritala, 2021;Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).…”

“…While some actors will have specific assets and technologies which are dependent on other actors, in general actor roles, and hence their level of agency, often emerge and evolve though ongoing negotiation and sensemaking between actors in the ongoing collaborative process of new knowledge creation (cf. Thomas & Ritala, 2021). Thus, in ecosystems typified by the flow of knowledge, the interdependencies between the actors are not necessarily fixed, and hence agency can also evolve.…”