Technology Legitimation: A Product‐Level Examination Across the Technology Lifecycle

Abstract

Legitimacy is an important explanatory factor for the success or failure of new products, but how individual actors engage in legitimation is not well understood. We focus on two categories of actors: the firms that develop and commercialize new technology-based products and the customers who evaluate these products and examine their legitimation behaviour across the technology lifecycle. Drawing from organization research, innovation studies and product innovation literatures, we posit that firms' legitimacy-seeking behaviour varies across the technology lifecycle depending on the need for legitimacy in each stage, while customers' emphasis varies depending on the relative importance they ascribe to each type of legitimacy. We test these hypotheses by examining online data about products that span four stages of the technology lifecycle. We advance a micro-level understanding of technology legitimation by demonstrating that firms' efforts to seek legitimacy and customers' emphasis on legitimacy for new technology-based products are distinct phenomena underpinned by different mechanisms. We expand the scope of existing technology legitimation research by examining how firms' efforts and customers' emphases vary across the technology lifecycle.

Simulation techniques in industrial engineering: A USA and African perspective review

“…In the context of technology and innovation, the USA has been at the forefront of systemic and society-changing technological innovations, primarily in the field of Deep Tech innovations, positioning the country as a leader in technological advancements (Schuh et al, 2022;Ogundairo et al, 2023;Ayo-Farai et al, 2023). Additionally, the emphasis on moral and cognitive legitimacy seeking for products in the early stage of technology development has been supported by organizational research, reflecting the significance of technology legitimation in the USA (Bunduchi & Candi, 2021). Moreover, the application of simulation techniques has been highlighted as an indispensable part of product development and industrialization, facilitating cost-effective solutions in manufacturing (Jeong et al, 2020;Ukoba et al, 2011).…”

FDI and Firm Productivity: A Comprehensive Review of Macroeconomic and Microeconomic Models

“…The first includes product and process innovations while the latter includes marketing and organisational innovations. However, marketing innovations often coincide with product innovations, while firms with organisational innovations often introduce new technological processes (Bunduchi and Candi 2021).…”

Technology Legitimation and User Resistance: The NHS COVID-19 App

“…Legitimacy is, therefore, a multi-level phenomenon that can be studied at the collective level (macro) and individual level (micro) [9]. This paper focuses on microlevel legitimacy judgements [10], analysing how individual users take active roles in evaluating the legitimacy of a technology [7]. These judgements are underpinned by disparate behaviours, depending on the type of legitimacy involved [11].…”

“…It is possible to assess individuals' judgements of a new technology in terms of expected utility (pragmatic legitimacy), their normative evaluations of it (moral legitimacy), and their cognitive assessments of its comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness about the technology. These micro-judgements and perception of an innovation guide individuals' behaviours, which in turn help produce the collective perfection of legitimacy within a group [7,11]. But innovations can be disruptive to social systems, in which case users may modulate their behaviours accordingly.…”

“…For this reason, legitimacy -the fit between an innovation, and society at large [6] -is an important explanatory factor for the success -or otherwise -of disruptive technologies. Specifically, the micro-judgements of legitimacy that individuals make with regards to a technology, can help understand why some innovations succeed or fail [7]. Likewise, users' actions when using said innovations -for example, resisting the requirements of the technology -may indicate how acceptable the technology is to users [8].…”