Too Red for Crowdfunding: The Legitimation and Adoption of Crowdfunding Across Political Cultures

Abstract

Institutional change is typically studied at the organizational field level; we leverage political culture to examine how the context in which these fields are embedded influence processes of institutional change within such fields. Specifically, we look at the effect of conservative political culture on legitimation and adoption of crowdfunding in the United States. We find that crowdfunding is less popular and more slowly legitimated in conservative regions. However, we also find that crowdfunding’s legitimacy is more important in these regions and that once a legitimacy threshold is reached, the adoption of crowdfunding in conservative regions surpasses that in liberal regions.

Financing the cultural and creative industries through crowdfunding: the role of national cultural dimensions and policies

“…This result suggests that countries where the management of the cultural system is centralised are more likely to adopt alternative funding. The coefficient performance of crowdfunding is positively and statistically significant at the 1% level, consistent with previous studies on the relationship between crowdfunding adoption and project success (Lewis et al, 2020 ). In Model 2, we include the welfare state variables in our empirical model.…”

Legitimacy Revisited: Disentangling Propriety, Validity, and Consensus

“…Research on legitimacy, commonly defined as a ‘generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 574), has become increasingly prominent in management and organization studies – and, in particular, in institutional theory (Harmon et al, 2015; Suddaby et al, 2017) – to the extent that legitimacy has been described as ‘perhaps the most central concept in institutional research’ (Colyvas and Powell, 2006, p. 308). The significant scholarly attention devoted to the topic is evidenced by the increasing flow of papers devoted to the analysis of legitimacy (e.g., Castello et al, 2016; Etter et al, 2018; Fisher et al, 2016; Haack et al, 2014; Hengst et al, 2020; Huy et al, 2014; Jacqueminet and Durand, 2019; Lewis et al, 2020; Scherer et al, 2013). This line of research stresses that through legitimacy, organizations acquire ideational and material support (e.g., access to financial and human resources) and increase their prominence and influence, all of which are fundamental to their growth and survival (Zimmerman and Zeitz, 2002).…”

The Distinctive Domain of the Sharing Economy: Definitions, Value Creation, and Implications for Research

“…Many types of platform exist (e.g., Baldwin and Woordward, 2009), and useful typologies are provided in the literature. These include collaboration platforms , where members cooperate to produce goods (Cusumano, in press; Gallus, 2017; O’Mahoney and Ferraro, 2007); exchange platforms , in which parties buy, sell, or swap products or services (Gerwe et al, in press; Lewis et al, in press; Reuber and Fischer, 2009; Taeuscher, 2019) or even digital assets (Benkler, 2006); and innovation platforms , where parties introduce complementary innovations (Boudreau and Lakhani, 2009; Nambisan et al, 2018; Srinivasan and Venkatraman, 2018). Cusumano et al (2019, p. 20) define transaction platforms as ‘intermediaries or online marketplaces that make it possible for people and organizations to share information or to buy, sell, or access a variety of goods and services’.…”