Legitimacy Is A Creative Process: Storytelling, Narrative And Venturing?

Legitimacy is a creative process: Storytelling, Narrative and Venturing

Introduction:

Storytelling can be traced back since the birth of human beings. When it comes to entrepreneurs, storytelling is the most powerful weapon. O'Connor, E. (2002) in his article “Storytelling to be real: narrative legitimacy building and venturing”, quoted the view of Gartner (1992), that before the existence of company, it’s all about storytelling, even after the company comes into being, it’s still remain largely fiction. The most important story one will ever tell to its stakeholders or investors is one entrepreneurial story. According to (Martens & Jennings, (2007)), storytelling is being recognized as a powerful tool of entrepreneur’s. Similarly, huge

Suchman (1995; 574), defined “Legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions”. The most important task for entrepreneurs is to acquire legitimacy (Werven, etal, 2014). This can be achieved through creative storytelling and turning belief systems of stakeholders into product and generate profit out of

As the technology and business environment are constantly changing, organizations cannot avoid constant change and they have to learn how to cope with and take the advantage of creativity. Blomberg (2014), in her article described creativity in an organizational context as collaborative “psychosocial process that takes place in an organization and is affected by various contextual and organization factors”. Most of the research defined creativity in terms of outcomes. If we take the idea of organizational creativity connected with outcomes, it excludes failure criteria which has been explained in details in Blomberg article (2014). Nevertheless, the focus of this study is purely on legitimacy and storytelling in the context of startups and how one could achieve legitimacy through creative