DETERMINING WHEN A NEW VENTURE IS LEGITIMATE: A CHANGEPOINT ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA RHETORIC

A. Jno-Charles, R. Raja Singaram, M. Radu-Lefebvre () and W. B. Gartner
Additional contact information
M. Radu-Lefebvre: Audencia Business School

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Despite the advances in scholarship on legitimation strategies, measuring the threshold for when new ventures attain legitimacy has remained elusive. We developed three theory-based linguistic markers for legitimation. Using these markers, we analyzed the social media rhetoric of 105 startups in the wearables sector that succeeded in their crowdfunding efforts on Kickstrater.com. Our dataset includes 21,687 social media posts from Twitter and Facebook collected in a time-matched pattern corresponding to crowdfunding funding progress. Using a novel technique for analyzing longitudinal text, we detect when new ventures cross their legitimacy threshold. Also, we find that startups reduce legitimacy-seeking behavior on social media only after reaching 135% to 180% of their originally desired funding. The implications of our results for new venture legitimacy literature are discussed. We show that the analytical method developed here can be applied to study a variety of constructs in entrepreneurship at different venture stages.

Keywords: New ventures; New Venture Legitimacy; Social Media; Entrepreneurial Rhetoric; Changepoint Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05369326v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Small Business Management, 2025, 63 (6), pp.2507-2543. ⟨10.1080/00472778.2024.2437550⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05369326

DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2024.2437550

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().