Designing legitimacy: Expanding the scope of cultural entrepreneurship

While the cultural entrepreneurship literature has shown how the stories entrepreneurs tell about their ventures help them attain legitimacy and acquire resources, we still know very little about how entrepreneurs develop their stories or how they change over time. In this paper, we draw upon Donald Schön's research in design studies to conceptualize a novel approach to understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurial stories and to provide a bridge between the cultural entrepreneurship and design literatures. While the design perspective in entrepreneurship research has tended to neglect the role of wider sociocultural processes related to legitimacy, we highlight three insights from Schön's research—iterative prototyping, design worlds, and the artistry of design—that scholars can leverage to cultivate a unique perspective on the entrepreneurial pursuit of legitimacy. We then provide an illustrative example that fleshes out how a design approach may fruitfully guide the study of cultural entrepreneurship processes. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how a designing legitimacy perspective might seed a research agenda that promises to enhance our understanding of frame resonance and the effectiveness of stories, pivoting, and the construction of entrepreneurial possibilities.