CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Our study generates significant contributions to the evolving theoretical and practical knowledge in two areas of social entrepreneurship research. First, we complement social entrepreneurship theory on social entrepreneurs’ practices in gaining legitimacy from external constituents (actor perspective) (Vestrum, Rasmussen, & Carter, 2016; O’Neil & Ucbasaran, 2016; Ruebottom, 2013; Sunduramurthy et al., 2016; Vestrum et al., 2016; Zahra et al., 2009) with the analysis of key constituents’ legitimacy judgments on social enterprises (evaluator perspective) (Bitektine, 2011; Überbacher, 2014). In particular, our findings develop an understanding of the evaluative legitimacy of social entrepreneurship by addressing the under-explored role of national experts as key legitimacy-givers (Zahra et al., 2009) (the who) and their evaluation of the efficiency of social entrepreneurship in solving social problems (the what). By doing so, we move away from understanding legitimacy as a given challenge that social enterprises must simply overcome (i.e., legitimacy as property, Suddaby et al., 2017) to the legitimacy of social enterprises construed by key national constituents’ judgments (i.e., legitimacy as perception, Suddaby et al., 2017). In this way our study offers new insights for developing an embedded evaluator perspective on the efficiency of social entrepreneurship (Choi & Majumdar, 2014; Short et al., 2009).
