Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused verbal language and there is limited understanding how other communication modes, such as visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With contemporary pervasiveness digital documents online environments that often employ visual mode, gap has become more relevant. To address it, study guided by following research question: do entrepreneurs use mode legitimize ventures? Building case a organization, shows features are especially well suited sustaining particular ways. While previous mostly remained conceptual level, empirically advances legitimation.