Legitimation for Early and Rapid Internationalization: A Review of Research in International Entrepreneurship

While the problem of legitimacy and legitimation has gained an increasing amount of attention in organizational studies and among business practitioners in general, our understanding of legitimation in the context of early and rapid internationalization remains unsystematic, fragmented and lacking coherence. This hinders cumulative and progressive advancement of our knowledge on the topic. In response to this, the current literature review organizes and synthesizes extant research on legitimacy and legitimation in international entrepreneurship to build a more comprehensive understanding of legitimation strategies and underlying activities that enable legitimation of early and rapidly internationalizing ventures. We achieve this by examining the whole body of international entrepreneurship journal articles, consisting of 978 papers that published over a 30-year period since the inception of international entrepreneurship as a distinct research domain in 1989. Based on the principles of ontological grouping, we categorize and discuss the legitimation activities that emerged during the analysis of the extant literature into four distinct groups. We then discuss the emergent findings in light of current debates in international entrepreneurship and its parent fields, and open up avenues for further research on the topic.