Legitimation paradox: Piggybacking a social enterprise on a system failure

The extant research on legitimation pays scarce attention to how firms defend their legitimated and institutionalized status quo that is threatened by outsiders and/or insiders. The paper employs legitimation paradox to explore how firms respond to such threats after they successfully achieved legitimacy, passed legitimacy threshold, were institutionalized, and enjoyed high growth and success. It adopts collaborative autoethnographic research where the researcher and the entrepreneur co-construct the narrative, employing analytic autoethnography within a previous life in an organization and within social science to explore legitimation paradox phenomenon. The case company, purposefully selected as information-rich, but not an extreme case, is one of the largest not-for-profit organizations in the UK, the Trussell Trust foodbank network.