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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Mairi Maclean
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This article explores the relational dynamics of legitimation within a professional service venture context, using a Bourdieusian framework to elucidate the struggles for capital and legitimacy that characterise the venture development process. Two profiles of individual business owners who renounce or adhere to established norms of the professional field are identified: apostate and traditional. Small accounting ventures may benefit from improved access to resources if they concentrate on fitting in with prevailing small firm professional logics, eschewing logics from outside the focal field associated with apostates. A model of legitimacy is developed that accounts for the efficacy of institutional and strategic modes of legitimacy relative to the maturity of the field and objectification of its social formations. We propose that entrepreneurial habitus mediates field-level conditions and capital formations that, when combined, create symbolic capital and resource acquisition possibilities.
Author(s): Stringfellow L, Shaw E, Maclean M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Small Business Journal
Year: 2014
Volume: 32
Issue: 5
Pages: 571-592
Print publication date: 01/08/2014
Online publication date: 13/01/2013
ISSN (print): 0266-2426
ISSN (electronic): 1741-2870
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266242612471693
DOI: 10.1177/0266242612471693
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