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Paper title and abstract

The dynamics of social evaluations

Abstract: Social evaluations—such as legitimacy, authenticity, status, and reputation—are central to entrepreneurial processes because they shape how new ventures are judged, supported, and sustained over time. Entrepreneurs must persuade diverse audiences that their ventures are worthy of attention, resources, and trust, often in contexts marked by novelty, uncertainty, and institutional ambiguity. As a result, social evaluations influence not only firm survival and growth, but also the emergence of markets, categories, and entrepreneurial identities. Although these evaluative forms have become foundational constructs across entrepreneurship, institutional theory, and economic sociology, they are typically theorized as distinct and analytically separable ideal types. Legitimacy is commonly associated with conformity to institutionalized norms and categories, authenticity with moral sincerity or identity alignment, status with hierarchical position, and reputation with aggregated past performance. This compartmentalization, however, obscures the fact that in practice, entrepreneurial actors are rarely evaluated along a single dimension at a time.

Empirically, social evaluations tend to co-occur, overlap, and interact, often in ways that are consequential for entrepreneurial action. Yet relatively little theory explains how different evaluative logics relate to one another. One important exception is Washington and Zajac’s study of collegiate athletics, which demonstrates how status and reputation jointly shape organizational outcomes. Their work illustrates the analytical payoff of examining multiple evaluations simultaneously rather than in isolation. Building on this insight, we argue that entrepreneurship provides a particularly revealing empirical setting for studying evaluative interaction. Startups routinely confront situations in which one form of evaluation is unavailable, unstable, or contested, prompting actors to mobilize alternative evaluative claims. Evaluation, in this sense, is not merely an outcome of social judgment but an ongoing process through which entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty, signal worth, and strategically frame their ventures across audiences.

This dynamic is especially visible in entrepreneurial domains such as craft, sustainability, and values-driven markets. In these contexts, ventures must often sustain claims of authenticity—rooted in founder identity, moral commitment, heritage, or place—while simultaneously securing legitimacy through certification, regulation, professionalization, or category conformity. Craft producers, for example, may rely on narratives of tradition and artisanal integrity to establish authenticity, yet must also comply with standards, scaling expectations, or market classifications that confer legitimacy. Similarly, sustainability-oriented startups must demonstrate moral purpose and sincerity while also meeting externally imposed criteria of impact and accountability. These dual demands create tensions that cannot be adequately captured by theories that treat legitimacy and authenticity as independent or opposing constructs.

Focusing specifically on the interaction between legitimacy and authenticity, this paper develops a processual typology of their relationships. Drawing on conceptual synthesis and illustrative empirical examples, we identify multiple patterns of interaction, including reinforcing dynamics in which legitimacy and authenticity mutually strengthen one another; contradictory dynamics in which gains in one undermine the other; curvilinear relationships in which alignment reverses beyond a threshold; sequential dynamics in which authenticity precedes legitimacy or vice versa; substitutive dynamics in which one compensates for the absence of the other; orthogonal relationships in which the two operate independently; layered configurations in which different audiences evaluate legitimacy and authenticity simultaneously; and cyclical or dialectical patterns in which their relationship shifts over time. By theorizing legitimacy and authenticity as interacting, temporally embedded social evaluations rather than static properties, this paper advances a dynamic view of evaluation that helps explain how entrepreneurs navigate contestation, scale values-based ventures, and sustain meaning as organizations grow.