The Legitimacy Spiral Process And The Driving Mechanism Of The Nascent Exhibition

The organizational legitimacy is related to the survival and development of organizations, so it has gained more and more attention of scholars. The traditional research about enterprise mainly focused on nascent organizations and mature organizations. For nascent organizations, the research primarily focus on the gain of legitimacy, and they consider the internal organization and the external environment are well-defined types of groups, it belongs to a relatively static perspective. But they pay less attention on the nascent events which containing multiple organizations.From a dynamic perspective of legitimacy, the paper takes the "China Yangzhou summer travel exhibition" which has been hold successfully three years by Yangzhou radio for example, using case study method to analyze the legitimacy acquisition process of nascent events. Studies show that the legitimacy acquisition process of nascent event is a spiral process(we call as "legitimacy spiral") and it contains three important effects- the expansion effect of legitimacy giving body(the number of legitimacy giving body is increasing and the scope is expanding in lateral and longitudinal), the aggregate effect of the legitimacy seeking body(the legitimacy seeking body is increasing and the internal consistency and capacity are improving) and the softening effect of the legitimacy strategy(the strategies orientation changes from rigid to neutral and to flexible gradually). The paper explained the formation process of legitimacy spiral, and concluded that the competitive pressures from environment and the motivation for development together promote the phenomenon, than the legitimacy spiral driving model has been put forward.The paper concludes some new views which different from traditional legitimacy research on the legitimacy assumptions, the legitimacy entities, the motivation for legitimacy, the legalization strategy and the applied environment of the strategy based on the research from multiple subjects involved nascent events by using longitudinal tracking mode. And it put legitimacy theory research from a static perspective to a dynamic perspective. Meanwhile this paper has contributed to the research between exhibitions events and legitimacy studies and provided a theoretical basis and important references for exhibition practitioners.