Legitimacy Acquisition In Internationalization Of Chinese Enterprises

Private enterprises have become the principal part of Chinese enterprises' "going abroad",however they are facing discouraging obstacles from foreign institutional areas.Lack of legitimacy of enterprises,in the development of the market,the development of customers,expanding profits and so on are facing difficulties,which will lead to a decline in the overall efficiency of society.Transnational strategic alliancing is an effective way for private enterprises,which lack both resources and experiences,to acquire legitimacy in new institutional environment.With the help of legitimacy oriented alliance,enterprises can overcome the obstacles from institutional environment,establish organizational legitimacy,and develop their own business.The study on establishing mechanism of legitimacy is not enough.The existing theories only cares about institutional factors,and give almost no considerations about resource factors,which may seriously affect legitimacy acquisition effectively in practice.In this study,we selected 36 cases from a database of 112 Chinese company's strategic alliances,which is collected by ourselves and divided into four types of different alliance attributes,to carry out a mixed study aiming at looking into the mechanism of acquiring legitimacy in "going abroad".Using the strategic alliance theory,the system theory and the resource-based view synthetically,we explored the influence mechanism of the system factor and the resource factor on the legitimacy acquisition under the alliance environment.The results show that the private enterprises in China acquire legitimacy mainly through resource approach,reputation and cognitive approach and isomorphic approach.The different attributes of alliances determine the different ways of legitimacy spillovers within alliance,and then will lead to different legitimacy acquisition mechanisms,among which resource factors play unneglectable roles.In theory,this study broadens the scope of legitimacy research,combining the resource perspective,let us have a more comprehensive understanding of the background of various approaches to legitimacy acquired by previous scholars,and further reveals the inherent mechanism.In practice,it also provides guidance for China's private enterprises in the internationalization of how to use strategic alliances to obtain legitimacy through their own resource advantages.