Legitimacy in the Platform Economy:An Ecosystemic Perspective

Despite the rapid rise and contemporary ubiquity of digital platforms in all social domains, the question how these new organizations build legitimacy remains insufficiently examined. Legitimacy has been studied mostly in the context of formal organizations. However, given the significant differences between platforms and formal organizations, there are also important differences in their strategies of legitimacy building. We propose an understanding of legitimacy as a stable relationship between platform and ecosystem. As very little is currently known about this topic, we ask how legitimacy is built in digital platform-ecosystems and provide preliminary answers, based on findings from a revelatory case study on Couchsurfing, the popular online hospitality platform for alternative travelling.