New Institutional Entrepreneurs in the Fashion Industry

This Chapter examines the emerging institutional field of e-commerce and social commerce, details early experiments in the 1990s in the emerging field of digital fashion, and introduces the major players in the book—new institutional entrepreneurs in e-commerce and social commerce. Chapter 2 also reveals the mechanism for gaining institutional legitimacy for said players: first, the development of legitimizing narratives that demonstrate how e-commerce and social commerce founders aligned their pragmatic knowledge and skill in e-commerce with a projected identity as legitimate partners for fashion companies; second, the transformation of said narratives into moral legitimacy; third, the formalizing of commercial practice into pragmatic legitimacy; and, fourth, the acquisition of a special legitimacy form—influence legitimacy.