Public relations and legitimacy: A study of new ventures on the corporate life cycle

In 2013, Germany, a world leading industrialized nation published its Industry 4.0 strategic plan. The term Industry 4.0 has been referred to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this paper, in the era of Industry 4.0, we studied the importance of three types of legitimacy related to the different stages of new ventures. A framework was designed using the concept of guanxi to better understand its relationship to the corporate life cycle. In this study, two different kinds of guanxi, business and political, affect the legitimacy of a company.