Organizational Legitimacy

The issue of latecomer firm’technological catch-up receives increasing attention in academia. In thirty years, technical capability of Chinese enterprises has improved rapidly, and obvious results have been achieved, such as automobile industry. Although those enterprises have made a concerted effort, their technological catch-up performance varies widely. This thesis focuses on this question,"how to explain the differences between enterprises’technological catch-up performance" or "what are antecedents for the occurrence of technological catch-up"To explore the reasons behind enterprises differences in catching-up, technologi-cal regime or technology paradigms, catching up strategy and industry policy are pro-posed in previous research. From the perspective of new institutionalism and the resou rce based view, this study focus on the mechanism effect between organizational legitimacy and enterprises’ technological catching up.This research uses various research methods, including exploratory case study and statistic analysis. Firstly, we explore the relationship between organizational legitimacy and enterprises’ technological catching up via qualitative method, and then, an empirical examination is applied to check the mediating effect of technological resource availability in the relationship between organizational legitimacy and enterprises’ technological catching up.At last, we found that:(1) Organizational legitimacy has a positive significant effect on technological catch-up performance. Both regulative legitimacy and social legitimacy has significant impact on technological catching up. Organizational legitimacy contributes to frim’s resource availability, creditability and identity, which are conducive to technological catch-up.(2) Technological resource availability has a positive effect on enterprises’ technological catch-up performance. Among them, domestic technological resources availability has a significant effect, while foreign technological resources availability has not.(3) Technological resource availability has a partial mediating effect in the relationship between organizational legitimacy and enterprises’technological catching up.There are following contributions in this research.(1) This study enriches the catching-up literature through the introduction of organizational legitimacy issues.(2) This dissertation distinguishes between technological catch-up performance and innovation performance at the frim level. Technological catch-up performance reflects the convergence of technological gap between the latercomers and front-runners.(3) This study highlights the mediating effect of domestic technological resource availability in the relationship between organizational legitimacy and enterprises’ technological catching up.