The Institutional Legitimacy of Disruptive Start-ups in Sharing Economy

The sharing economy, with innovative business models (e.g. ride sharing, house sharing, and crowdsourcing), has threatened and disrupted the traditional industries. However, the process of such disruptions and negotiation of new institutional legitimacy is messy. Our study attempts to utilize institutional legitimacy literature to understand the dynamic process of new institutional legitimacy formation in a sharing economy disruption and generate a framework to explain the factors which influence the legitimacy process. We used deep- learning technique to identify the institutional legitimacy issues surrounding Uber, a leading tech start-up in sharing economy, from news articles published between 2009 and 2016. The preliminary results show that institutional legitimacy of sharing economy disruption varies by time and geographical regions