Abstract Purpose-driven ecosystems are built around significant, multifaceted, and wicked societal problems like climate change, access to health services, and waste and resource management. Such ecosystems are collective organizations that rally around a shared moral purpose, enabling ecosystem participants, often for-profit organizations, to proactively address societal expectations. However, given the complexity of the issues addressed and the multiplicity of external expectations, the ecosystem participants often diverge in their views on a coherent moral purpose and the appropriate organizational structures and actions aligned with it. These challenges highlight the importance of building moral legitimacy in purpose-driven ecosystems, which we examine via an in-depth case study of an ecosystem focusing on broad sustainability goals in urban regions. Our findings demonstrate parallel processes of collective narratives and organizational architectures that together drive discursive and performative legitimation in the ecosystem. However, we also reveal major legitimacy struggles as ecosystem participants, both collectively and individually, first build moral legitimacy for a multivocal, higher-order set of purposes but eventually find them difficult to act on. Then, after identifying a disconnect between the collective narrative and concrete on-the-ground action, the ecosystem participants eventually partially rebuild moral legitimacy by finding a consensual narrative and structuring an organizational architecture that establishes a coherent moral purpose-action alignment in the eyes of both internal and external stakeholders. Our study contributes to the nascent literature on purpose-driven ecosystems by demonstrating how they build moral legitimacy through a process that combines deliberate discourse with an organizational architecture that demonstrates performance grounded in that discourse. We show that these two legitimation strategies must be aligned to create coherence between a wicked societal problem and the on-the-ground feasibility of a shared moral purpose.
Patala et al. (Tue,) studied this question.