How can research on platform ecosystems be connected with institutional theory and organizational legitimacy? Identify relevant concepts across these literatures and propose a theoretical framework that could generate a novel research contribution.

1. The theoretical connection

Platform ecosystems and institutional theory can be connected by treating the platform not merely as a digital infrastructure or market intermediary, but as a collective organizing arrangement that must achieve legitimacy while coordinating heterogeneous actors. A platform ecosystem links a platform owner, complementors, users, regulators, and other stakeholders through modular interfaces, shared rules, and interdependent value-creation processes. Hein et al. [1] characterize these ecosystems through platform ownership, value-creation mechanisms, and complementor autonomy, while Kretschmer et al. [2] conceptualize them as “meta-organizations”: less hierarchical than firms but more coordinated than markets.

Institutional theory adds a complementary question: Why do actors accept, reproduce, or challenge the rules and authority of a platform ecosystem? Platform participation depends not only on technical functionality or economic incentives but also on whether the platform is perceived as appropriate, trustworthy, fair, and compatible with prevailing institutional expectations. Legitimacy therefore provides a mechanism linking ecosystem governance to participation, cooperation, and endurance. This perspective shifts the analysis from “How does a platform attract and coordinate participants?” to “How does a platform establish and maintain the institutional conditions under which participants regard coordination as acceptable and credible?” The connection can be organized around four relationships:

This integration is consistent with research showing that ecosystem development requires more than technical integration. Costabile et al. [3] demonstrate that actors must undertake institutional work to create common standards across technologies, data, and business processes. Similarly, platform governance research identifies a persistent tension between openness for joint innovation and control for value capture; access, control, and incentive mechanisms must be embedded in the platform’s technical and organizational architecture [4].

2. Relevant concepts across the literatures

2.1 Platform ecosystems as institutional environments

A platform ecosystem can be understood as an institutional environment because the platform establishes the design rules, interfaces, participation conditions, and evaluative criteria that structure interaction among autonomous actors. The platform owner—or a distributed governance arrangement—does not simply provide a technological core. It defines what kinds of participation are possible, which actors are recognized as legitimate contributors, how value is distributed, and how conflicts are resolved.

This view extends the conventional distinction between platform architecture and platform governance. Openness, for example, is multidimensional: a platform may be open to suppliers but closed to complementors, open to users but restrictive regarding product categories, or technically accessible while remaining commercially selective. Broekhuizen et al. [5] show that openness involves distinct decisions concerning suppliers, customers, complementary providers, product categories, and channels. Institutional analysis can explain why these decisions acquire legitimacy in some contexts but provoke resistance in others.

The concept of boundary resources is especially useful. APIs, software-development kits, data standards, certification procedures, and contractual rules allow external actors to connect to the platform while simultaneously defining the boundaries of acceptable participation. These resources are therefore both technical and institutional: they enable coordination, but they also encode assumptions about authority, competence, ownership, and responsibility.

2.2 Institutional pillars and platform governance

Scott’s three institutional pillars—regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive—can be mapped onto platform governance.

The regulative pillar concerns formal rules, monitoring, sanctions, compliance requirements, and property rights. Within a platform ecosystem, it appears in admission criteria, content moderation, data-access rules, interoperability requirements, pricing policies, and dispute-resolution procedures. Regulatory intervention can alter these arrangements. For example, research on the EU Digital Markets Act frames regulation as a site of power contestation between platform owners and dependent complementors, rather than as an external constraint alone [6].

The normative pillar concerns obligations, values, and standards of appropriate conduct. It includes expectations of fairness toward complementors, responsible data use, transparency, nondiscrimination, and reciprocal value creation. These expectations are particularly important when economic dependence is asymmetric. A platform may comply formally with its own rules yet lose legitimacy if stakeholders perceive those rules as exploitative or procedurally unfair.

The cultural-cognitive pillar concerns shared categories and taken-for-granted understandings. Platforms must make their roles intelligible: participants need to understand what the platform is, what contribution means, which forms of exchange are acceptable, and how the ecosystem’s value proposition relates to existing professional or industry identities. Standardization is important here because common data formats and work practices create shared interpretations as well as technical compatibility.

2.3 Organizational legitimacy as a multidimensional ecosystem judgment

Organizational legitimacy is best treated as a stakeholder judgment that the platform and its governance arrangements are desirable, proper, or appropriate within a socially constructed system of norms and values. A useful distinction is among:

• Pragmatic legitimacy: stakeholders believe participation produces benefits, reduces transaction costs, improves market access, or creates valuable complements.
• Moral legitimacy: stakeholders regard the platform’s conduct and consequences as fair, responsible, and socially beneficial.
• Cognitive legitimacy: stakeholders understand the platform as familiar, necessary, and comprehensible.
• Regulative or institutional legitimacy: relevant authorities and institutional actors recognize the platform as compliant and appropriate within formal governance arrangements.

These dimensions need not develop together. A platform may enjoy pragmatic legitimacy because it generates economic value while lacking moral legitimacy because its value-distribution rules are viewed as unfair. It may possess cognitive legitimacy as a familiar market infrastructure while facing regulative illegitimacy because it violates competition or data-governance expectations.

The platform literature provides several mechanisms through which legitimacy can be produced. Ojala et al. [7] show how digital platform providers can internationalize rapidly across national borders, implying that platforms must secure acceptance across multiple institutional environments. Teplov et al. [8] further frame orchestration and legitimation as endogenous processes through which platform firms and institutions co-evolve. Legitimacy is therefore not simply an antecedent of platform growth; it is also an outcome of platform expansion and a resource used to obtain cooperation.

3. A proposed legitimacy-centered platform ecosystem framework

The proposed framework conceptualizes ecosystem development as a recursive process comprising institutional conditions, governance design, legitimacy judgments, participation behavior, and ecosystem outcomes.

3.1 Institutional pressures and ecosystem context

The framework begins with three types of institutional pressure:

1. Regulative pressure, arising from laws, regulators, industry mandates, and formal standards.
2. Normative pressure, arising from professional associations, stakeholder expectations, ethical principles, and social evaluations.
3. Cultural-cognitive pressure, arising from established categories, routines, and assumptions about how a sector should operate.

These pressures shape what platform configurations are viewed as acceptable. A platform entering healthcare, finance, public services, or sustainability-sensitive industries will encounter stronger expectations concerning accountability, privacy, safety, and inclusion than a platform operating in a less regulated domain. Institutional pressures also vary across countries and sectors, which helps explain why the same platform design may receive different legitimacy judgments in different environments.

3.2 Governance translation

Platform governance translates institutional pressures into operational arrangements. The central governance dimensions are:

• access and participation criteria;
• allocation of decision rights;
• data ownership and transparency;
• standardization and interoperability;
• monitoring and sanctioning;
• incentive and revenue-sharing mechanisms;
• dispute resolution and appeals;
• mechanisms for stakeholder voice.

This translation is not automatic. Governance can achieve institutional alignment when platform rules reflect relevant regulatory requirements, professional norms, and stakeholder expectations. It can also produce institutional misalignment when the platform imposes rules that are technically efficient but socially unacceptable.

The concept of governance translation is important because it identifies where institutional theory becomes empirically observable in platform ecosystems. Rather than treating institutions as broad environmental variables, researchers can examine how institutional expectations are encoded in APIs, contracts, algorithms, standards, moderation procedures, and participation policies.

3.3 Legitimacy formation and contestation

Governance arrangements generate legitimacy judgments among different stakeholder groups. These judgments should be examined at both the platform and ecosystem levels.

At the platform level, actors evaluate the focal platform’s competence, fairness, transparency, and trustworthiness. At the ecosystem level, they evaluate whether the wider arrangement distributes opportunities and risks appropriately among platform owners, complementors, users, public authorities, and affected communities.

Legitimacy is also dynamic and contested. Cozzolino et al. [9] show that incumbent producers and entrant platforms can move through selective cooperation, allied competition, and selective coopetition. These shifts can be interpreted institutionally: actors may cooperate when the platform’s role is viewed as acceptable, contest its authority when dependence becomes problematic, and renegotiate participation when established identities or interests are threatened.

A further mechanism is legitimacy repair. Platforms may respond to criticism by increasing transparency, revising access rules, introducing stakeholder participation, delegating authority, or changing standards. Mayer et al. [10] show that governance around generative-AI boundary resources changes through resistance and accommodation between platform owners and complementors. This suggests that legitimacy is produced through iterative negotiation rather than secured permanently by initial design.

3.4 Consequences for ecosystem participation and performance

Legitimacy should influence several ecosystem outcomes:

• complementor entry and retention;
• user adoption and continued use;
• willingness to share data and knowledge;
• investment in complementary innovations;
• cooperation with regulators and industry bodies;
• ecosystem resilience;
• international expansion;
• perceived fairness of value capture.

The mechanism is not simply that legitimacy increases participation. Rather, legitimacy lowers perceived institutional and relational risk, making actors more willing to commit resources to an interdependent system. Conversely, legitimacy deficits may lead to withholding data, reducing innovation effort, exit, collective resistance, or regulatory intervention.

Platform ecosystem resilience is particularly promising as an outcome. Flötgen et al. [11] show that platforms can mobilize ecosystem resources to respond to exogenous shocks, while Yan et al. [12] find that innovation capacity, diversity, IT-infrastructure flexibility, IT-infrastructure efficiency, and sustainability positioning contribute to platform resilience. A legitimacy-centered extension would ask whether these capabilities produce resilience only when stakeholders regard the platform’s crisis responses as appropriate and trustworthy. The resulting conceptual sequence can be expressed as:

$$\begin{aligned} &\text{Institutional pressures} \\ &\quad \rightarrow \text{Governance translation} \\ &\quad \rightarrow \text{Legitimacy judgments} \\ &\quad \rightarrow \text{Stakeholder participation and commitment} \\ &\quad \rightarrow \text{Ecosystem outcomes} \end{aligned}$$

The relationship is recursive because ecosystem outcomes feed back into future legitimacy judgments. Growth, innovation, resilience, or social benefits can strengthen legitimacy, whereas exclusion, value appropriation, privacy violations, or regulatory conflict can undermine it.

4. The novel research contribution

The principal contribution would be to theorize platform ecosystem legitimacy as a multilevel, dynamic, and governance-mediated construct. Existing platform research explains ecosystem coordination, openness, complementor autonomy, orchestration, and value capture. Institutional research explains how organizations gain acceptance by conforming to or strategically responding to institutional expectations. Connecting them produces three theoretical advances.

First, the framework moves legitimacy from the background environment to the core mechanism of ecosystem orchestration. A platform does not coordinate autonomous actors solely through prices, technical interfaces, or network effects; it must also persuade them that its authority and rules are appropriate. This helps explain why technically viable platforms fail to scale and why some ecosystems sustain participation despite relatively modest short-term economic incentives.

Second, the framework distinguishes platform legitimacy from ecosystem legitimacy. A focal platform may be trusted by users but distrusted by complementors, or accepted by regulators but rejected by civil-society actors. These forms of legitimacy may reinforce or undermine one another. Treating legitimacy as stakeholder-specific avoids the assumption that “the ecosystem” holds a single unified evaluation.

Third, the framework conceptualizes governance as institutional translation and negotiation. Platform rules are not neutral coordination devices; they materialize institutional assumptions and redistribute authority. This perspective can explain how standards, boundary resources, algorithms, and participation policies become sites of institutional work and power contestation. The CheMatSustain Facility illustrates this possibility by treating stakeholder engagement as a design principle for translating fragmented knowledge into actionable governance and sustainability tools [13].

A particularly promising empirical contribution would therefore examine how governance alignment affects the relationship between ecosystem legitimacy and complementor commitment. The central theoretical claim would be:

Platform ecosystems are more likely to attract, retain, and mobilize autonomous participants when their governance arrangements translate salient institutional expectations into credible procedures for access, accountability, participation, and value distribution.

This claim can generate a research model in which institutional pressures shape governance design; governance design influences pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy; legitimacy affects participation and ecosystem resilience; and stakeholder contestation feeds back into governance adaptation. The model would be especially valuable in contexts where platforms operate across institutional boundaries, such as digital healthcare, financial technology, public data spaces, circular-economy platforms, and sustainability-oriented ecosystems.

5. Boundary conditions and research directions

The framework should not assume that greater institutional conformity always improves platform performance. Excessive conformity may reduce experimentation, increase compliance costs, or limit generativity. Conversely, deliberate institutional nonconformity may enable innovation if the platform can build an alternative basis of legitimacy. The relevant issue is therefore not conformity alone but the fit between governance arrangements and the expectations of strategically important stakeholders.

The framework also requires attention to power asymmetry. In ecosystems dominated by a powerful platform owner, participation may continue despite weak moral legitimacy because complementors lack viable alternatives. Such participation should not be interpreted as genuine legitimacy; it may reflect dependence, coercion, or switching costs. Shared-ownership or network-governed ecosystems provide a contrasting setting in which legitimacy may depend more directly on deliberation and distributed decision rights. Kari et al. [14] identify this shift in emerging network-driven ecosystems, where ownership and decision rights are shared rather than concentrated in a single keystone organization.

Finally, the framework invites comparative research across institutional environments and ecosystem stages. Early-stage platforms must establish cognitive legitimacy and persuade unknown actors that participation is worthwhile; mature platforms must maintain moral and regulative legitimacy as their power expands; and international platforms must repeatedly translate governance across national contexts. This temporal perspective connects emergence, scaling, and institutionalization rather than treating platform legitimacy as a fixed attribute.