Understanding How Legitimacy Drives Social Enterprise Scaling: Lessons from India
I’m preparing for an upcoming session with a group of social enterprises and the challenge and need to build legitimacy keeps coming up. So I dove into a recently published article by Khare, Ghura & Agrawal (2025) from the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship titled: "A Process Model of Social Enterprise Scaling Using the Legitimacy Lens." The title immediately drew me in as I’m always interested in the question of how social enterprises actually achieve scale, not just what strategies they use, but what underlying mechanisms make those strategies work, and the concept of legitimacy is one that really interests me. (If it’s a topic you’re interested in, I also recommend this article: Exploring social enterprise legitimacy within ecosystems from an institutional approach: A systematic literature review and research agenda by Spanuth & Urbano (2023))
This research is based on The Kalgidhar Trust Society (TKTS) in Northern India, which has scaled from a single school in 1986 to 129 schools (now 130 since publication actually!) serving 62,000 students, plus hospitals, teacher training programmes, and de-addiction centres. So, there's of course, a geographical and cultural contextual difference from Ireland, but I believe there's still much that can be gleaned from it—particularly around the process of how legitimacy enables scaling.
Three Types of Legitimacy That Enable Scaling
The article identifies three distinct types of organisational legitimacy, each playing a different role in the scaling journey:
Internal Legitimacy: This is about whether your own team truly believes in and executes on your mission. It's reflected in shared organisational values, consistent processes, centralized quality control, and having skilled people who are genuinely committed to the social mission. For TKTS, this meant everything from their centralised procurement systems (achieving cost efficiencies) to their innovative teacher training programme that deliberately recruited from the communities they served.
External Legitimacy: This is your reputation and credibility with stakeholders outside your organisation—donors, beneficiaries, media, other organisations. TKTS built this through operational efficiency (80 of 129 schools built on donated land!), community engagement, responsiveness to local needs, and a hybrid funding model that demonstrated both social commitment and financial sustainability.
Socio-Political Legitimacy: This is the big one for deep impact—it's when policymakers, government officials, and broader society recognize you as a legitimate voice on the issues you're addressing. TKTS achieved this through scale (reaching 1.9 million people), awards and recognition, and ultimately being invited to help shape education and social policy at the state government level.
Three Types of Legitimacy That Enable Scaling
What really resonated with me was how Khare and colleagues identify three distinct types of organisational legitimacy, each playing a different role in the scaling journey:
Internal Legitimacy: This is about whether your own team truly believes in and executes on your mission. It's reflected in shared organisational values, consistent processes, centralized quality control, and having skilled people who are genuinely committed to the social mission. For TKTS, this meant everything from their centralised procurement systems (achieving cost efficiencies) to their innovative teacher training programme that deliberately recruited from the communities they served.
External Legitimacy: This is your reputation and credibility with stakeholders outside your organisation—donors, beneficiaries, media, other organisations. TKTS built this through operational efficiency (80 of 129 schools built on donated land!), community engagement, responsiveness to local needs, and a hybrid funding model that demonstrated both social commitment and financial sustainability.
Socio-Political Legitimacy: This is the big one for deep impact—it's when policymakers, government officials, and broader society recognize you as a legitimate voice on the issues you're addressing. TKTS achieved this through scale (reaching 1.9 million people), awards and recognition, and ultimately being invited to help shape education and social policy at the state government level.
Three Types of Legitimacy That Enable Scaling
What really resonated with me was how Khare and colleagues identify three distinct types of organisational legitimacy, each playing a different role in the scaling journey:
Internal Legitimacy: This is about whether your own team truly believes in and executes on your mission. It's reflected in shared organisational values, consistent processes, centralized quality control, and having skilled people who are genuinely committed to the social mission. For TKTS, this meant everything from their centralised procurement systems (achieving cost efficiencies) to their innovative teacher training programme that deliberately recruited from the communities they served.
External Legitimacy: This is your reputation and credibility with stakeholders outside your organisation—donors, beneficiaries, media, other organisations. TKTS built this through operational efficiency (80 of 129 schools built on donated land!), community engagement, responsiveness to local needs, and a hybrid funding model that demonstrated both social commitment and financial sustainability.
Socio-Political Legitimacy: This is the big one for deep impact—it's when policymakers, government officials, and broader society recognize you as a legitimate voice on the issues you're addressing. TKTS achieved this through scale (reaching 1.9 million people), awards and recognition, and ultimately being invited to help shape education and social policy at the state government level.
This model doesn’t just set out three types of legitimacy you need to tick off, but rather it proposes it as a process where each type enables the next:
Stage 1: Internal and external legitimacy enable you to scale up (replicate your model in multiple locations) and scale wide (expand into related service areas). For TKTS, their strong internal processes allowed them to replicate schools efficiently, while their external credibility attracted donated land and resources.
Stage 2: Scaling up and wide creates the visibility, reach, and track record that builds socio-political legitimacy. You can't influence policy from your living room—you need demonstrated impact at scale.
Stage 3: Socio-political legitimacy enables you to scale deep—to create systemic change in cultural values, institutional practices, and policy frameworks. This is where you're not just delivering more services but actually changing how society addresses the problem.
So What Does This Mean for Scaling Social Enterprises?
Focus on legitimacy before capital. The research makes a compelling case that organizations should prioritize building different forms of legitimacy, which then facilitates resource acquisition. This flips the common assumption that you need resources first. TKTS succeeded by establishing legitimacy through quality delivery and community responsiveness, which then attracted land donations, volunteers, and funding.
Internal legitimacy is your scaling foundation. You can't scale effectively without strong internal processes, shared mission commitment, and operational excellence. This means investing in things that might seem like "overhead" such as, centralised procurement, quality control systems, training programmes, but that actually enable replication without quality loss.
Different legitimacy types matter at different scaling stages. Early-stage social enterprises need to focus intensely on internal and external legitimacy. Community engagement partnerships make sense here. Mid-stage organizations scaling up need to leverage external legitimacy for resource acquisition. Late-stage organizations can use socio-political legitimacy for scaling deep—but only if they've built the foundation first.
Mission preservation prevents legitimacy loss. One of TKTS's most interesting decisions was refusing franchise opportunities because they couldn't guarantee quality and mission alignment. They understood that damaging their legitimacy through inconsistent delivery would undermine their entire scaling strategy. Sometimes saying "no" to growth opportunities is the most strategic choice.
Legitimacy takes time, so start building it early. Just like partnerships (as I noted in my blog post on Wang's work), legitimacy doesn't happen overnight. TKTS spent decades building trust with communities before achieving the socio-political legitimacy to influence policy.
Understanding how legitimacy enables scaling changes the questions social enterprises should be asking themselves. Instead of "How do we get more funding?" ask "What legitimacy do we need to build to attract sustainable resources?" Instead of "How do we grow faster?" ask "What internal legitimacy do we need to scale without losing quality?" Instead of "How do we influence policy?" ask "Have we achieved the scale and external legitimacy that makes policymakers want to listen?"
As we all know, resources and capacity are often stretched in social enterprises, and building legitimacy, not unlike building partnerships, takes time and intention. But this article makes a compelling case that legitimacy isn't an optional overhead; it's the mechanism that makes scaling actually work. The social enterprises that understand this and invest accordingly are the ones that don't just grow bigger they create lasting systemic change.
Reference: Khare, P., Ghura, A. S., & Agrawal, A. (2024). A Process Model of Social Enterprise Scaling Using the Legitimacy Lens. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2024.2315933