Social license to operate is an increasingly used but seldom defined concept. In this article, we draw from academic, popular, and industry literature to identify and synthesize three models of social license to operate. Building on our review, we investigate the linkages between social license...

How does the legitimacy conferred on entrepreneurial endeavors affect the legitimacy of subsequent ones? We extend the notion of a “legitimacy threshold” to develop and test a recursive model of legitimacy. Whereas extant research has focused on whether entrepreneurial endeavors garner...