‘It is only women’ to ‘it is women’: A process model for how poor women gained legitimacy as economic and social actors through a grass root social innovation

Rising social inequality around the world has prompted organizational scholars to pay increased attention to socially innovative organizations that address issues of inequality and social exclusion. A key area of research has been the creation of legitimacy for such organizations in the institutional landscape. We note that social inequality is an outcome of the refusal to recognize marginalized groups as legitimate social, political and economic actors, and argue that mitigation of inequality would require building greater legitimacy for beneficiaries themselves rather than for the organization alone. We observe that the processes by which beneficiary legitimacy is built are relatively underexplored in the extant literature. In this paper, we draw on the literature on the social process of (de)legitimation of status hierarchies, and examine the beneficiary participation in the Kudumbashree Community Based Organization (KS CBO), a poverty eradication initiative started in Kerala, India in 1998, and present an empirical model to demonstrate a progressive shift in the referential beliefs about poor women resulting in a greater legitimacy for them as social, economic and political actors.