“Under Pressure”: Scientific Production as Legitimacy Work Across Academic and Commercial Audiences

Academic entrepreneurship is widely promoted as a core channel for science commercialization, yet we know surprisingly little about how academic entrepreneurs (AE) conduct and sustain their research while building ventures. Prior work shows that science commercialization can both enhance and distort scientific performance, and that AEs construct hybrid academic–entrepreneurial identities to manage role tensions. However, these literatures largely treat research outputs as downstream outcomes of commercialization or focus on the psychology of identity work, leaving underexplored the micro-level research practices of AEs and, given the collective nature of research and entrepreneurship, how these practices are shaped by social evaluations. Drawing on an inductive qualitative study of 26 AEs in the French academic system, we mobilize organizational legitimacy theory to analyse how laboratory colleagues, technology-transfer officers, investors, and clients evaluate academic entrepreneurs' dual role, and how AEs adjust their research practices. We find, first, that enacting a hybrid academic–entrepreneurial identity exposes AEs to multi-audience legitimacy challenges, including external pragmatic demands and intra-lab moral, relational, and cognitive questioning. Second, we identify a portfolio of science-based activities—most notably publications, joint projects, and PhD co-supervision within their home laboratories—that AEs strategically deploy as pragmatic, relational, moral, and cognitive legitimacy signals across audiences. Third, we show that this science-based legitimacy work is enabled by hybrid-identity-related synergies, contingent on local academic cultures. The study advances research on science commercialization, hybrid identity, and legitimacy in science by explaining how AEs convert their dual role into sustained scientific production.