Wrapping Illegitimate Creative Organizations to make them Legitimate? An ethnographic exploration of strategies deployed by Artistic Squats in Paris to acquire legitimacy

Highly creative artistic organizations such as artistic squats are facing an ‘institutional paradox': to generate radical artistic innovation they have to break norms and frames; to survive in their institutional environment they need to be perceived as ‘acceptable' by society – at least to some extent. The purpose of this paper is to address that paradox by investigating empirically the processes through which two Parisian artistic squats have acquired legitimacy towards their stakeholders in spite of organizational features drastically constraining their range of legitimating strategies. We show how the process of artistic squat construction and organization – assimilated to the enactment of an original and marginal ‘art world' – constrain this search for external legitimacy, and how squats overcome these barriers by obtaining the support of key stakeholders (public, media, and politicians). Finally, these case studies inspire a reflection on the life cycle of creative organization legitimacy-building processes.