In its etymological sense, legitimacy is the quality of what is in conformity with the law. From this, the concept of legitimacy was first conceived in relation to the justification and sustainability of state systems of power (Zelditch, 2001a). Nowadays, legitimacy is demanded in many areas of our society, becoming a pillar of structuring (Connel, 1992). Indeed, various actors, and for different categorical purposes, lay claim to a right to be or to act within a specific social environment (Hatzfeld, 2014). Thus, in a broader generic sense, legitimacy is the character of a social entity that enjoys the approval of the actors in his or her environment, based on shared norms and relating to what is acceptable or not (Laufer and Burlaud, 1997; Buisson, 2008).
Organisations are a natural domain for legitimacy issues (Suddaby et al., 2017), but we observe that few works are devoted to individual legitimacy. The few studies on the subject are concentrated, in terms of governance and entrepreneurship, around the leader or the management team (Laufer, 1996; Petit and Mari, 2009; Petit and Boulocher, 2009; Petit and Saguy, 2011), the creator (Messeghem and Sammut, 2007), the successor (Barach et al., 1988) or even the business buyer (Cullière, 2008; Ouardi, 2012; Mazari, 2018; De Freyman et al., 2019). Among these first approaches, we believe that studies related to the legitimacy of external SME takeovers deserve special attention from the scientific community, and it is important for scholars to initiate this work presently…