Innovation Narratives in Startups: Legitimation Grammars Under Inequality in Brazilian and International Technology Ventures

Abstract

This study examines how technology startups communicatively construct and legitimate their innovation activities through organizational narratives. Drawing on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations perspective, organizational narrative theory, and legitimation studies, we analyse publicly circulating self-descriptions from twelve technology ventures spanning fintech, logistics, creator economy, e-commerce, proptech, healthtech, foodtech, mobility and B2B SaaS. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identify five narrative types (Disruption, Inclusion, Growth, Impact, and Team/Founder) and five articulation patterns. The central finding concerns narrative position rather than presence: Inclusion Narratives occupy dominant positions in the majority of ventures operating within inequality-dense institutional environments, while appearing exclusively as secondary narratives in ventures embedded in mature capital markets. We interpret this asymmetry as a re-specification of legitimation grammars conditioned by structural inequality, financial exclusion, and historical underprovision of services. The study contributes an empirically grounded contextual qualification of disruption-centred accounts of entrepreneurial legitimation, a typology of narrative articulation patterns, and an initial theorization of the Infrastructural Narrative as a legitimation strategy in platform economies.