How Can New Players Establish Themselves in Highly Institutionalized Labour Markets? : A Belgian Case Study in the Area of Project-Based Work

International audience; How can new players seeking to serve nonstandard worker categories (such as project-based workers) establish themselves into labour markets that are highly institutionalized? This paper explores the case of SMart, a Belgian community-based labour market intermediary that successfully developed solutions to better represent the interests of project-based workers and secure their discontinuous careers. Using an organizational legitimacy approach, we find that labour market entry and growth involve different types of boundary-crossing when addressing the needs of workers that do not fit into established categories. However, to justify boundary-crossing, the new player must complement its pragmatic work on delivering new services and tools with conceptual (cognitive) and structural (moral) legitimation work.