Abstract: Digital technology provides the possibility for ecological participants to break through their passive position and achieve identity crossing. When crossing identity, participants have to not only deal with resource constraints, but also address the post-crossing institutional pressures. Starting from the institutional bricolage strategy and taking ZhuDing Tea as a case, which is an ecological player in the field of West Lake Tea, this study attempts to analyze the specific process of how ecological participants grow into eco-masters and obtain legitimacy through exploratory institutional bricolage strategy and exploitative institutional bricolage strategy. The study finds that: (1) ecological participants adopt exploratory institutional bricolage and exploitative institutional bricolage strategies in the two stages of building digital platforms and building ecosystems; (2) the exploratory institutional bricolage helps enterprises obtain enterprise-level legitimacy by “aggregating institutional elements”, “reconstructing institutional resources”, and “cross-ecological improvisation”. The exploitative institutional bricolage helps enterprises gain ecosystem-level legitimacy by “focusing on institutional systems”, “reorganizing institutional elements”, and “improvising with the ecology”; (3) an enterprise should choose one of the two institutional bricolage strategies according to the actual situation, with exploratory institutional bricolage more suitable for the situation where the enterprise is constrained by resources and the ability is weak, and the use-based system patchwork more suitable for the situation where the enterprise has a certain resource base and ability; (4) market response mechanism and platform governance mechanism are the two main mechanisms that trigger enterprises to choose institutional bricolage strategies. This study makes a theoretical contribution to the research on ecological participants, institutional theory and institutional bricolage, and provides a reference for SMEs to participate in industrial digital transformation to achieve corner overtaking.

Key words: ecological participants, corporate legitimacy, ecosystem legitimacy, exploratory institutional bricolage, exploitative institutional bricolage