Following the literature on entrepreneurial framing and identity change, we examined how Chinese shan-zhai phone entrepreneurs have drawn on their cultural resources to reframe their businesses to claim new identities and gain legitimacy over time. Through qualitative procedures, we found that a staged process of collective identity development underlies this entrepreneurial process, consisting of building (a) niche-market identity via pragmatic reframing, (b) socio-political identity via nationalistic reframing, and finally (c) professional identity via comprehensive reframing. There has also been a clear change in the sources of legitimacy from the indigenous market through the wider Chinese society to the more globally defined industry. Our central contribution is a processual model of identity change through cultural reframing specifically focused on how informal entrepreneurs grow into formalization and global competition.
