Abstract: As more and more Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises（SMEs）go abroad to face international competition, a series of problems appear one after another within the new institutional environment. Among them, the lack of cognition by international customers has become the main obstacle of the SMEs internationalization. At present, more and more studies regard strategic alliance as an important way to solve this problem. This stream of research hold the idea that demonstration effect and isomorphism effect is the mechanisms of obtaining cognitive legitimacy by establishing alliance.
This paper argues that since technology plays an important role in alliances, the effect of technological learning should also be an important factor affecting customer′s cognition, so this study analyze the cases of successful international alliance of Chinese SMEs, to explore how they can overcome the cognitive constraints in their growth through alliance with international established enterprises, so as to clarify the impact of organizational learning on cognitive effect. In this research, we adopt a process of gradually focus. In line with the research theme of SME′s internationalization, 26 cases are selected from more than 100 multinational alliance being inspected. From them, 10 representative cases are selected to conduct qualitative analysis. The underlining logic of this selection is to find out those typical ones in showing the regular appearance according to the variance of organizational learning performance. Finally, four cases are selected for purpose of deep analysis.
The main findings are: 1) About alliance types and legitimacy acquisition effect: no matter what kind of alliance, it has a certain effect on the acquisition of alliance partners′ cognitive legitimacy. With the deepening of contact and the increase of organizational learning types, the demonstration effect, isomorphism effect and technology learning effect are gradually superimposed, and the effect of cognitive legitimacy acquisition is better; 2) About the role of alliance partner: alliance partner play a key role in the acquisition of legitimacy. It is not only the key subject endowed by legitimacy, but also the bridge of legitimacy diffusion to peripheral stakeholders; 3) About technical learning in legitimacy acquisition: according to the different types of organizational learning, different learning effects are produced, and the isomorphic effect of organizational learning makes both the core and the peripheral key stakeholder′s cognition improved, while the learning effect of technology has strong cognitive identity to alliance partners through the strongest stimulation of economic interests, which produce further demonstration and isomorphic effect.
This study has two main theoretical contributions in revealing the legitimacy acquisition mechanism of organizational learning in the alliance environment:(1) the importance of technology learning effect to the legitimacy acquisition of multinational alliance partners is confirmed and analyzed with rich materials from multiple cases, which is also a supplement to the demonstration effect and isomorphism effect theory in the field of legitimacy; (2)the mechanism of demonstration effect, isomorphism effect and technology learning effect is summarized with abundant case materials. This process reveals the legitimacy acquisition mechanism in different alliance situations. The above two theoretical contributions reveal the role of organizational learning in the acquisition of legitimacy in alliance environment. This theoretical contribution has a practical inspiration for the current SME′s internationalization in using legitimacy alliance to promote the cognition of overseas consumers.

Key words: SME, internationalization, strategic alliances, stakeholders, cognitive legitimacy