In May, 2023, Associate Professor Xiong Feng (correspondent) from the Accounting Development Research Center/School of Management of Xiamen University and his collaborators wrote the paper "Innovator Trouble Maker? The Co-evolution of Ethical Controversies, Legitimation and Institutionalization of the Ride Sharing Firms in China” was officially published online in FT50 Journal of Business Ethics.

Since the development of online car rental, many scholars have studied its legalization process. From the perspective of Co-Evolution, this paper studies how the ethical disputes, legalization and institutionalization of online car-hailing have co-evolved in the dynamic institutional environment of China. In this paper, based on the framework of Stakeholder Salience Theory, SST) and Orders of Worth, and the double-layer analysis method of enterprise and institution, the legalization process of Didi in China market is studied as a case. The research results of this paper reveal the moral disputes between stakeholders with different significance levels on the legalization of Didi, and the dynamic interaction between the legalization of Didi and the market supervision on the system level for online car. In this paper, a process model is developed, which shows how the changes of moral disputes, the emergence of new market categories (online car-sharing companies) and the legalization of online car-sharing companies have co-evolved.