Activation of values and anchoring of beliefs: How contextually embedded individuals are inspired by an institutional entrepreneur

This thesis is a report of a theory-driven approach designed to evaluate the role of ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ in developing adaptive not-for-profit healthcare organisations.Thesis aim and objectives:The aim of this thesis was to seek the program theories that describe how, why and under what circumstances institutional entrepreneurs might build adaptive not-for-profit healthcare organisations; to examine the strategies they use, under which circumstances they are used, the projected outcomes of those strategies, and the underlying mechanisms driving adaptive change.Methods:This thesis is a realist evaluation, which involved two parts: (1) a rapid realist review to develop initial program theories, and (2) a realist evaluation of a case study to test and refine those theories. Part 1 was a rapid realist review of the relevant literature supplemented by six rounds of Delphi discussions with an Expert Reference Group (n=8) over a period of approximately 10 months. This was followed by Part 2, a realist evaluation case study of not-for-profit disability service providers in Queensland preparing for a large-scale mandated reform— the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Data comprised of two rounds of realist, semi-structured interviews (n=39) and documentation review over a period of approximately 12 months.Findings:Eight program theories describing strategy-context-mechanism-outcome (SCMO) configurations were rigorously developed, tested and refined over the course of the study drawing on rich data. My contribution to the theory of institutional entrepreneurship and discourse of adaptive capacity is based on taking a forward-looking perspective. I provide strong evidence to demonstrate how the strategic work of institutional entrepreneurs before change can build adaptive organisations, thereby ensuring that organisations are ready to respond to disturbances in the field. The study’s final findings are presented under the themes of 1) Emergence, 2) Execution, and 3) Engagement, to show how such strategic work ensures that not-for-profits exhibit appropriate adaptive characteristics, including openness to change, learning, social networks, innovation, and collective leadership. Institutional entrepreneurs’ structural and content legitimacy are important, and can foster greater support and trust from staff towards new institutional logics and the legitimacy of change itself. Skilful rhetoric can overcome conditions of coercive pressure, institutionalised practices, and ongoing changes in the field by influencing individuals’ perceptions of adaptive change. The extent to which adaptive capacity penetrates into the culture of the organisation depends on the network of groups and individuals involved in its promotion.Conclusions:Addressing a need for greater adaptability in not-for-profit healthcare organisations, this thesis highlights the important role of institutional entrepreneurship to this area of inquiry. Practical implications can be drawn from the theoretical propositions uncovered in this thesis, regarding the use of strategies by institutional entrepreneurs wishing to prepare their organisations for ongoing change in the not-for-profit healthcare sector. The realist approach to inquiry has offered more useful focus areas for developing adaptive capacity, in that institutional entrepreneurs can make informed decisions based on the findings about what is likely to “work” in their unique situation. Organisational structure, historical factors, and the motivations and interactions of staff are factors that need to be taken into consideration in adaptive capacity building efforts.

Knowledge has been an implied part of all social organizations, since it allows the progress and the discovery of new techniques and technologies to put up new activities that are not easily replicated by rivals. The chapter aims to show that institutions of higher education support the society of knowledge in Mexico for entrepreneurship through an analysis of the programs that are taught in the two public universities in the country. The structure of the chapter will be organized into three sections: 1) the knowledge of society and its relation with institutions of higher education, 2) the generation of entrepreneurship in higher education institutions, and 3) the society of knowledge and entrepreneurship in institutions of higher education in Mexico.

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in the modern global economy; the share of products of small and medium enterprises in the gross product and exports not only of the developed but also of developing countries is growing. Innovation processes cover all sectors of the economy, and more and more people are involved in entrepreneurial activity, which contributes to the penetration of entrepreneurial thinking and business values in all areas of the socioeconomic life of society. The Institute of Entrepreneurship plays an increasingly prominent role in the institutional environment of socio-economic systems. This actualizes the problem of studying the relationship of the institution of entrepreneurship with the institutions of law, culture, management. This requires a methodology that allows you to explore the impact on the institute of entrepreneurship not only economic, but also non-economic factors. The methodology of the “old” institutionalism possesses such a tool, it is structural modeling (pattern modeling), which allows to explore the diversity of interrelationships of the institution of entrepreneurship with other components of the institutional and economic environment. The article explored the features of the development of the institution of entrepreneurship in Russia, established the relationship between the institution of entrepreneurship, values, motives and incentives for entrepreneurial activity, built a structural model of the institution of entrepreneurship based on the methodology of the old institutionalism (pattern modeling). The structural model of the institution of entrepreneurship reveals the relationship between the institution of entrepreneurship, the values of entrepreneurial activity, its motives and incentives; as well as the relationship between the institution of entrepreneurship with the institutions of governance, cultural and religious institutions, legal institutions and society.

As agents of strategic institutional change, institutional entrepreneurs (IEs) draw resources from their structural environment to alter the structural context in which they are embedded. In this article, we explore which resources IEs mobilize in different structural settings. We distinguish between (positional or free) field resources and personal resources, all of which may be material, cultural, social, symbolic or political in kind. Our review of leading case studies of institutional entrepreneurship shows that centrally positioned IEs draw primarily on organizational positional resources. By contrast, peripherally positioned IEs rely mainly on the skilful mobilization of free resources as well as on the personal resources of individuals. Also the field’s degree of institutionalization has an impact on IEs’ resources: in emerging fields where field positions and field boundaries are not yet defined, resources must be imported from mature fields. Furthermore, although resource-poor peripheral IEs may set off institution-building processes in emerging fields, they are usually superseded by central organizational actors during later stages of institution-building.

This commentary highlights the challenges and opportunities facing institutional entrepreneurship in the digital public health realm. The institutional entrepreneurship of public health researchers concerns the opportunity to improve the norms regulating social media companies by engaging the public and private sectors. Beyond the clarification of concepts, the contribution of the commentary is to demonstrate why public health researchers committed to institutional entrepreneurship should mind the mental model they employ to think about business regulation. The popular Chicago School model negates the legitimacy of corporate policy making that trades profits for public health. Thinking this way obscures the relevance of institutional entrepreneurship by stipulating that corporations should answer to shareholders and government but not civil society. Though digital health communication is consistent with the Chicago School picture, the alternative public-private model reinforces opportunities for digital health communication as well as institutional entrepreneurship. The commentary proposes a toolkit for public health researchers to consciously open up to opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship in digital public health.

Institutional entrepreneurs are actors who play a leading role in establishing or changing institutions. They gather support for a vision of change when ambiguous field characteristics are prevalent, such as during institutional contradictions. Existing research conceptualizes institutional entrepreneurs as heroes who appear from nowhere to change the world, and sheds little light on the formative factors in their identity. Therefore, I applied a phenomenological methodology to study the experiences of select institutional entrepreneurs and compared these with that of actors who did not act as institutional entrepreneurs in similar situations. I found that institutional entrepreneurs had developed an identity with certain values as a reaction to crucial experiences during their first socialization. In line with their values, they had embraced various institutional contradictions throughout their lives and thus developed skills that enabled them to initiate institutional entrepreneurship. Additionally, their early established identities influenced their motivation to respond to prevalent institutional contradictions by realizing their key values during opportunities for change. The findings reveal that institutional entrepreneurs are disembedded actors only when seen from the outside: from their own perspective, they legitimize their behavior vis-à-vis their past experiences. This insight contributes to the debate on the paradox of embedded agency.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of institutional entrepreneurship in opportunity formation and opportunity exploitation in developing emerging strategic new industries. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the focal literature focussing on institutional entrepreneurs’ role in opportunity formation with special attention to opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs in emerging economy. A multi-method approach consisting of historical case studies and event sequencing is applied to track the historical development of the solar energy industry in two case contexts and to investigate the role of institutional entrepreneurs in this process. Findings – Investigation of two cases illustrates that different types of institutional entrepreneur, as represented by individual entrepreneurs and local government, in the context of massive institutional change – such as the Grand Western Development Program and the Thousand Talents Program in China – have varied effects on triggering and inducing institutional change and innovation to explore and exploit opportunities in emerging new industries. Practical implications – The significance of local context for the nature and scope of institutional entrepreneurship in emerging economy is worthy of further research. The top-down process of institutional innovation dominated by local government might cause myopic outcome and distortion of market opportunities. Indigenous individual entrepreneurs with well-accumulated political capital and strong perceived responsibility could be the main actors to introduce incremental institutional change by combining bottom-up and top-down processes and promoting sustained new industry development through creating and seizing institutional opportunities and market opportunities. Originality/value – This paper illustrates the close relationship between institutional environment and opportunity formation in emerging economies, contributes to the understanding of contextualizing institutional entrepreneurs in different regional contexts and discloses the problems involved in local government acting as an institutional entrepreneur.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to enrich empirical studies on institutional entrepreneurship (IE), more specifically those focusing on the role of the IE in building a new field (here the orphan drug [OD] field). This research addresses the main paradoxes of IE theories: a deterministic vs free agent point of view; an individual hero vs a collective action approach; and a change vs reproduction perspective.Design/methodology/approach– A case study of the role of an IE in the building of the OD field in Europe conducted through interviews with the main actors and in-depth documentary research.Findings– The case highlights the IE resources as products of a dynamic historical process driven by values; the process of building the field as an interaction between framing issues, mobilizing agents and resources, transforming a policy window into a political opportunity. It relativizes the IE role: an indispensable catalyst of collective action that can also reinforce the hegemonic bloc while changing the rules.Originality/value– The paper highlights the necessity of longitudinal analysis to address the agent/structure paradox.

The rapid institutional changes taking place today, including the emergence and global spread of new institutions bring to the fore the question of how new institutions develop. From the 1990s onwards, a new technical term has begun to spread in the literature: institutional entrepreneurship, reflecting the revaluation of people’s activity in institutional change. The aim of the paper is to answer the questions regarding this kind of entrepreneurship. How does institutional entrepreneurship emerge, how can we interpret and define this phenomenon? What kind of driving forces are behind it? How does it work in the real economy? The novelty of the paper is in addressing institutional entrepreneurship as the result of a special ability and activity of actors to combine different, already known elements for building up new institutions. The study introduces the characteristics of institutional entrepreneurship, using the example of the sharing economy, by contrasting sharing as an alternative to conventional market solutions. The paper also demonstrates how the institutional entrepreneurship of sharing changes its socio-economic environment, from mobilization of unused resources through perception of ownership to the increase of the growth potential of the economy.

We are delighted to introduce this special issue of Organization Studies ,t he purpose of which is to develop a deeper understanding of the concept of institutional entrepreneurship and to offer new avenues for future research. This concept has been attracting considerable attention in recent years, as was reflected in the record number of papers that were submitted ‐ the largest number that this journal has received for any of its special issues to date. As a result, the selection process has been stringent and we are very pleased to present the eight articles in this special issue, all of which survived the demanding review process. Each of these articles contributes important insights to our understanding of institutional entrepreneurship and, collectively, they provide an important benchmark for subsequent research on this phenomenon. In different ways, they explore how actors shape emerging institutions and transform existing ones despite the complexities and path dependences that are involved. In doing so, they shed considerable light on how institutional entrepreneurship processes shape ‐ or fail to shape ‐ the world in which we live and work The term institutional entrepreneurship refers to the ‘activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones’ (Maguire, Hardy and Lawrence, 2004: 657). The term is most closely associated with DiMaggio (1988: 14), who argued that ‘new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly’. These actors ‐ institutional entrepreneurs ‐ ‘create a whole new system of meaning that ties the functioning of disparate sets of institutions together’ (Garud, Jain and Kumaraswamy, 2002). Institutional entrepreneurship is therefore a concept that reintroduces agency, interests and power into institutional analyses of organizations. It thus offers promise to researchers seeking to bridge what have come to be called the ‘old’ and ‘new’ institutionalisms in organizational analysis (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). We preface these papers with some of our own observations on institutional entrepreneurship stemming from its paradoxical nature. Research on institutions has tended to emphasize how organizational processes are shaped by institutional forces that reinforce continuity and reward conformity. In contrast, the literature on entrepreneurship tends to emphasize how organizational processes

제도 혁신가(institutional entrepreneur)란 자신의 이해관계를 실현하기 위해 기존 제도를 변화시키거나 새로운 제도를 창조하는 행위자를 가리킨다. 지난 연구들은 그동안 제도 혁신가가 구사하는 담론전략에 초점을 맞추어 왔다. 지금까지 일정한 연구 성과들이 축적되어 왔지만, 과연 제도 혁신가의 담론전략이 온전히 규명되었는지는 의심의 여지가 있다. 이제까지의 연구들은 제도 혁신가가 이중의 모순된 요구를 충족시켜야 한다는 것에 주목하지 못했다. 제도 혁신가는 그 정의상 기존 제도를 변화시켜야 하지만, 그 역시도 다른 행위자와 마찬가지로 조직 장에 배태된 이상 기존 제도에 순응해야 한다. 기존 연구들은 오직 전자에만 초점을 맞추었는데, 이는 지나치게 행위자의 자율성만을 부각한 일면적인 관점이라 하지 않을 수 없다. 본 연구는 이러한 기존 연구들의 한계를 극복하기 위해, 어떻게 제도 혁신가가 두 가지 모순적인 요구를 모두 충족시키는 담론전략을 구사할 수 있는지를 규명하고자 했다. 본 연구는 청년유니온의 사례에 주목했다. 청년유니온은 청년 실업자와 구직자까지 가입대상으로 하는 노동조합이라는 점에서 한국의 노사관계 제도와 충돌할 수밖에 없었고, 따라서 제도 혁신의 활동을 통해서만 적법한 노조가 될 수 있었다. 본 연구는 청년유니온이 구사한 담론전략을 파악하기 위해서 청년유니온이 생산한 텍스트와 활동가들의 심층면접 자료를 수집하고 분석했다. 분석 결과, 청년유니온의 담론전략은 크게 제도의 비판 및 변화와 준수라는 세 유형으로 구분할 수 있었는데, 이는 조직 장에 배태된 행위자로서 제도 혁신가의 존재론적 역설이 반영된 것으로 해석할 수 있다. 토론에서는 청년유니온의 담론전략이 어떻게 제도의 유지와 변화라는 모순된 요구를 달성했는가를 상세하게 논한다.Institutional entrepreneurs refer to the actors who change existing institutions to promote their own interests. Previous studies have focused on the discursive acts used by institutional entrepreneurs. While some research achievements have been accumulated in recent years, it is doubtful whether the entire body of discursive strategies has been identified. Past studies have not yet acknowl-edged that institutional entrepreneurs must meet dual contradictory demands; by definition, they must not only change the existing institutions but also, like any other incumbents embedded in the field, must conform to these existing institutions. Studies to date have focused only on how institutional entrepreneurs change the institutions and, thus, have placed too much emphasis on actors’ agency. To overcome the limitations of existing studies, the present study tried to show how institutional entrepreneurs employ discursive strategies to meet both contradictory demands. For this, a case study was conducted of the Youth Community Union. This study analyzed texts produced by union activists and in-depth interview scripts conducted with union officials. In doing so, it was found that the Youth Community Union’s discursive strategies are largely divided into three types: criticism of, change of, and compliance to existing institutions. These discursive strategies reflect the existential paradox of institutional entrepreneurs as embedded agencies. Furthermore, in the dis-cussion section, this study explains how the Youth Community Union’s dis-cursive strategies satisfy the contradictory demands of maintaining and changing the institutions.

Institutional entrepreneur strategies in emerging economies: Creating market exclusivity for the rising affluent

Purpose This paper aims to examine Indonesian independent musicians' (indie) adaptation to the environmental business model. The research on institutional entrepreneurship (IE) has been used in organizational studies, including the music profession. However, the music industry's information and technology advancement has not been scrutinized in a less developed country (LDC) context. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach is used to conduct semi-structured interviews with 14 independent music professionals and enthusiasts. The interview result was three stages of coding, including open, axial and selective, as well as generating appropriate themes. Findings The results summarize entrepreneurial behavior, socio-economy and technology factors. The existing literature supports these results, though new perspectives are only identified in the LDC context. Internal factors drive IE, while socio-economy, including music literacy, education and legal issues, influence its sub-setting. On the other hand, technology positively or negatively impacts IE based on individual utilization. Research limitations/implications Despite the massive piracy and copyright issues, independent musicians require creativity and innovation beyond product creation. Weak and unclear regulations in Indonesia prevent musicians from revealing their identity and publishing their artwork, preventing or obstructing them from their goals. Practical implications This paper illustrates the urgency to implement copyright regulations for musicians in Indonesia, which are insufficiently enforced by law enforcement. Such conditions prevents musicians from revealing their identity and publishing their artwork. Social implications This paper addresses the extent to which a community such as independent musician, struggles to find its identity toward the changing of its business model. By mapping the factors associated with an independent musician, the paper suggests that this community has strategic economic potential as a creative entity. Originality/value This paper examines the music industry in less-developed nations by contextualizing their institutions using the IE framework. It contributes to identifying the environmental factors influencing independent institutional musicians. Internal and external factors significantly contribute to identifying Indonesia's independent musician setting through IE.

A growing body of literature has examined the dynamics of wind energy development across different mature and emerging institutional contexts. However, so far only few have paused to reflect on the differences between developed and emerging economies. Building upon the literature on institutional entrepreneurship, this paper compares institutional strategies in wind energy development in Finland and India by using the typology of political, technical and cultural work. We highlight the role of institutional approaches in studying sustainable energy transitions in mature and emerging institutional contexts, while being sensitive to the role of heterogeneous actors in shaping institutional arrangements. Our findings offer implications for debates in the institutional entrepreneurship literature by exploring how actors shape their institutional environment in different contexts, and the extent to which emerging institutional contexts provide more opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship. Finally, this paper underscores the need for developing insights into enabling conditions for successful collective institutional entrepreneurship and for developing typologies of institutional strategies which are generalizable across both mature and emerging institutional contexts.

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to propose an action-interaction-process framework to extend research on institutional entrepreneurship. The framework examines an actor's characteristics, interactions in an institutional context, and the process by which entrepreneurial action is accomplished.Design/methodology/approach– Via a sociohistorical archival method of narrative analysis, the action-interaction-process framework is applied to an exemplary case of institutional entrepreneurship – the case of James Meredith and the integrationist movement at the University of Mississippi in the 1960 s.Findings– The findings show that institutional entrepreneurs who maintain little power and influence over the institutional field must form strategic alliances to mobilize constituents and capitalize on the convergence of resources in the social setting.Practical implications– Through the process of collective action, institutional entrepreneurs can overcome resistance to change and displace inequitable institutional policies, while establishing new practices and norms.Originality/value– This research provides a stronger approach to examining institutional entrepreneurship and institutional entrepreneurs, the interaction between the institutional entrepreneur and the social context in which the individual operates, and the process by which inequitable institutionalized norms are reformed through collective action. This approach is useful to researchers examining institutional entrepreneurship or any area in which power disparity plays an important role.