Chance or Genius?: Dutch Sustainability Reporting and Garbage Can Institutionalism

Abstract

In this article I question the dominant assumptions of institutionalisation and change being smooth and linear processes driven by a single heroic institutional entrepreneur blessed with great foresight and purpose. Instead I combine institutional theory with the theoretical lexicon of the garbage can model to offer an alternative interpretation of an institutional story, in particular fitting for pluralistic practices in a relatively emerging, uncertain and heterogeneous field. I draw on a qualitative analysis of the rise of Dutch sustainability reporting and examine how the oftentimes collective and serendipitous interplay between problems, solutions, decision makers and decision moments shapes social order and institutions. I find that sustainability reporting’s development resembles a more collective form of institutional entrepreneurship as a range of actors muddled through and were involved in the enactment of historical contingencies that enabled action and change as problems, solutions, and partic...