How to change other people's institutions: discursive entrepreneurship and the boundary object of competition/competitiveness in the German banking sector

Abstract

The paper explores recent public debates about the structure of the financial system in Germany. It pays particular attention to their symbolic-strategic dimension, that is, to attempts by several institutional entrepreneurs to reformulate the criteria of organizational legitimacy, concentrating on the sense-making and legitimization processes involved in institutional persistence or change. The paper discourse-analyses a campaign by institutional entrepreneurs – mainly representatives of commercial banks – who attempted to homogenize the criteria of organizational legitimacy in the German banking sector by questioning the fundamentals of the three-pillar system and the non-commercial banks. Institutional entrepreneurs are understood as discursive entrepreneurs whose actions refer to institutionalized generalizations of value. In the case of the financial sector in Germany, it was the generalized value of competition/competitiveness that served as a discursive device to legitimize the attempts of commercial banks to alter the institutional structure.