Institutional entrepreneurship among small ventures: Moderating role of institutional environment

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although resource-poor peripheral IEs may set off institution-building processes in emerging fields, they are usually superseded by central organizational actors during later stages of institution-building.

The paper reviews the current discussion on institutional change and institutional entrepreneurship. Specifically, it focuses on institutional change agents, by which we mean individuals whose actions can be shown to have contributed to formal or informal institutional change, to the benefit of the wider economy or society as well as to themselves. It aims to explore their antecedents and behaviours, and the contingent factors contributing to institutional change, both intentionally and unintentionally. We find that the concept of institutional entrepreneurship does not provide an adequate conceptual underpinning for incorporating human agency into institutionalised theory. We therefore argue that a focus on institutional change agents may be more productive. Whilst institutional theory recognises the impact of institutions on entrepreneurs and individuals, this paper draws attention to the role of human agency for institutional change. Institutional change can happen intentionally and as an unintended by-product of entrepreneurial or organisational 'path-dependent' behaviour. The implication of this is that it is not only intentional behaviour which contributes to institutional change, but rather any entrepreneurial behaviour which implicitly or explicitly questions existing institutions. Thus, the paper adds to the current debate on institutional entrepreneurship.

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.

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.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of the institutional environment on strategic networks including their cohesiveness as well as institutional entrepreneurship activities conducted by members of these networks.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a case study of the trade association Pharma Industry Finland (PIF) and its institutional environment.FindingsInstitutional environment and institutional entrepreneurship of a strategic network are intertwined in various ways. Changes in the institutional environment influence the strategic cohesiveness of the network and the mutual goals of its network members. As a result, PIF proactively engages in entrepreneurial activities to realize its interests.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper of one network and one institutional environment is limited in generalizability. Further research is needed to explore if similar results can be obtained in other contexts.Practical implicationsIn order to be successful, companies should be able to sense and evaluate which matters can be effectively addressed through collective institutional entrepreneurship and/or the company's own entrepreneurial activity.Originality/valueThis empirical study contributes to discussions on the theoretical understanding of strategic networks in relation to institutional environments, institutionally bounded strategizing in networks, and institutional entrepreneurship in business networks.

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in the modern global economy, increasing the share of production of the enterprises of small and medium enterprises in gross domestic product and exports not only developed but also developing countries. Innovation processes cover all sectors of the economy, and more and more of the population is involved in entrepreneurial activity that promotes the penetration of entrepreneurial thinking and values of entrepreneurship in all spheres of socio-economic life of society. Institute of entrepreneurship plays an increasingly prominent role in the institutional environment of socio-economic systems. It actualizes the problem of studies of the relationship of entrepreneurship with the institutions of law, culture, management. Institutional Economics has sufficient capacity heuristic, methodological and theoretical research tools to study this problem. In particular, the structural modeling of the “old” institutionalism covers, in the author’s opinion, the diversity of interrelationships institute of entrepreneurship and other components of the institutional and economic environment.

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.

The existing HRM literature has identified several roles of HR within an organization. This paper proposes a role for HR at the institutional level. As HR actors are involved in several interfaces within the organization and between the organization and its institutional environment they have a key role to play as institutional entrepreneurs. This paper focuses on three dimensions- one, characteristics of HR actors as institutional entrepreneurs, two, the triggers of HR entrepreneurship and three, the locus of HR institutional entrepreneurship. The aim of this paper is to introduce the role of HR actors as institutional entrepreneurs in order to add a novel perspective to the existing literature on roles of HR. This would hopefully trigger future research to look at this role of HR and derive meaningful implications for business organizations.

Purpose This study analyzes professionalization processes and interdisciplinary collaboration of social work professionals within Chilean family and criminal justice systems following judicial reforms implemented in the 2000s. Materials and Methods An exploratory-descriptive qualitative design employed semi-structured interviews with 21 social workers across Metropolitana and Biobío regions (2020–2022). Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling from family courts (n = 14) and criminal justice settings (n = 7). Thematic analysis was conducted using ATLAS.ti software, applying integrated deductive-inductive approaches grounded in sociology of public action, law and society studies, and feminist ethics of care frameworks. Results Three fundamental transformations emerged: social workers introduced gender perspectives and care ethics into judicial practices, catalyzing shifts from punitive toward relational interventions prioritizing human dignity and social complexity; active collaboration developed between social workers and lawyers, generating productive tensions that enhanced each profession’s expertise in addressing complex social-legal issues; differentiated professional roles materialized, with social workers functioning as judicial partners in family cases and community-legal mediators in criminal contexts. Discussion Care ethics integration constitutes a fundamental challenge to traditional juridical capital, promoting contextually-sensitive justice models. Social workers operate as institutional entrepreneurs, employing street-level bureaucratic practices to gradually transform institutional cultures despite persistent professional hierarchies and resource constraints. Conclusion Chilean judicial reforms facilitated social work integration, contributing to justice system humanization through structural transformations. Social workers consolidated their role as agents of institutional change, though sustained investment in human resources and policies prioritizing social perspectives remains essential for advancing paradigmatic shifts toward inclusive, people-centered justice models.

This study explores the relationship between institutional entrepreneurship and legitimacy. It looks at how an institutional entrepreneur is able to acquire legitimacy for a novel innovation. The empirical setting is in an emerging economy, because institutions are typically less rigid in emerging economies, and so the likelihood of institutional entrepreneurship occurring is greater, providing more opportunities for experimental observation. While institutional theorists have devoted considerable attention to institutional entrepreneurship in recent years, there has been little focus on exploring the difference between the institutional entrepreneur’s actual creative act and the subsequent need for the entrepreneur to acquire legitimacy for her/his innovation. This study is the first to separate these two components of institutional entrepreneurship. By doing so, the study is then able to investigate three related questions: (1) Is it possible to shed new light on resolving the paradox of embedded agency?, (2) What are the mechanisms of legitimacy acquisition that an institutional entrepreneur uses to get her/his novel idea accepted and approved by the internal and external stakeholders?, and (3) What kind of institutional or ideological preconditions might be necessary for institutional entrepreneurial action to benefit or harm a society in an emerging economy? The study uses a qualitative case study design research based on systematic combining approach for data collection and analysis. The critical case study is the establishment of the first free trade zone in Dubai, UAE, the Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZA). Data was collected from 18 semi-structured interviews and several secondary resources detailing the establishment of JAFZA; and analyzed using thematic analysis to explain how the institutional innovation of JAFZA was received and accepted in a society. JAFZA has subsequently gone on to become the core business of the hugely successful DP World group.

The notion of institutional entrepreneurship has been central to institutional change. However, the role of MNEs as institutional entrepreneurs has mostly remained understudied. This research focuses on the unique characteristics of emerging economy contexts to and the role of MNEs in developing, refining, and changing institutional arrangements in their institutional settings. We use a mix-method which includes a qualitative comparative case analysis and a quantitative repertory grid analysis with the help of the Nextexpertizer software to analyze face-to-face interviews with mid-level and senior managers of subsidiaries of eight major MNEs, and build our theoretical framework. The findings of our interviews suggest that MNEs take different strategic actions to act as institutional entrepreneurs to respond to facets of their institutional environment, depending on the restrictiveness/openness of their institutional environment, and their own relative strength.

Purpose Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are critical to enhancing economic growth and the rejuvenation of tourism destinations. However, current research offers limited insight into the broader evolutionary logic behind tourism SMEs as a collective effort by various stakeholders. This paper aims to use an institutional entrepreneurship lens to analyze the evolution process of tourism SMEs. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from three representative cases in China, with responses from 80 interviewees, including tourism SME owners and key stakeholders such as tourists, government officials and residents. Thematic analysis was applied to examine the data across cases, identifying both common patterns and contextual variations within the institutional entrepreneurship framework. Findings The three cases provide three different but most likely prevalent modes of development, i.e., collective-oriented, policy-oriented and market-oriented modes, which have proved to be very generalizable to other regional and international situations. The findings indicate that the transformation of tourism SMEs takes various trails in these modes that introduce a twist to the institutional entrepreneurship paradigm. To be more exact, the mobilization and legitimization sequence can be inverted, clustering is a crucial process in the development of tourism SMEs, and the sequence of clustering depends on contextual factors. Originality/value This study not only advances theoretical understanding of how tourism SMEs interact with their institutional environments but also critically contributes to the advancement of the institutional entrepreneurship theory. The results provide practical implications for various destinations with various development modes to adequately inform the development of the tourism SME sectors.

The powerful imagery of entrepreneurship as a means to induce and explain institutional change is gaining momentum (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). In response to criticisms that institutional theory was chiefly being used to explain homogeneity and persistence, important efforts have been devoted to restoring human agency in explanations of endogenous institutional change (DiMaggio, 1988; Sewell, 1992; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). However, the image of the entrepreneur as institutional change agent has also been a source of controversy among institutional theorists, especially when accompanied by voluntarist, un-embedded conceptions of individual action (Holm, 1995; Leca & Naccache, 2006). As a result we observe vivid scholarly discussions on how to solve the "paradox of embedded agency"– i.e. on explaining how institutional change is possible if actors are fully conditioned by the institutions that they wish to change (Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006).

Post-institutionalism is a promising direction in the study of institutions, developing the methodological ideas of critical institutionalism to build an extended institutional approach (in G. Hodgson's terminology). The mission of post-institutionalism is the development of interdisciplinary, complexity-centered methodologies for the analysis of institutions, allowing the development of institutional research beyond the framework of both new and original institutional theories. The article briefly outlines the logic of the creation and origins of the post-institutional theory, provides its methodological features, philosophical foundations, and guidelines for the research program. Post-institutionalists proceed from the fact that the methodological tools of both the new institutional economics and the traditional (“old”) institutionalism are inadequate to the tasks of understanding and explaining the qualitatively complicated institutions of late capitalism. Such institutions are internally heterogeneous, highly fluid, combine different coordinating principles (logics), their functions and boundaries are difficult to identify. The focus of special attention in post-institutional economics is assemblages – ​institutional systems that combine heterogeneous institutions with irreducible logics. Institutional assemblages are highly adaptive but also functionally redundant and conflict-prone. Bricolage is considered as the main type of institutional change in post-institutionalism, which is understood as the recombinant creation of institutions by a multitude of actors from the elements available in the access to solve current institutional problems. Institutional change agents are not only institutional entrepreneurs, but also institutional “workers”, i. e. ordinary actors in their daily routine. The main function of institutions from the point of view of post-institutionalism is not the minimization of transaction costs, but the creation of transaction value.

The article is devoted to the study of the impact of institutional aspects on the transformation of the hospitality industry in Ukraine. The object of the study is the transformation processes of the hospitality industry, which took place under the influence of institutional factors. The paper analyses a number of scientific works by foreign and domestic scholars on understanding the concepts of "institution", "institute", "institutional environment" and its importance in the development of the hospitality industry in general. Methodology. The aim of the study is to analyse the impact of institutional factors on the transformational processes of development of the hospitality industry in Ukraine at the present stage. It is proposed to consider the institutional environment as a set of formal and informal institutions that at different levels have different impacts on the formation of the institutional system of society. The comparative characteristics of formal and informal institutions were compiled in order to clearly distinguish their differences and apply them correctly in building an effective institutional policy for the hospitality industry. It is proved that although formal institutions are relatively stable, their formation and preservation should be based on their perception by people in society as a factor in effectively solving certain problems. It was determined that Ukraine, as a country in a period of crisis (direct military action), should seriously consider institutional factors as a source of future direct investment, and weak institutional policies will raise concerns about the possibility of transferring management practices, procedures, and methods from other countries. The authors compiled a scheme of influence of factors on the formation of the institutional environment of the country as a whole and the hospitality industry, including political, legislative, economic, socio-cultural and ethical factors of influence. The publication examines the mutual influence of the institutional environment and the organisation, which is based on institutional ties, institutional pressure and institutional entrepreneurship. It has been found that an effective institutional environment stimulates the development of the hospitality industry, and a good institutional structure characterised by a strong rule of law, control of corruption, freedom of expression, a stable political environment, better regulation and good governance can open a new path for hospitality services. Conclusion. The results of the study are a significant contribution to the qualitative formation of the institutional environment of the hospitality industry.