Institutional Entrepreneurship as Embedded Agency: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

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