The Resources of Institutional Entrepreneurs in Different Structural Settings

This study represents a crucial step in identifying the key components of institutional entrepreneurship among small ventures. It examines how the institutional environment moderates the efforts of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of strategic institutional change. Using a representative sample of 55 small ventures to confirm the hypotheses, the data were analyzed with the hierarchical linear method to examine how institutional entrepreneurship components are moderated by the institutional environment. The findings indicate that institutional entrepreneurs recognize key components of institutional entrepreneurship, including the locale of change, strategic behavior, and new technology. Additionally, this study finds that the institutional environment moderates the relationships between the locale of change, strategic behavior, new technology, and government regulations. Institutional entrepreneurship activities vary considerably across countries and over time. Therefore, achieving a comprehensive understanding of their role remains an important area of research. This study offers a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs’ legitimation approaches and underscores the significance of examining the contextual foundations of institutional entrepreneurship.

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.

Creating opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship: The Colonel and the Cup in English County Cricket

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and discuss how healthcare organisations can act as institutional entrepreneurs in a context of change. The authors conducted an in-depth longitudinal case study (2005-2008) of a healthcare organisation in the province of Quebec, Canada. Data collection consisted of real-time observations of senior managers (n = 87), interviews (n = 24) with decision-makers and secondary data analysis of documents. The paper reports on the extent to which entrepreneurial healthcare organisations can be a driving force in the creation of a new practice. The authors analyse the development of a diabetes reference centre by a healthcare organisation acting as an institutional entrepreneur that illustrates the conceptualisation of an innovation and the mobilisation of resources to implement it and to influence other actors in the field. The authors discuss the case in reference to three stages of change: emergence, implementation and diffusion. The results illustrate the different strategies used by managers to advance their proposed projects. This study helps to better understand the dynamics of mandated change in a mature field such as healthcare and the roles played by organisations in this process. By adopting a proactive strategy, a healthcare organisation can play an active role and strongly influence the evolution of its field. This paper is one of only a few to analyse strategies used by healthcare organisations in the context of mandated change.

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.

A Nurse and a Civil Servant changing institutions: Entrepreneurial processes in different public sector 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.

The present study contributes to the literature on institutional entrepreneurship by exploring the phenomenon of failure – particularly, how it is construed as such and de-emphasized through face-saving efforts by institutional entrepreneurs. We draw on extant research on institutional entrepreneurship in established fields and insights from social movement literature and political theories of organizations to illustrate how a French business school tried and failed to promote a new MBA program format for students with no prior work experience. The longitudinal case study reveals several mechanisms which played a central role in increasing the project’s ambiguity and ultimately forced a strategic reorientation: (1) the institutional entrepreneurs’ inability to mobilize collectivities and persuade them of the credibility and appropriateness of the innovation, despite their central position in the French business education field; (2) the subsequent centralization of the audience’s social structure and their counter-mobilization around an alternative institutional project; (3) the expansion of organizational membership bringing in new actors who challenged the institutional innovation thereby feeding political struggles inside the organization. We also elaborate on organizational recovery from failure by showing (1) how the conjunction of intra-organizational and field-level factors led the institutional entrepreneurs to construe their innovation as unsuccessful and compelled them to acknowledge failure; and (2) how they sought to minimize the damage of a strategic U-turn and save face in the eyes of key audiences.

In this article, we address the question of institutional and organizational change through the start-up of new ventures. Following the institutional entrepreneurship theory, we examine the process of divergent change and the kinds of institutional work enabling entrepreneurs operating in a peripheral social position of mature fields to challenge the existing status quo. We argue that the start-up of new organizations can be an opportunity for repositioning existing traditional entrepreneurial capabilities by combining them with additional and complementary competences towards new institutional logics. Building on an in-depth longitudinal case study of a group of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises – acting intentionally as a community for innovation – we highlight the contextual conditions and the implementing factors allowing this type of institutional entrepreneurship. Our study makes two main contributions. First, we try to fill the gap with existing research mostly focused on dominant organizations, by showing how institutional entrepreneurship can be implemented by low-status organizations, within highly institutionalized fields. Second, we shed light on the process implementing new divergent organizational forms, by bridging established mature firms with new innovative fields.

Institutional entrepreneurship comprises the activities of agents who disrupt existing social institutions or create new ones, often to enable diffusion, especially of radical innovations, in a market. The increased interest in institutional entrepreneurship has produced a large number of scholarly publications, especially in the last five years. As a consequence, the literature landscape is somewhat complex and scattered. We aim to compile a quantitative overview of the field within business and management research by conducting bibliometric performance analyses and science mappings. We identified the most productive and influential journals, authors, and articles with the highest impact. We found that institutional entrepreneurship has stronger ties to organization studies than to entrepreneurship research. Additionally, a large body of literature at the intersection of institutions and entrepreneurship does not refer to institutional entrepreneurship theory. The science mappings revealed a distinction between theoretical and conceptual research on one hand and applied and empirical research on the other hand. Research clusters reflect the structure–agency problem by focusing on the change agent’s goals and interests, strategies, and specific implementation mechanisms, as well as the relevance of public agents for existing institutions, and a more abstract process rather than agency view.

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.

We draw on the early history of the management consulting field to build theory about how institutional entrepreneurs legitimate new kinds of organizations in emerging fields. We study the professional form of management consulting organization, which came to dominate other alternatives. Pioneers of this organizational form seized opportunities arising from broad institutional change to discredit the status quo and legitimate their model of how to advise organizations on strategic and operational issues. Similar to institutional entrepreneurs seeking to change mature fields, those in this emerging field engaged in theorization, undertook collective action, and established affiliations with recognized authorities and elites. But unlike institutional entrepreneurs in mature fields, the actors we studied could not leverage logics, positions, or collectivities within their emerging field; instead, they drew on logics from outside their field, sought affiliations with external authorities and elites, and emphasized the benefits of their activities for society at large. Our analysis thus suggests important differences in how actors legitimate novel organizational forms in emerging versus mature fields and underscores the need for theories of institutional entrepreneurship that explicitly account for field context.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explicate the role of institutional entrepreneurs who use accounting technology to accomplish change within a privatised telecommunications company.Design/methodology– The case study method is adopted. The authors draw on recent extension to institutional theory that gives greater emphasis to agency including concepts such as embeddedness, institutional entrepreneurs and institutional contradiction.Findings– As part of the consequences of new public management reforms, we illustrate how institutional entrepreneurs de-established an older state-run bureaucratic and engineering-based routine and replaced it with a business- and accounting-based routine. Eventually, new accounting routines were reproduced and taken for granted by telecommunications management and employees.Research Limitations/implications– As this study is limited to a single case study, no generalisation except to theory can be made. There are implications for privatisation of state sector organisations both locally and internationally.Originality/value– The paper makes a contribution to elaborating the role of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change towards privatisation and how accounting was used as a technology of change.

This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency—that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the co...

Current research on institutional change is typically conducted with the field as the central unit of study. Studies on institutional entrepreneurship have been conducted in both mature and emerging fields, and there are calls for researchers to further explore the differences between institutional entrepreneurship in these two contexts. I suggest that a third category could be usefully examined: merging fields. In this paper I provide a comparison between merging fields, mature fields and emerging fields, and discuss the implications of this for institutional entrepreneurship. I suggest that this distinct context provides unique challenges and opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs.