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Institutional Entrepreneurship. Cynthia Hardy and Steve Maguire The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism Chapter 7. Presented by Di Wu. Introduction of authors. Cynthia Hardy Professor of Management ( Organization Studies) Organization discourse theory
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Institutional Entrepreneurship Cynthia Hardy and Steve Maguire The SAGE handbook of organizational institutionalism Chapter 7 Presented by Di Wu
Introduction of authors • Cynthia Hardy • Professor of Management (Organization Studies) • Organization discourse theory • Power and politics in organizations • Identity Inter-organizational collaboration • Strategic change • Organizational theory • Steve Maguire • Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University • Markets and Globalization • Strategies for Sustainable Development • Managing Organizational Politics
Definition of Institutional Entrepreneurship • “activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangement and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones”. (Maguire, Hardy &Lawrence, 2004:657) • “new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources (institutional entrepreneurs) see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly”. (DiMaggio, 1998:14)
Different Perspectives • Individual institutional entrepreneurs play highly influential, if not determining, roles in episodes of creating and transforming institutional arrangements. VS • Collective, incremental and multi-level elements of institutional entrepreneurship is a process.
Interesting questions for recent institutional theorists • How actors are able to envision and champion new practices if they are embedded in an institutional field and subject to its regulative, normative, and cognitive pressures? • Deeply embedded, advantaged, resource-rich central players. • How institutional entrepreneurs get other embedded field members to take up and institutionalize new practice? • Those less embedded in and less privileged are more likely to welcome new ideas.
Introduction of this chapter • Review the emerging and rapidly growing body of organizational research on institutional entrepreneurship. • Which types of actor take on the role of institutional entrepreneur? • The field condition that help to initiate institutional entrepreneurship. • The role of interpretive struggles. • Intervention strategies. • Provide some insights.
Institutional entrepreneurs • Who? • Individuals; • Organizations, especially in the professions; • Networks; • Associations; and • Social movements.
Two approaches to understand Who -1 • One approach focuses explicitly on the properties – special characteristics, qualities and abilities • Take a reflective position towards institutional practices and can envision alternative modes of getting things done (Beckert,1999:786) • Critical realism emphasizes “autonomous reflexive” • An actor who reflected in relative isolation from the concerns of others, as a result of which he was more likely to experience conflict with the structures that surrounded him and, there fore, to seek opportunities for change.
Two approaches to understand Who -2 • The Other approach focuses in subject positions or social positions from which actors can take action. (Maguire et al., 2001; Battilana, 2006; Bourdieu, 1990) • Actors do not have power; instead, they occupy subject positions that allow them to exercise power in and on a particular filed. • Legitimated identities; legitimacy with respect; powerful; • Empirical studies have found that institutional change can be initiated by powerful actors located in dominant positions in mature fields. • Central actors may have access to alternative practices in other fields through a variety of mechanisms. • Institutional change can also be initiated by less dominant, peripheral actors.
Initiating field conditions • Certain stimuli – uncertainty, problems, tensions and contradictions in a field – can establish favourable initiating conditions for institutional entrepreneurship by motivating and furnishing ideas for change; • Fields in particular states, especially emerging ones and those in crisis, are also more likely to present opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship.
Interpretive struggles • Actors are not simply carriers of institutional meanings; rather, they are viewed as active interpreters of practices whose meaning is, as a result, negotiated in ongoing, complex process • “individual” interpretations can be seen as part of institutional agency • The process of discursive struggle through which institutional entrepreneurship succeeds or fails. • View meanings as a collective achievement and emphasizes the complex and contradictory process in which it is negotiated and stabilized
Intervention strategies • How do institutional entrepreneurs succeed in these activities to change institutional fields? • Identifying and explicating the strategic interventions made by institutional entrepreneurs to bring about change. • Strategies and activities in which institutional entrepreneurs engage (e.g., Lawrence, 1999) • Skills and abilities required to carry out these activities (e.g., Fligstein, 1997; Perkmann & Spicer, 2007) • Three broad themes: resources, rationales, and relations
Resources • DiMaggio highlighted the necessity of “sufficient resources” to create or change institutions (DiMaggio, 1988:14) • Wide range of resources • The use of finance, knowledge, position; (Beckert, 1999) • political, financial, and organizational resources; (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) • material resources; (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) • cultural resources; (Creed, Scully & Austin, 2002) and • discursive resources. (Hardy &Phillips,1999)
Resources • This chapter focus on material resources • Material resources are mobilized by institutional entrepreneurs to be used as a lever against other actors – subsidiary actors, allies, and external constituencies – to negotiate support for the change project in question (DiMaggio, 1988) • Positive inducement: rewards • Negative inducements: punishments • Recruit allies to control rewards and punishments
Rationales • How the content of the institutional entrepreneur’s communication creates shared cognitions that support institutional change. • The discursive interventions associated with institutional entrepreneurship draws attention to the context in which legitimating accounts are produced. • Institutional entrepreneur’s discursive interventions in terms of the desired outcomes they are designed to achieve in relation to the targeted audience.
Relations • Institutional entrepreneurship often involves establishing new inter-actor relations to bring about change. (e.g., Dew,2006; Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Garud et al., 2002) • Institutional entrepreneurship is associated with various forms of collaborative relations. • Institutional entrepreneurs engage in a range of material and discursive interventions aimed at changing inter-actor relations and bringing about collective action.
Three dimension of power(Lukes, 1974) • Institutional entrepreneurship is tightly connected to the exercise of power (Fligstein, 2001) • 1st: The overt leveraging of material resources to ensure change even in the face of resistance, such as offering financial incentives, imposing penalities, or invoking formal authority, etc. • 2nd: Less discussion, to manipulate decision agendas, arenas and participants to bring about change. • 3rd: Discursive interventions to create and communicate convincing rationales.
Insights – Outcomes • Actor-centric view: centered on the institutional entrepreneur. • Creation of new formal institutions, industries, organizational forms, practices and identities. • Process centric view: focus on institutional entrepreneurship as an emergent outcome of activities of diverse, spatially dispersed actors (Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007) • Major upheaval or transformation • Changes that while they might be quite marked, do not entail a significant redistribution of capital (Bourdieu, 1990)
Insights – broad view • The two narratives are not necessarily mutually exclusive; • The great potential lies with the process-centric narrative • Three reasons (page212,213) • There are dangers in the recent groundswell of interest in institutional entrepreneurship • Celebrating heroic “entrepreneurs” and great “leaders” • Reify fields, actors, and the process of change itself.
Big questions in OT • Why do organizations exist? • Why are firms the same/different? • What causes changes in organizations? • Why do some firms survive and others don’t? • Emerging issue?