Julie Battilana & Coauthors on Institutional Entrepreneurship
Fast Breaking Papers Commentary, August 2011
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Article: How Actors Change Institutions: Towards a Theory of Institutional Entrepreneurship
Authors: Battilana, J;Leca, B;Boxenbaum,
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Julie Battilana, Bernard Leca, & Eva Boxenbaum talk with ScienceWatch.com and answer a few questions about this month's Fast Breaking Paper paper in the field of Economics & Business.
Why do you think your paper is highly
cited?
This paper deals with institutional entrepreneurship, that is, the process by which organizations or individuals initiate and implement change that diverges from the taken-for-granted practices in a field of activity. At a time such as now, when the question of how to reform existing institutions has taken on great urgency, understanding the process of institutional entrepreneurship is crucial.
Creating change in deeply rooted systems, such as financial and health care systems or social systems that reproduce inequalities, is distinctively challenging. Patterns of acting and organizing in these systems become so taken-for-granted that people perceive them as the only possible ways of acting and organizing. To successfully reform such systems, one needs to better understand the dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship.
Does it describe a new discovery, methodology, or
synthesis of knowledge?
Coauthor Eva Boxenbaum
Coauthor Bernard
Leca.
The paper proposes a model of the process of institutional entrepreneurship that builds on a comprehensive review of the institutional entrepreneurship literature. In doing so, we systematically integrate previous pieces of knowledge on institutional entrepreneurship.
We first address definitional and theoretical issues associated with the concept of institutional entrepreneurship. We then present the different phases of the process of institutional entrepreneurship from the emergence of institutional entrepreneurs to their implementation of change. Finally, we highlight future directions for research on institutional entrepreneurship.
Our aim is to strengthen the theoretical foundation of institutional entrepreneurship and thereby help to develop a theory of action that accounts for actors' embeddedness in their institutional environment while also accounting for their capacity to change this environment.
Would you summarize the significance of your paper
in layman's terms?
The paper outlines how individual and organizational actors might contribute to changing their environment despite institutional pressures toward stasis. In doing so, we hope that our work will enable a variety of actors to better understand the challenges of changing deeply rooted social systems as well as how to cope with those challenges.
How did you become involved in this research, and
how would you describe the particular challenges, setbacks, and
successes that you've encountered along the way?
With most countries facing a major financial and economic crisis, the question of how to reform existing institutions has assumed greater urgency. The demand for institutional change is increasing among organization members and citizens the world over. Efforts to change them, however, face institutions' strong power of inertia.
Recognizing that institutional change is a complex process involving different types of forces and agents, we argue that it is our responsibility as scholars to explain not only how institutions influence actors' behavior, but also how these actors might, in turn, influence, and possibly change, institutions. Uncovering the dynamics of institutional change is a challenging task as it is a complex and multi-dimensional process but it is also an exciting endeavor.
Where do you see your research leading in the
future? Do you foresee any social or political implications for your
research?
Because institutional change is a highly complex and uncertain process, the outcome of which is difficult to predict, we should devote additional effort to trying to understand better how actors can initiate and implement change that diverges from the institutional status quo. By doing so, we will inform our understanding not only of the institutional origins of a crisis such as the one that we are currently facing, but also of how actors, in particular, policymakers, might reform institutions.
We also hope that this research will be useful for researchers in various
social sciences disciplines including economics, sociology, or development
studies, who are willing to engage with the issue of how to reform deeply
rooted social systems.
Julie Battilana
Associate Professor
Organizational Behavior Department
Harvard Business School
Boston, MA, USA
Bernard Leca
Professor
Strategy and Organization Theory
IAE of Lille—LEM, UMR 8179
Lille, France
and
Rouen Business School
Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
Eva Boxenbaum
Associate Professor
Department of Organization
Copenhagen Business School
Frederiksberg, Denmark
and
Associate Professor
Center for Management Science
Mines ParisTech
Paris, France
KEYWORDS: INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE, INTERORGANIZATIONAL COLLABORATION, RELATIONAL SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION, FORMAL STRUCTURE, HUMAN AGENCY, FIELDS, INDUSTRY, TRANSFORMATION, PERSPECTIVE.