Institutional Entrepreneurship: Agents’ Ability and Activity for Building up New Institutions by Combining Existing Elements

Katalin Szabó ()
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Katalin Szabó: Department of Comparative and Institutional Economics, Corvinus University Budapest, Budapest

Society and Economy, 2017, vol. 39, issue 3, 359-383

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Institutional entrepreneurship; non-isomorphic change; agency theory; institutional proliferation; sharing economy; sharing as a combination; dematerialization; mass customization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 M O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: This paper is an extended version of the presentation given at the conference held on the occasion of Balázs Hámori’s 70th birthday by the Department of Comparative and Institutional Economics of Corvinus University Budapest.
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