Creative forces for entrepreneurship: The role of institutional change agents

Friederike Welter and David Smallbone

No 01/15, Working Papers from Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IfM) Bonn

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: institutional entrepreneurship; human agency; entrepreneurship context (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 D02 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-hme and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifmwps:0115

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