A Critical Realist Approach To Institutional Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Recent works in institutional analysis have challenged the traditional deterministic view, whereby institutional pressures explain actors’ actions and behaviours, and have called for the restoration of agency to this analysis. This presents institutional analysis with a major challenge: how to consider simultaneously the influence of both actors’ actions and the structures in which they are embedded, without conflating them? This issue is especially crucial when trying to analyse institutional entrepreneurs’ strategies. In this paper, we outline a non-conflating model of institutional entrepreneurship, by drawing on critical realism. We illustrate this model by mean of an illustrative case study.