Balancing Agency with Structure: Institutional Entrepreneurship as an Embedded Discovery Process

Abstract

While mainstream research has treated entrepreneurship as a highly individualised and agentic process, institutional researchers contend that entrepreneurship operates within a greater embedded setting. Various researchers have appealed to Giddens’ dual structure to explain an entrepreneur’s embedded-agency. According to Giddens’ dual structure, this embedded-agency consists of the rules or norms of a social group in which these rules constrain and enable an entrepreneur’s resources. Yet, despite Giddens’ contributions, Giddens is criticised for conflating the rules of this embedded setting with an entrepreneur’s resources in which neither affects the other in any significant way. By drawing on concepts of the Austrian entrepreneur and embeddedness, a theory of institutional entrepreneurship is developed to address this conflation problem. This institutional entrepreneurship offers an embedded-agency to explain how an entrepreneur can create, maintain and disrupt their embedded social settings. This embedded-agency addresses Giddens’ conflation problem and broadens the agent-centric focus of institutional entrepreneurship research.