Institutional entrepreneuring for energy poverty: The role of boundary work in developing a collaborative product-service system for household appliances

This study explores a remarkable initiative named “Papillon” that aims to contribute to alleviating energy poverty by organizing affordable and context-sensitive access to energy-efficient appliances. The initiative involves a collaboration across societal sectors (civil society, business, government) and has used the idea of a product-service system to develop an appliance rental system for energy-poor households. As these kinds of “cross-sectoral” collaborations hold promise for contributing to complex societal issues but are notoriously hard to develop, we set out to trace the entrepreneurial process that brought the collaboration into being. To do so, this paper builds on and elaborates insights from institutional theory on organizations. More specifically we start off from Hjorth & Reay's (2022) recent account of institutional entrepreneuring and further develops it in relation to the empirical case of Papillon. In doing so, we arrive at a theoretical-analytic framework that focusses on entrepreneurs' configurational boundary work in the context of diverging institutional logics. In the analysis we show how four modes of boundary work – probing, arranging, buffering, coalescing – play a decisive role in bringing about a collaborative rental system for appliances that is attuned to the lifeworld of households in energy poverty. Our paper aims to contribute by (1) presenting and analysing a cross-sectoral approach to provide energy-poor households with access to essential appliances (2) developing a framework that brings novel insights into the formation of cross-sectoral initiatives that aim to create social value.