Institutional Work: Bringing change into the lives of the poor: entrepreneurship outside traditional boundaries
The powerful imagery of entrepreneurship as a means to induce and explain institutional change is gaining momentum (Greenwood Suddaby, 2006; Lawrence Suddaby, 2006) In response to criticisms that institutional theory was chiefly being used to explain homogeneity and persistence, important efforts have been devoted to restoring human agency in explanations of endogenous institutional change (DiMaggio, 1988; Sewell, 1992; Emirbayer Mische, 1998) However, the image of the entrepreneur as institutional change agent has also been a source of controversy among institutional theorists, especially when accompanied by voluntarist, un embedded conceptions of individual action (Holm, 1995; Leca Naccache, 2006) As a result we observe vivid scholarly discussions on how to solve the "paradox of embedded agency" i.e. on explaining how institutional change is possible if actors are fully conditioned by the institutions that they wish to change (Holm, 1995; Seo Creed, 2002; Greenwood Suddaby, 2006) The current debate is important and we welcome more agent oriented views on institutions. The purpose of this chapter is to advance institutional theory by rethinking various aspects of institutional work (Lawrence Suddaby, 2006; DiMaggio, 1988) and thereby to contribute new insights into the paradox of embedded agency. We do so by challenging and breaking dominant patterns in current empirical research. While previous research on institutional entrepreneurship has predominantly looked at elite and/or powerful actors (DiMaggio, 1988; Fligstein Mara Drita, 1996) who assume either peripheral (Leblebici, Salancik, Copay King, 1991) or central (Greenwood Suddaby, 2006) positions, we focus instead on institutional work carried out by actors with limited power and very few resources.