Februrary 2008
Seminar
Identity Processes in Institutional Entrepreneurship:
Emergence, Contestation and Enactment of a New Role
February 15, 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Social Ecology I, Room 306
Jennifer Howard-Grenville
Professor of Management
Lundquist College of Business
University of Oregon
Biography
Jennifer Howard-Grenville is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business. Jennifer studies microprocesses of organizational and institutional change and has explored the role of routines, issue selling, and culture in enabling and inhibiting change. Her work has been published in Organization Science, Organization & Environment, Law & Social Inquiry, California Management Review and several other journals. She is the author of Corporate Culture and Environmental Practice (Edward Elgar, 2007), which documents her ethnographic study of a high-tech company. Jennifer received her Ph.D. at MIT, her MA at Oxford University, and her B.Sc. at Queen’s University, Canada.
Seminar Paper Abstract
This paper examines the emergence and tactics of institutional entrepreneurship in a mature field in crisis. Based on a longitudinal, inductive study of a lay Catholic reform group founded in the wake of revelations of sexual abuse in the American Catholic church, we develop theory on the role of identity processes in institutional entrepreneurship. In contrast to most accounts of institutional entrepreneurship, we find that identity, rather than pre-existing interests, mobilized actors and shaped their collective goals and the tactics they used to seek change. Contestation of this identity by those in power focused and re-shaped the group’s tactics over time, suggesting a dynamic interplay of identity, action, and interests in the emergence of institutional entrepreneurship. Building on prior accounts of embedded actors as institutional entrepreneurs, this study demonstrates how identity work and selective enactment of certain aspects of identity can be central to the mobilization of and pursuit of change by such actors. The analysis contributes to a growing literature on the processes of institutional entrepreneurship and draws particular attention to these processes in mature fields as opposed to more extensively studied emerging or slowly evolving fields.