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The problem of the role of actors in institutional theory can be addressed in considering a model of institutional entrepreneurship. A sociological posing of this question defines institutional entrepreneurs as actors who have social skills, that is, the ability to motivate cooperation of other actors by providing them with common meanings and identities. The author argues that skill is applied differently across organizational fields that are forming, become stable, and are being transformed. To illustrate some of these principles, the author considers the example of the role of Jacques Delors in the framing of the Single Market Program of the European Union.
Institutional theory in organizational analysis has a limited theory of action because it generally focuses on how meanings become taken for granted in organizational arenas. To the degree that institutional theory in organizational analysis has a theory of action, it treats shared meanings as constraints on action that limit and determine what is meaningful behavior (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). There are two ways in which actors can be brought back into institutional theory. Scholars can borrow other theories that focus on action such as institutional theory in economics, which has a theory of action based on game theory and the rational-actor model. In this case, the two institutional theories are complementary. Game theory produces a view of how institutional arrangements are hammered out in the first place (Fligstein & Mara-Drita, 1996), and institutional theory can provide a view of the institutional context for negotiations and the way in which agreements become institutionalized (i.e., taken for granted).
But there is another way in which actors can be brought back into institutional theory in organizational theory. This involves proposing a theory of institutional entrepreneurship based on the tenets of institutional theory in organizational theory. I argue that this is an alternative to rational-actor models because it specifies how "games" get constructed in the first place and how action is the result of actors creating and producing an organizational field. I propose to view action as the outcome of the type of social skill that institutional entrepreneurs possess and how that skill translates into institutional arrangements that produce organizational fields.
The idea that some social actors are better at producing desired social outcomes than are...