Institutional Logics and Entrepreneurship: Struggling for Legitimacy in the Emerging Bio-Energy Field

Abstract

Citing a scholarly movement towards contextualized entrepreneurship research, this dissertation explains and encourages new reflection on the entrepreneurship process and its role in the transition to a sustainable society. The goal is to re-examine and resituate entrepreneurship processes through an Institutional Logics Perspective – a new approach to culture, structure, and process. Building on a two-year qualitative study with Dutch entrepreneurs who aim to commercialize bio-energy technologies – which replaces fossil fuel energy and reduces carbon emissions – the author provides evidence that to build new organizational forms that merge environmental and commercial values, entrepreneurs navigate their complex institutional environment through an assemblage process. An assemblage process is where seemingly coherent and stable institutional logics are assembled together to give new purpose and meaning to activities. This study shows how entrepreneurs synthesize institutional complements and reconcile or avoid institutional conflicts to construct new environmental-commercial hybrids. Further results demonstrate that to acquire resources from potential stakeholders, entrepreneurs use symbolic practices – metaphors, allegory, actions, and objects - to represent themselves beyond a functional dimension. They aim to gain a perception of legitimacy according to one or more institutional logics present, which, in turn, works to reinforce or subvert dominant institutional paradigms. More qualitative data reveals how entrepreneurs engage in institutional work to alter the arrangements and properties of institutional logics when their claims are seen as illegitimate. Entrepreneurs in small, marginalized groups are seen as sectarian associations that enact different modes, scopes, and scales of institutional work compared to entrepreneurs working alone. In addition, examining two longitudinal survey databases through regression analyses, the author finds evidence that entrepreneurs employing ‘clean’ technologies – alternative energy, new waste and water remediation technologies – are more likely to seek legitimacy by enacting strategies that go beyond product development. These legitimacy strategies differ from entrepreneurs using biotechnology and information and communication technologies. Moreover, entrepreneurs commercializing ‘clean’ technologies are more likely to view environmental regulations as a barrier to their development yet these regulations also significantly lead to venture growth over time. Ultimately, these findings have a number of implications into how, and under what conditions, entrepreneurs are able to access, activate, change, and/or produce new institutional logics. They work to explain how entrepreneurs create new organizational forms, alter the bases of legitimacy judgments, generate resource availability, and develop new sustainable markets.