Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals’ Social Position

Abstract

Although early neo-institutional studies did not explicitly tackle the issue of agency, more recent studies about institutional entrepreneurship have brought it to the forefront. Institutional entrepreneurship has been presented as a promising way to account for institutional change endogenously. However, this notion faces the paradox of embedded agency. To overcome this paradox, it is necessary to explain under what conditions actors are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs. Some neo-institutional theorists have already addressed this issue. Their studies focus mainly on the organizational and organizational field levels of analysis. In this paper, I aim to complement their work by examining under what conditions individuals are more likely to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. By doing so, I take into account the individual level of analysis that neo-institutional theorists often tend to neglect. Relying on Bourdieu's conceptualization of fields, I propose that individuals' social position is a key variable in understanding how they are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs despite institutional pressures. Key words. Bourdieu; divergent organizational change; human agency; institutional entrepreneurship; social position.The importance and endurance of the agency versus structure debate in social sciences is indicated by the number of different names it goes by: person versus situation, strategic choice versus environmental determinism, and voluntarism versus determinism. This debate is directly related to the assumptions made by organization scholars about human nature (Burell and Morgan, 1979;Astley and Van de Ven, 1983). In organization Volume 13(5): 653-676

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