Charlene Zietsma

What Competition? Myopic Self-Focus in Market-Entry Decisions

This paper documents egocentric biases in market-entry decisions. We demonstrate self-focused explanations for entry decisions made by three groups of participants: actual entrepreneurs (founders), working professionals who considered starting their own firms but did not (nonfounders), and participants in a market-entry experiment. Potential entrants based their decision to enter primarily on evaluations of their own competence (or incompetence) and paid relatively little attention to the strength of the competition. Our results suggest that excess entrepreneurial entry is more complicated than simple overconfidence, and can help explain notable patterns in entrepreneurial entry.

Building Chains and Directing Flows : Strategies and Tactics of Mutual Influence in Stakeholder Conflicts

This article aims to deepen the understanding of the processes and specific actions aimed at influencing and shaping business practices through dynamic stakeholder relationships. An inductive, longitudinal study of all players involved in a stakeholder conflict identified four clusters of influence tactics that were used by both secondary stakeholders and their target firms: issue raising, issue suppressing, positioning, and solution seeking. The stakeholders studied built elaborate influence chains and worked to direct influence flows. The study contributes to stakeholder theory by offering a refined understanding of both bilateral and mutual-influence tactics, expanding the theorys focus beyond bilateral relationships, and highlighting the use of dependence relationships among multiple embedded organizations to build influence over a specific target, and more generally, an organizational field. These findings are discussed in light of work on social movement organizations and institutional theory.

Emergent Identity Work and Institutional Change: The ‘Quiet’ Revolution of Japanese Middle-Class Housewives:

How do relatively low-power, role-constrained actors break through their constraints in a highly institutionalized environment? Examining the experience of Japanese middle-class housewives involved in a social enterprise, we developed a model of emergent identity work which outlines how actors who enacted their role values in new domains triggered a process of learning and sensemaking which led to spiralling cycles of role boundary expansion. In this process, facilitated by an enabling collective, actors not only changed their own self-concept (internal identity work) but also, through external identity work, changed others’ conceptions of their institutionally prescribed roles.

Does Culture Matter in Inter-Firm Cooperation? Research Consortia in Japan and the USA

Collaborative research consortia allow firms to pursue scale and scope economies in research, finance large costly proposals, share risks, avoid unnecessary duplication, internalize the externalities created by research spillovers, and allow the use of firm-specific complementary skills and resources. In this study we examine the evolution of cooperative research organizations in the USA and Japan. We explore the factors which influence the emergence of alternative forms of cooperation. Specifically, we examine the role of culture and the institutional environment in molding the organization of cooperation between firms in R&D and the consequences of such cooperation.

Building the Social Structure of a Market

Motivated by the question of how to develop viable new markets and value chains in the resource-constrained settings of least developed countries, we adopted multi-year qualitative methods to examine the intervention of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in developing the dairy value chain in Bangladesh. Consistent with the theoretical premise that markets and value chains are social orders, we found that the NGO’s success relied on building the social structure of a market wherein market participants could negotiate relationships and norms of production and exchange and embed them in practices and technologies. To establish social structure among participants as a means of market building, the NGO acquired relevant knowledge, then used contextual bridging (transferring new meanings, practices and structures into a given context in a way that is sensitive to the norms, practices, knowledge and relationships that exist in that context), brokering relationships along the value chain (facilitating introductions and exchanges between value chain members) and funding experimentation (providing resources to test ideas and assumptions about new market practices). Market participants themselves also contributed to the development of the market’s social structure by means of social embedding (building relationships and negotiating norms of exchange and coordination), and material embedding (implementing technologies and practices and integrating market norms into technology). Increased productivity and equity and reduced costs of transactions resulted from the creation of a social structure that, in this case, preceded and enabled the economic structuring of a market rather than the other way around.

The Valuable, the Constitutive, and the Energetic: Exploring the impact and importance of studying emotions and institutions:

Emotions shape our lives and experiences as institutional actors, yet neo-institutional theorizing has paid scant attention to them until recently. In this introduction to the Special Themed Section, we explore why this blind spot has existed in past theorizing and aim to push scholarship further to elucidate the role that emotions play in institutional life. Drawing insights from the emerging literature and the four papers in this issue, we emphasize specific themes of interest for research on emotions and institutions. Specifically, we highlight the need for a focus on the role of emotions as: value-laden, constitutive of institutions, and energetic. We argue that foregrounding emotions promises a myriad of opportunities for future work and promises rich theoretical rewards.

Social Innovation: Integrating Micro, Meso, and Macro Level Insights From Institutional Theory

Social innovations are urgently needed as we confront complex social problems. As these social problems feature substantial interdependencies among multiple systems and actors, developing and implementing innovative solutions involve the re-negotiating of settled institutions or the building of new ones. In this introductory article, we introduce a stylized three-cycle model highlighting the institutional nature of social innovation efforts. The model conceptualizes social innovation processes as the product of agentic, relational, and situated dynamics in three interrelated cycles that operate at the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. The five papers included in this special issue address one or more of these cycles. We draw on these papers and the model to stimulate and offer guidance to future conversations on social innovations from an institutional theory perspective.

The Opportunity not Taken: Entrepreneurship as an Occupational Identity in Contexts of Poverty

Innovative entrepreneurship is an essential but often missing component to poverty alleviation efforts. This qualitative study set in rural Ghana explores entrepreneurship as an occupational identi...

Opening Governance of Natural Resources: A Multilevel and Spatially Embedded Perspective

In light of a wide range of diverse and far reaching societal issues, such as unsustainable levels of deforestation, disagreement over water rights, and conflict over the extraction of mineral reso...