| dc.description.abstract | Part of this research’s aim is to elaborate on the process model of institutional entrepreneurship as proposed by Battilana, Leca & Boxenbaum (2009). This process model shows that institutional entrepreneurs create a vision of change and that they mobilise allies and resources to implement divergent change. This theory, however, does not provide any insights into the activities that institutional entrepreneurs perform to change institutions. Lawrence & Suddaby (2006) proposed several activities for three types of institutional work: creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions. Although this theory provides insight into how institutions are changed, it lacks an elaboration on how expectations are used in these activities. This gap in literature is what this research aims to fill through answering the following research question: “How do institutional entrepreneurs use expectations to implement divergent change?”
In order to find out how expectations are used, the case of autonomous vehicles in the Netherlands has been selected and two types of data have been collected: First, news articles from five different newspapers and two digital news outlets have been collected through LexisNexis and the websites of the digital outlets, and second, interviews are conducted with institutional entrepreneurs.
First, the analysis of news articles provided four different themes of expectations: impact, scenarios, support and technological readiness. For both impact and technological readiness several subthemes could be identified. Second, the analysis of the interviews revealed that all institutional work for the case autonomous vehicles is aimed at either creating or disrupting institutions. In this, it is also found that the expectations that are used most are related to ‘Safety’ and ‘Road Situations & Spatial Planning’. Both these themes are subthemes to ‘Impact’.
This research concludes that institutional entrepreneurs use expectations to emphasise their vision and weaken other visions in order to gain support for creating new institutions or disrupting existing institutions. More specifically, highly moral and ethical expectations are used in activities that are aimed at creating institutions and expectations related to the support towards the technology are aimed at disrupting institutions. | |
