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The purpose of this paper is to address the decreasing role of professional associations in governing the work of entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive professions such as management consulting. It presents the example of an alternative path to traditional professional regulation. This organic professionalization path is introduced through the concept of dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The paper builds on an in-depth qualitative investigation of professionals in the intercultural industry combining physical and digital ethnography in a multi-modal investigation.

The findings illustrate how an ideological divide within the professional community prevents an emergence of the traditional, association-led professionalization path. Instead, the investigated community follows an organic, bottom-up route, with competing individual entrepreneurs developing converging strategies and products. This process is labelled dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The findings indicate that current views on professionalization need to reconsider admission criteria and the professionalization paths that are generally assumed. Further research could focus on investigating organic professionalization paths among other professional groups.

With an in-depth qualitative investigation of an aspiring professional community this paper contributes to an ongoing discussion on the process of professionalization. The findings show that independent agents’ efforts could be at the centre of the process. They can prevent the professional association from leading the professionalization project while enabling the organic development of synergies across the community.

This paper aims to illustrate how dispersed institutes of social innovation operating as intermediary actors within higher education institutions (HEIs) may help overcome many of the institutional bureaucracies and structures that inhibit social innovation in higher education.

This paper reviews core conditions for social innovation, along with the opportunities, challenges and tensions that emerge as HEIs work to apply these conditions in practice. It then describes how dispersed institutes enact principles of decentralization, localization and collaboration in pursuit of social innovation.

Five main ways that dispersed institutes enable social innovation were identified in this review, including bridging academic–practice divides, enabling co-creation and co-production with users, facilitating experiential and co-curricular education, supporting interdisciplinary collaborations and generating customized and place-based solutions.

Findings suggest four strategies that HEIs can use to support dispersed institutes, including prioritizing social purpose organizations as institutional partners, incentivizing public engagement and collaboration, leveraging their convening power to strengthen global networks among dispersed institutes and using budgeting models that reflect the importance of creating both economic and social value.

Although innovation labs in HEIs have long been a feature of natural sciences and technology services, they are still comparatively new for the social sciences and humanities. This paper addresses a gap in the literature on the value contributed by dispersed institutes of social innovation operating within HEIs such as living labs, makerspaces, incubators and excubators, social innovation parks, cooperation accelerators and technology transfer offices.

The purpose of this paper is to present and compare alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding entrepreneurship policy: targeted interventions to increase venture creation and/or performance. The authors contrast the Standard view of the state as a coherent entity willing and able to rectify market failures with an Individualistic view that treats policymakers as self-interested individuals with limited knowledge.

The authors draw on the perspective of “politics as exchange” to provide a taxonomy of assumptions about knowledge and incentives of both entrepreneurship policymakers and market participants. The authors position extant literature in relation to this taxonomy, and assess the implications of alternative assumptions.

The rationale for entrepreneurship policy intervention is strong under the Standard view but becomes considerably more tenuous in the Individualistic view. The authors raise several conceptual challenges to the Standard view, highlighting inconsistencies between this view and the fundamental elements of the entrepreneurial market process such as uncertainty, dispersed knowledge and self-interest.

Entrepreneurship policy research is often applied; hence, the theoretical rationale for intervention can be overlooked. The authors make the implicit assumptions of these rationales explicit, showing how the adoption of “realistic” assumptions offers a robust toolkit to evaluate entrepreneurship policy.

While the authors agree with entrepreneurship policy interventionists that an “entrepreneurial society” is conducive to economic development, this framework suggests that targeted efforts to promote entrepreneurship may be inconsistent with that goal.

The Individualistic view draws on the rich traditions of public choice and the entrepreneurial market process to highlight the intended and unintended consequences of entrepreneurship policy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurship traditions evolve in diaspora.

A qualitative multiple case study examining the role of diaspora embeddedness, extended family, ethno-religious-, cultural- and social ties and relevant structures shaping diaspora entrepreneurship.

The authors found that social ties and diaspora embeddedness create dynamism fostering entrepreneurial identity as a part of the Bukharian culture, and as a preferred career option in the context of Bukharian Jews in diaspora. Diasporic family businesses are products of culture and tradition that migrate to new locations with families and communities, not as disconnected business entities.

The ways in which families nurture a highly entrepreneurial culture that transfers across generations and contexts are context-specific and not per se generalizable to other diasporas.

Diasporans often continue their traditions and become again entrepreneurs after their settlement, or they may generate hybrid, circular solutions that allow them to employ their competences in the new contexts or connecting various contexts. This calls for transnational entrepreneurship-policymaking.

Time changes diasporas. A long-term commitment to the business environment evolves and reduces the mobility of the individual diasporan; typically the children of these migrants become more integrated and develop divergent career paths. Hence, their plans are not necessarily including family entrepreneurship creating a challenge for continuation of the original culture of entrepreneurship.

Despite a notable tradition in Jewish studies, there is limited research on Jewish entrepreneurial diaspora and its contemporary entrepreneurial identity and tradition. Furthermore, the population of Bukharian Jews is an unknown and under-explored highly entrepreneurial group that may offer instrumental views to larger diasporic audiences being concerned about maintaining notions of ethnic heritage and identity.

Initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) over half a century ago, fair trade has successfully evolved from a regional business discourse to a global social movement within international trade. In the matter of fair trade coffee, this global social movement has transformed the traditional coffee trade structure of inequality and unfairness into a conglomerate of international institutions that embrace equity and inclusivity – a metamorphosis that can be attributed to NGOs’ institutional entrepreneurship.

In this exploratory study, the authors examine the fair trade coffee industry and trace the actions of NGOs along with other stakeholders at the organizational field level, in moving toward an inclusive model of globalization.

Departing from exploitative globalization, fair trade practices advocate inclusive growth through the promotion and establishment of greater equity for all as well as higher environmental standards in global value chains.

This study contributes to nascent research on inclusive growth by analyzing how fair trade promotes inclusive growth and trade in GVCs. This study also contributes to research on institutional entrepreneurship by examining two enabling conditions – the shift in institutional logics and the peripheral social position of NGOs – that enabled NGOs to serve as institutional entrepreneurs in the initiation phase of institutional entrepreneurship.

Policymakers may encourage collaboration between profit organizations and nonprofit organizations to provide entrepreneurial opportunities for trials, errors, and revisions. The evolution of fair trade coffee provides such an example.

The coevolution of NGOs and MNEs has made the globalization of fair trade practices possible. The collaboration between NGOs as institutional entrepreneurs (operating on the community logic) and MNEs as institutional followers (operating on the financial logic) support inclusive globalization and sustain fair trade practices.

Drawing on the process model of institutional entrepreneurship, the authors seek to understand the role of NGOs as institutional entrepreneurs in the dynamics of initiating, diffusing and sustaining fair trade coffee practices.

In this chapter, we examine and expand institutional theory. While acknowledging that actors and organizations interrelate in an institutional (legal, political and socio-economic) framework and that this interaction between them shapes economic activities (North, 1990; Scott, 1995), we argue that the boundaries of today's institutional environments have significantly evolved. They encompass not only the traditional domains of micro (individual/organization) and macro (nation-state) levels as well as of a co-located physical environment captured by received institutional theory but also an added dimension that transcends physical space. This new dimension includes a dispersed, borderless environment that invisibly cuts across nation-states. We discuss the implications of this extended view of institutional domains for theory and practice.

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how different dimensions of the institutional environment of a region may influence the level of corporate entrepreneurship of firms.

The paper develops the relationship between the institutional environment, differentiated in regulatory, cognitive and normative dimensions, and entrepreneurship in existing firms, corporate entrepreneurship, via a questionnaire study covering 150 firms in Spain.

The relation between institutional environment and corporate entrepreneurship can be distinct. The results show that both the normative and cognitive dimension of the institutional environment influence an organisation's entrepreneurial orientation. They also show that regulatory dimension influences what type of corporate entrepreneurial activity is carried out.

Literature about institutional theory and entrepreneurship has been both descriptive and fragmented. This paper complements the increasing interest in the analysis of the influence of institutional frameworks on corporate entrepreneurship and answers recent calls in the literature to complete previous analyses in an empirical way that supports previous works.

Healthcare policy-makers are implementing practices based on the logic of cost-opportunity to rationalize investments and resource consumption. The successful implementation of these practices depends on policy-makers’ capacity to involve professionals dispersed in the ecosystem, and who are unaccustomed to cooperating. Our case study investigates the institutional work pursued by the Lombardy Region to stimulate a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) program.

This chapter is based on a longitudinal case study of institutional change linked with a HTA program in the Lombardy Region. The HTA program initiatives were implemented during the 2009–2012 period. The case study is based on triangulating data from archival data, contents of the assessment forms and interviews with regional staff and experts.

The Lombardy Region implemented two distinct strategies, with mixed results. A strategy that was based on the formalization of the HTA program in a legislative direct through educational efforts did not obtain the commitment of the key actors in the relevant ecosystem. Subsequently, the Region implemented an ‘institutional work’ design strategy that included a combination of political, cultural, technical and structural work. This strategy stimulated local HTA experiments that might be used in the future to legitimize the full diffusion of the new practice in the ecosystem.

This study highlights a viable strategy of change that policy-makers can use to manage processes of institutional change in a professional ecosystem. The ‘institutional work’ strategy can support the establishment of new practices that incorporate the logic of cost-opportunity, which might rationalize the use of resources and improve investment decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the distinctions and complementary of William Baumol and Israel Kirzner’s classifications of and insights into entrepreneurship, and thus providing a more complete taxonomy of the substance of entrepreneurial activity. This paper also attempts to clarify distinctions between unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship.

This paper illustrates a more complete taxonomy of the substance of entrepreneurial activity by examining entrepreneurial innovation in drug markets both legal and illegal, identifying cases of productive, unproductive, superfluous, erroneous, destructive, and protective entrepreneurship.

This paper finds that the classifications of entrepreneurship (productive, superfluous, unproductive, erroneous, protective and destructive) put forth by Baumol, Kirzner, and the institutional entrepreneurship literature are complementary. While Baumol seeks to explain the disequilibrating tendencies of entrepreneurship, Kirzner seeks to explain the equilibrating tendencies of entrepreneurship within the institutional context.

This paper utilizes case studies from legal and illegal drug markets to uniquely and better explain the six cases of entrepreneurship. This paper also contributes to the literature by clearly articulating the complementarity of Baumolian and Kirznerian entrepreneurship.