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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of middle managers in the corporate entrepreneurship process that drives new capability development. Middle managers are highlighted as key entrepreneurial agents because of their special position in an organization.

The paper draws on existing capability development and corporate entrepreneurship literature and develops a conceptual model and research propositions that are illustrated through three examples from a Chinese private firm.

This paper contends the dual role of middle managers, both as change implementers to follow pre-set rules of an existing corporate entrepreneurship system and as change initiators to bring new rules to improve the existing system.

The paper is conceptual in nature, advancing the understanding of middle managers’ role in corporate entrepreneurship. The paper provides directions for future empirical research.

The interactions between middle managers and other organizational agents are discussed in the propositions. This paper suggests the importance of empowering middle managers to facilitate changes in complex internal environments.

The paper provides a unique theoretical contribution by introducing the interface-based, multi-level conceptual model of corporate entrepreneurship toward new capability development.

Narrow, managerially centered notions of organizational culture remain hegemonic, marginalizing richer, anthropological approaches as well as efforts to understand how the beliefs and practices of organizations are fundamentally shaped by the wider societal dynamics within which they are embedded. In this paper, the authors draw upon recent efforts to explore the interface of scholarship on practice and the institutional logics perspective to highlight the utility of a practice-driven institutional approach to the study of organizational culture that brings society back in. Empirically, the authors present a longitudinal case study of a Chinese private enterprise, and analyze how the unfolding dynamics of a strong community logic increasingly affected by a rising market logic, shaped the formation of political coalitions internally and externally as organizational members aimed to maintain truces between the push and pull of logics over a period of 22 years. Through an analysis of seven episodes that we conceptualize as “cultural encounters,” the authors find that a combination of compartmentalization and overall integration of logics contributes to provisional truces, and that people in the same cohort who share common geographic socialization are more likely to form allies. Our aim is to encourage future scholars to study how societal beliefs and practices work their way into organizations in a variety of explicit as well as more mundane, hidden ways.

This chapter provides a summary of the closing plenary at the 2018 Alberta Institutions Conference in which four scholars – Markus Höllerer, Marc Schneiberg, Patricia Thornton, and Charlene Zietsma – shared their views on how we could once again put the macrofoundations of institutional theory more center-stage in institutional analysis. The first major theme emerging from the panel discussion pertains to the meaning of macrofoundations. While Schneiberg sees institutions as socio-cognitive infrastructures, Zietsma emphasizes their constitutive nature. Second, both Thornton and Höllerer caution that an exclusive focus on either the micro- or the macro-level might remain only partial, and call for more cross-level studies of institutions – and for understanding the micro and the macro as co-constitutive analytical categories. Finally, the panelists discuss how we could break academic silos in institutional analysis and strive for theoretical innovation through interdisciplinary studies, among other avenues.