Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship

Work on values when shaping public institutions: “What’s trust got to do with it?” - Experiences from Scandinavia. Kap. 12

Values work appears in the shaping of structures as well as in the shaping of cultures in organisations. In this chapter, the author elaborates on mechanisms of values work, based on textual analysis of articles concerning trust and trust-based management in three Scandinavian popular scientific journals. The findings indicate that trust is ‘worked upon’ in the shaping of structures within public organisations, and not in an homogenous manner. Competing concerns for trust and distrust in public sector are manifestations of differences between institutional logics. The variety in understanding concerns related to trust in public institutions illustrates the ambiguity within values. Yet this ambiguity makes it possible for actors to agree on the importance of trust yet differ fundamentally on the understanding of what it means to structurally perform and strengthen trust

Foxes and lions: How institutional leaders keep organisational integrity and introduce change. Kap. 7

Using the concept of institutional work, we illustrate how leaders respond to external pressures for change and actively transform organisational practices and identities. We argue that a leader’s actions manifest either through projective, future-oriented agency or through habitual, routinised agency. The latter emphasises how institutional leaders act in spaces already occupied by bits and pieces of plural, often conflicting institutions. Particularly, a leader is an institutionally embedded individual, one whose patterns of thinking and acting are conditioned by field-level and organisational institutions. Drawing on empirical illustrations of public administration leaders, in a Polish context, who adopt field-level changes in governance patters, we develop a typology of leaders-innovators acting upon plural isomorphic pressures. We argue that one of the strategies specially fits conditions of institutional pluralism since it advances a value of dialogue between institutional logics and, therefore, builds a reflexive capacity into the organisation