Regulatory and Institutional Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The concept of regulatory entrepreneurship was coined by Pollman and Barry to characterize the business strategies that change existing regulatory frameworks to increase future opportunities or maintain current business activities. The rapid expansion of this stream of literature not only echoes the copious news items concerning lobbying operations, but also the rise of platform business models operating in legal grey areas and whose influence strategies are still controversial. From this perspective, scholars from both law and business management backgrounds have endeavored to describe the different strategies deployed by regulatory entrepreneurs, their implementation process as well as the institutional conditions favoring their emergence. In this chapter, as a response, the author offers a cross-literature review of these concepts of regulatory entrepreneurship and institutional entrepreneurship. This systemic review on institutional entrepreneurship unpacks its main conceptual properties in comparison with regulatory entrepreneurship, and presents four areas of cross-fertilization: understanding agency, power dynamics, hybridization processes, and the complexity of institutional change. The chapter also argues that future research should further explore the dynamic interaction between different strategies promoted by institutional entrepreneurs, considering that regulatory entrepreneurship appears as embedded in a wider complex network of institutional initiatives. Accordingly, this chapter offers a research agenda to build upon the complementarities of those literatures.