Institutional Pressures, Institutional Work and the Development of Universities’ Entrepreneurial Turn

• Main Authors: Juliana Marangoni Amarante, João Marcelo Crubellate
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração (ANPAD) 2019-12-01
• Series: RAC: Revista de Administração Contemporânea
• Online Access: https://rac.anpad.org.br/index.php/rac/article/view/1379

Based on Institutional Theory, in this theoretical essay we aimed to create a model that could explain the development of the entrepreneurial turn of universities. As a result, we suggest the following theoretical proposition: universities’ entrepreneurial turn is contingent on institutional work and may be understood as a result of a confluence of inward and outward forces that are shaped through a historical and recursive interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures, conjointly derived from each actor of the Triple Helix, that is, the state, the industry - or society in a broader sense - and academia. Our main theoretical contributions consist of : (a) placing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn at the epicenter of all the competing institutional pressures and logic when it comes to innovation creation; (b) characterizing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn as a result of the recursive interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures, conjointly derived from each actor of the Triple Helix; and (c) stressing the fundamental role of the institutional work performed by institutional entrepreneurs in the process of developing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn.