Abstract

How Institutions Become Entrepreneurial: The Emergence and Evolution of Cultural Toolkits for Reinventing Government in the United States (1980s-2020s)

This paper is based on the empirical sections of my dissertation, which examines ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ (Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004) in the public sector by tracing the history of the “Reinventing Government” movement at federal and state-local levels of government in the United States from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present day and assessing its impact on institutions over time. Existing research on institutional entrepreneurship has generated rich accounts of how radical changes in institutional fields can occur given the paradox of 'embedded agency' (Hardy & Maguire, 2017; Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). Yet, theories of institutional entrepreneurship tend to focus primarily on early-stage activities; few have examined this from the vantage points of those not responsible for initiating radical change, or its evolution forward. This paper takes a cultural perspective in developing a new conceptualization of change agency in institutional fields by examining how actors use, exchange, and modify their “cultural toolkits” (Swidler, 1986) in the service of reinvention. Based on a rich collection of historical archival documents and oral history interviews, the paper shows how the cultural materials generated by both participants and observers of reinvention, such as stories, language and linguistic metaphors, normative behaviors and other cultural bits, have evolved into durable and flexible cultural toolkits for improving government performance and promoting innovation in the American public sector.