Written news at the crossroads : Entrepreneurial processes of reproduction and novelty in an institutional field in crisis

Abstract: This dissertation explores entrepreneurial processes in an institutional field incrisis. It is based on the inductive reinterpretation of four original papers that, combined, study activities of individuals searching for solutions to organizational problems in incumbent and startup newspapers. Building on an integrative framework of compatible concepts in entrepreneurship and institutional theory, and foregrounding the role of Bourdieu’s notion of capital, this thesis provides answers to how actors’ capitals mediate mechanisms of reproduction and novelty. Based on the analysis of multiple cases situated in a macro-level shift characterized by the transformation of the material environment, this work finds how—despite the aleatory and materialistic origins of written news norms and concepts, and their failing economic traction—entrepreneurial processes in all types of newspapers reproduce structural templates. In relatively affluent incumbents, reproduction happens because, in their search for solutions to losses of capital, actors interpret imported ideas within the meaning structure provided by existing norms and concepts, and day-to-day activities—“decoupled from innovation”—do not change significantly. Also, at the moment that these new activities generate short-term (albeit small) relative capital gains, as problems seem to wane, individuals unravel their search for solutions, reinforcing reproduction. In particularly deprived newcomers, the importation of innovative ideas can even be averted upfront by the organization of unrelated-to-the-venture supportive activities that generate unrelated-to-the-venture economic capital—a condition that shields these ventures from market demands and avoids exit scenarios. The “sheltered conformity” of daily activities in these organizations also results in reproduction. Yet, not all the entrepreneurial processes this thesis identifies contribute to the reproduction of existing institutional arrangements. Instances of significant difference in organizational structures can be forged in a distinct experience of constraints resulting from severe capital scarcity. A combination of absence of economic capital and moderate-to-low levels of cultural and social capital, as they are defined by the field, inhibits common solutions to problems. When actors find that freely available inputs accumulated in their personal biographies work, these inputs become “situated new forms of capital”. As they work, significantly different activities, partly decoupled from templates in the field, are incorporated in the structure of these organizations. Because it is existing ideals in the field that fuel resource-deprived entrepreneurs to sustain efforts, institutional arrangements do play a role in their own change.By offering empirical support to the central role of the personal experience of capital constraints and situated redefinitions of capital in processes of institutional reproduction and divergence, this thesis complements interpretations of institutional contradictions: Rather than starting from the coexistence of different templates that actors can alternatively employ at intersections of structures, this study explores early endogenous processes by which new norms and concepts enter existing fields, reinterpreting resources in them. These findings provide additional insights into questions related to the origin of ideas, emergent processes of decoupling and to definitions of an institutionalized field in crisis and organizational novelty. This research also contributes to entrepreneurship within sights into how alertness and discovery transpire. When focusing on institutional templates and problem-solving activities of ordinary actors, entrepreneurial action—even in an institutional field in crisis—can contribute to the reproduction of the status quo. And when significant differences happen, because they can result from a distinct experience of resource constraints, they may appear in humble beginnings that contrast those chronicled in later stages of change by institutional entrepreneurship theory. Additionally, this thesis adds to entrepreneurial resourcefulness by unbundling the process by which bricolage produces outcomes that depart from its institutional environment. In my findings, bricoleurs do not blatantly violate norms and concepts, and yet they can bring divergent organizational novelty to their working solutions. In fact, the efforts of entrepreneurial bricoleurs are largely sustained by the predetermined meaning of inputs and institutionally conforming ideals in ways that, I suggest, bring the concept of bricolage closer to its original definition by Lévi-Strauss.