This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the role, characteristics and strategies of individuals when they act as what the academic literature categorizes as institutional entrepreneurs. Despite the recent growth of research on the subject of institutional entrepreneurship, work on the individual level continues to be scarce. To achieve our objectives, we probe the literature in search of papers that focuses the actions of individuals as institutional entrepreneurs. We review five articles published in high impact international journals between 2006 to 2009. We identify the individual characteristics of the entrepreneur in these papers, especially those related to the actions of these actors, the stage of institutional change at which they acted and what attributes have been ascribed to them. After that, we confront the results found in the literature review with the role of three entrepreneurs who have created a private company and pioneered the field of commercialization of electric power in Brazil, contributing to the changes taking place in that industry during the 1990s. We describe the institutional context in which they worked, their personal trajectory and the role they played in the field. As research methodology, we adopt the case study method. The phase of data collection relied on multiple sources of evidence, mainly deep interviews. We find predominantly convergent results between the literature and the case analyses. As a contribution, our study suggests that the activities of agents can be divided into two main categories as to their extension. In addition, the analysis of the case study suggest the emergence of a certain consensus about the acting of individuals acting as institutional entrepreneurs.
Institucional entrepreneur; Case study; Sociological institutionalism; Strategy; Brazilian electric power sector
