Scaling up to institutional entrepreneurship: A life history of an elite training gymnastics organization

Abstract

This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the institutional level. The diachronic analysis describes the micro, local, historical, intra-organizational work that serves as a proving ground for generating resistance before proceeding to institutional level work; in doing so, the article explores how leadership activities can be ‘scaled up’ to affect institutions through the intermediary of an organization. Identity violations triggered a founder’s sensemaking and moved her to lead others to resist institutional forces on her own organization’s training practices. The founder used the rhetorical strategy of narrative to create sensebreaking to help members make sense of the dominant institutional influence, articulate an alternative philosophy, translate the alternative into practices, and acquire material resources for undertaking resistance at the local organizational level. Finally, in attempting to scale up to institutional entrepreneurship, the institutional resistance leadership then struggled with defining success for the organization in the view of dominant institutional actors.