ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at ‘agency’ across the three women’s businesses to unravel the influence of interests, power and networks in institutional development, building off Chapters 3, 4 and 5. In Chapter 2, Hodgson described agency as the capacity of agents to ‘reflect and deliberate upon the context, options, purpose and possible outcomes of action’, while structure referred to a ‘set of significant relations between individuals that can lead to causal interactions’ (Hodgson, 2004). For this research, I conceptualised actors as influenced by their own dynamic motivations and interest, skills/capacity and networks, with these in turn continually influenced by structure (existing institutions, relations, and endogenous politics). Initially, the discussion re-examines and expands upon the literature on entrepreneurs, networks and agency. Turning to the cases, the discussion considers the underlying motivations and interests of key actors, and identifies core dimensions of the local context (environmental particularities) and structure towards unwrapping actor strategies in institutional processes. Finally, it draws attention to dominant entrepreneurs, and the role of networks and collective power in institutional diffusion and adoption.
