Title: The entrepreneurship of nested systems: a socially complex approach

Authors: Desmond Ng

Addresses: Texas A&M University, 377 Agricultural and Life Sciences Building, College Station, Texas, USA

Abstract: A classic debate faced by management scholars is whether organisational life is determined by intractable environmental constraints or is it actively created by strategic managerial choice? Such polarising perspectives however fail to account for co-evolutionary processes in which individual choice and their environment jointly shape organisational life processes. Specifically, recent developments in institutional research have called for a greater attention to bridging micro and macro level processes to explaining ordering and disordering tendencies of institutions. In drawing on complexity science, Austrian economics, social network and related institutional research, a conceptual model is developed to explain such tendencies in a nested institutional system. Such an approach offers three contributions/implications to complexity science and institutional research.

Keywords: institutional entrepreneurship; nested institutions; social networks; innovation; individual choice; work environment; organisational life; complexity science; Austrian economics; conceptual modelling; institutional research.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCLM.2011.046440

International Journal of Complexity in Leadership and Management, 2011 Vol.1 No.4, pp.379 - 394

Published online: 22 Oct 2014 *

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