Measuring the Unmeasured: An Institutional Entrepreneur Strategy in an Emerging Industry

TLDR

Organizational literature on emerging industries stresses the importance of institutional entrepreneurs for legitimizing new activities, yet empirical research on their strategies remains limited. This article proposes that institutional entrepreneurs can build legitimacy and power by developing measurement tools. The authors examine a French entrepreneurial firm’s creation of corporate social performance metrics to assess how such tools affect industry legitimacy and systemic power. The analysis shows that measurement tools influence legitimacy and power dynamics, offering insights for future research on measurement in management and business‑society studies.

Abstract

The organizational literature on emerging industries has emphasized the need for institutional entrepreneurs - actors who give the new activity legitimacy and determine its patterns of behaviour. However, little empirical research has been carried out on the strategies that institutional entrepreneurs employ in order to achieve legitimacy for their activity. In this article, we suggest that an institutional entrepreneur can use the development of measurement tools as a strategy to develop its own legitimacy and power. By looking at a French entrepreneurial company’s development of tools to measure corporate social performance, we analyse how measurement tools influence the legitimacy of an industry and the systemic power within it. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for research into measurement tools in the areas of management or business and society.