Institutional entrepreneurs as translators : a comparative study in an emerging activity

This paper analyzes the reasons why some institutional entrepreneurship strategies failed to translate an institution while other succeeded, by paying a specific attention to the interaction between material and discursive dimensions in the translation process. A theoretical framework integrating both dimensions of translation is first proposed in order to study strategies of competing entrepreneurs. Then a comparative study of three entrepreneurs translating practices of corporate social evaluation in the French context is used to investigate the processes through which competing translators achieved their objective more or less successfully.