Knowledge that Transforms

The debate as to the effects of globalization on organizational forms and management practices is well known. Our paper focuses on two institutionalist traditions in organization theory which make a significant contribution to this discussion: new institutionalism and the business‐systems approach. Both emphasize the adaptation of organizations to their institutional environments but come to very different conclusions as to the global standardization of organizational forms and management practices. Our paper aims to move them beyond the convergence‐divergence dichotomy to account for signs of both global standardization and continued persistence of national differences. We do so by systematically comparing the two traditions, suggesting how they can be cross‐fertilized and developing an agenda for future empirical research. We also highlight that they cannot learn from each other on the issue of agency and point to structuration theory as a way in which they can integrate agency into their accounts of the global standardization debate.

The prevailing theories of entrepreneurship have typically revolved around the ability of individuals to recognize opportunities and then to act on them by starting a new venture. This has generated a literature asking why entrepreneurial behaviour varies across individuals with different characteristics while implicitly holding constant the external context in which the individual finds herself. Thus, where the opportunities come from, or the source of entrepreneurial opportunities, is also implicitly taken as given. By contrast, in this paper an important source of entrepreneurial opportunities is identified – knowledge and ideas created in an incumbent organization. By commercializing knowledge that otherwise would remain uncommercialized through the start‐up of a new venture, entrepreneurship serves as a conduit of knowledge spillovers. According to the theory of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship, a context with more knowledge will generate more entrepreneurial opportunities. By contrast, a context with less knowledge will generate fewer entrepreneurial opportunities. Based on a data set linking entrepreneurship to the knowledge context, empirical evidence is provided that is consistent with the proposition that entrepreneurial opportunities are not exogenous but rather systematically created by investments in knowledge by incumbent organizations.