Entrepreneurship in institutional context: actor emergence in transitions from wage-employment to entrepreneurship

Observing the technical enablers of the new forms of work and the prominent changes in the corporate employment patterns, many argue that we are at the dawn of a new era in the organisation of work. As the proportion of work is increasingly taking place in smaller, distributed units, transitions into entrepreneurship following redundancies are also becoming more common. While entrepreneurship is known to positively influence economic growth and employment, less is known about how entrepreneurial ventures that originate from a corporate redundancy programme obtain viability in the field of entrepreneurship. This thesis seeks to contribute towards an improved understanding of the transitions from wage-employment to entrepreneurship by addressing the question, “How do institutional contexts influence the emergence of entrepreneurial actors that originate from a corporate redundancy programme?” Empirically, the thesis explores the emergence of around 300 entrepreneurial ventures that originated from the corporate redundancy programme that Nokia ran in Finland as a part of the global restructuring of its operations between 2011 and 2014. By utilising interview and archival data, the thesis studies how the ventures’ embeddedness, capital strategies and engagement with the institutional infrastructure of the entrepreneurial system influence their emergence in the sense of them obtaining the authority and capacity to act for themselves in the entrepreneurial field. The findings contribute towards the theory of entrepreneurship in several ways. The thesis demonstrates that, rather than systems of entrepreneurship forming unitary entities of homogeneous goals, identities and principles, they may, in some cases, split into subsystems. It further elaborates on the multidimensionality of entrepreneurial ventures’ embeddedness and demonstrates that entrepreneurial capital may, at times, be restricted by the context. Beyond the contribution to the contextualisation of entrepreneurship, the thesis substantiates the theory of fields in organisational institutionalism. The findings offer a rare view into the separation of institutional infrastructure into subfields and elaborate the periphery of fields as a rich terrain of overlapping social orders, nonisomorphic actors, and heterogeneous positions.