Research

The extant literature on emerging market strategy emphasizes the role of the institutional context, and focuses on how companies adapt to institutions, or to institutional transformations. This article extends this work by arguing that corporations can also act as institutional entrepreneurs which actively shape emerging market institutions. Using a coevolutionary framework, we first develop a taxonomy of corporate postures vis a vis institutions. We distinguish between two types of adaptive and two types of proactive postures for companies. Subsequently, we illustrate our typology with three cases of large companies from the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, and offer conjectures on how institutional entrepreneurs operate in emerging market contexts.

• Coevolution

• Institutional Entrepreneurs

• Emerging Markets

• Indonesia, Agency