O empreendedorismo institucional influenciando a formação de novos mercados: o caso da viticultura biodinâmica na serra gaúcha

Abstract

Institutional entrepreneurs are agents that transpose the institutional inertia by proactively breaking barriers while initiating new practices, standards, and policies in legitimate institutional fields. These actors play a role of social articulation influencing the process of change and contributing to the transformation or creation of new institutions . The core of this thesis lies in this context, as it aimed to explain how the action of institutional entrepreneurs, in the traditional field of viticulture of Gaucho Highlands, influenced the creation of a new market: biodynamic grapes. Biodynamic agriculture, a branch of agroecology that is little explored by the market, uses ancient ritualistic traditions in its cultivation. This study analyzed the process of institutional entrepreneurship carried out through practices, following not only the macro-structural approach but also describing the elements related to the microlevel, such as everyday dynamics. Thus, the academic contribution of this research is to bring together two different theoretical approaches: institutional entrepreneurship and the practice theory while uniting these concepts through a model that explains the formation of a new market. The research findings can reunite the structuralist views of institutional theory with the studies of practice explaining how human action is capable of overcoming the agency and enabling the actors to form new arrangements in the structures in which they are inserted. Moreover, the research presents as management contributions results that help in understanding the change, transformation, and legitimation of new markets in a nonhomogeneous field, such as sustainable food. Markets that are still in formation and that depend on the ability of actors to articulate collective changes.