Entrepreneurship in Innovation Communities by Jan-Peter Ferdinand

Author:Jan-Peter Ferdinand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.3.3 Elaborating Collective Rationalities and the Actors’ Scope of Agency

Characterizing the institutional tensions that are prevalent within the field of 3D printing requires the complementary analysis of the symbolic constructions and material practices that guide and inform entrepreneurial actions. While the former can be traced by deriving dominant shared understandings (see above), the latter seeks the identification of patterns of collective rationalities. Recapturing Friedland and Alford’s assumption that institutional logics provide distinct sets of material practices that are available to organizations and individuals to elaborate on (Friedland and Alford 1991, p. 240), adding a meso-level order that merges different sets of material practices increases the complexity of such endeavor. However, the questions of how actors implement these practices requires empirical investigation addressing the ideas and intents by which actors attach meaning to their actions. In the setting of my research, I relate these theoretical considerations to the practices, which actors in the 3D printing field use to face the dilemma of entrepreneurship.

Indeed, I assume that actors, who initially participate in innovation communities and then develop commercial ambitions over time, necessarily need to reflect upon the potential tensions that arise at the intersection of their community background and entrepreneurial effort. Consequently, each of their practical responses to the dilemma of entrepreneurship displays a notion of individual agency, which potentially affects their institutional environment.

The empirical emphasis on the reasoning and rationalization of action narrows the opportunities for empirical data collection down to qualitative methods that reveal the nuances of actor’s attach meaning to their actions. Since I assume that knowledgeable actors are widely aware of the ideas and intents that inform their actions, interviews are appropriate means to search for related insights. Consequently, I approached founders of 3D printing startups with semi-structured interviews and asked them about their particular background in the RepRap community, the circumstances that let them become entrepreneurs for 3D printers, the struggles they faced in this process, and how they tried to respond to them. I then transcribed the interviews verbatim and coded them with the qualitative data analysis tool ATLAS.ti.

Although my coding strategy for the generated interview data starts with a rather open approach looking for similarities and patterns among the cases observed, I take a second analytical step to structure the emerging codes and contents in two systematic ways. First, I applied the entrepreneurial process as a heuristic to link the interviewees’ actions and experiences to the phases of their becoming of founders (1), their efforts to create (2) and sustain (3) a viable business. This chronological layer helps me to unveil conceivable changes of the founders’ attitudes and mindsets that accompany their increasing experiences as entrepreneurs. Secondly, I put particular emphasis on the denotative codes, which I revealed through my discursive analysis of the CBI-related controversies. Assuming that these codes reflect general contradictions and cultural discrepancies immanent to the dilemma of entrepreneurship, tracing the founders’ practical ways of approaching them renders relevant insights, which delineate their scope of agency. However, since entrepreneurs of 3D printing

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