Engagement-driven institutionalization in market shaping: Synchronizing and stabilizing collective engagement

Abstract Although recent literature on market shaping highlights the importance of actors' engagement dispositions and behaviors and their interplay with institutional work, little is understood about the mechanisms that facilitate the institutionalization of engagement dispositions and behaviors within the market-shaping process. Beyond this backdrop, this conceptual paper addresses how the engagement of multiple actors contributes to institutional change within market shaping. To answer this question, our paper considers the concept of synchronization as a mechanism that facilitates the alignment of multiple actors' engagement dispositions and behaviors to generate collective engagement within institutional work. Applying the emerging theory of Practice-driven Institutionalism as well as the concept of collective engagement, we develop a process model of engagement-driven institutionalization that consists of three stages: (1) the synchronization of collective dispositions and behaviors, (2) the development of temporal stability of these behaviors through self-reinforcing mechanisms resulting in practices, and (3) the ensuing institutional change for market shaping. By connecting this model to the market-shaping process, we demonstrate how our model contributes to a better understanding of the theoretically fuzzy processes of institutional change within market shaping and how it may help market shapers in their endeavors to shape markets successfully.