Institutional Entrepreneurship through Voluntary Standard Setting: The Case of the Global Reporting Initiative

Dror Etzion, IESE Business School, and Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School

12/15/2008
(Original Publish Date: 2/10/2007)

We study institutional entrepreneurship in an emergent field by analyzing the case of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its efforts to purposefully institutionalize the practice of sustainability reporting. We attempt to understand how a resource constrained organization creates a new logic at the juncture between potentially conflicting institutional spheres. Using discourse and frame analysis, we identify three linguistic mechanisms harnessed by GRI: ambiguity reduction, discourse bridging and robust design. These intertwined mechanisms address both conceptual and practical aspects of sustainability reporting and provide a coherent rationale for convergence on a voluntary standard.