How does multiplicity and institutionalization influence strategic opportunities in fields

Radical innovation or doing different things than usual seems to be of key importance for organizations, to survive severe competition and crisis. Facing the financial and economic crisis in countries and companies, there is an urgent question on how or when to innovate or engage in strategic change (Christensen, 1997). The institutional perspective seems to be essential for the overall understanding of markets, industries and organizational fields and combine the inside-out and outside-in views to understand processes, and not take them for granted. Institutionalization is the process by which organizations acquire identity and legitimacy. Institutionalization involves more than building formal structures and processes (Eberlein, 2003). Dorado (2005) follows this institutional perspective and proposes in her paper, that processes of institutional change vary depending on the form, taken by the three factors that define them: agency, resource mobilization, and opportunity, and determine the organizational field which may result in opportunity conditions (opportunity hazy, opportunity transparent and opportunity opaque). The framework and theory of Dorado (2005), combined with the agency theory to innovate in a certain field, and different strategic opportunities, can reduce uncertainty in the organizational field and provide more opportunities within the organizational field and perhaps other fields. To understand this and try to formulate an answer, we should look at: ‘How does the degree of institutionalization and multiplicity in a given field, influence the strategic opportunities of organizations in that field? ’ To obtain data, we used four organizational fields within the mobility sector: sustainable mobility, traffic safety, recreation close to home and assistance en route. The collected data from these four fields are obtained through interviews and secondary data analysis. All collected data is analyzed by the use of coding specific words and sentences, in combination with the conducted literature in the literature review and framework. This data-analysis gave insight in the fields and provide data to answer the research question. There are a lot of here are a lot of similarities between the fields within the mobility sector. The outcome of the research shows that when there is a high degree of institutionalization and a low degree of multiplicity, the actors operate in an opportunity opaque organizational field and strive for a routinized strategic opportunity (focused on the sustainable mobility, assistance en route and partly in the traffic safety field). The transparent field is visible in the recreation close to home field and partly in the traffic safety field. The outcome shows that when there is a moderate degree of institutionalization and multiplicity, the actors operate in an opportunity transparent field, and strive for routinized, strategic and sense making strategic opportunities. So when there is a low degree of institutionalization and a high degree of multiplicity, the organizations operate in an opportunity haze organizational field and strive for a routinized and sense making agentic strategy, which focuses on the past and present.