Keywords: Institutional work, institutional entrepreneurship, agency

In its history, institutional theory privileged the analysis of how institutions shape and constrain agency (Scott, 2008), that led for some authors to construct the paradox of embedded agency that questions how will transformation take place if the agents are constrained and limited by institutions? To try to overcome this paradox two institutional approaches have gained emphasis in recent years, institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work.

The approach of institutional work seeks to highlight the purposeful action of individuals and organizations aiming to maintain, create or disrupt institutions (Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca, 2011; Kaghan and Lounsbury, 2011). In this approach the action is the centre stage. The concept of intentional action encompasses a complex relationship with institutional elements. On one hand, the actor may be aware that his agency ruptures a certain institutional field, but implements it intentionally. On the other, due to its embeddeness, the institutional entrepreneur action may have an institutional impact, but it is not perceived as intentional (Battiliana and D'aunno, 2009).

The institutional entrepreneur is an actor who engages in the process of transforming existing institutions or creating new ones (Maguire, Hardy and Lawrence, 2004; Mendonca, Alves and Campos, 2010) and, thus, do institutional work related to change. Some authors (Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca, 2011; Battiliana and D'aunno, 2009) suggest that institutional entrepreneur is often characterized in a heroic and powerful way to overcome immersion of shared values ​​(embeddedness), ignoring the fact that even the institutional entrepreneurs share these values.

These approaches make use of some concepts of the old and new institutionalism. From the early work of organizational institutionalism, we have the notion of organizing, as pointed out by Selznick (1966), in which “actors enact as much as they act” (Meyer, R., 2008) and the role of language as an element that involves both the agency and the construction of reality (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009), what causes the importance of discourse to understand institutional change (Fairclough, 2005; Maguire and Hardy, 2009).

From the neo-institutionalism, perspective influenced by the works of Schutz and Goffmann, and from the idea that reality is socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1990), the cognitive elements and the construction of meanings that permeate institutions are discussed. Thus, the work of neoinstitucional perspective, in its first moment, attribute great importance to cultural and cognitive processes that influence the behavior of organizations/individuals, and the agency ends up in the background, being understood as a reaction to institutional processes (Battiliana, 2006).

Considering the exposed, this article aims to understand how the ideas of the new and the old institutionalism contribute for the concept of institutional work. More specifically, our goal is to answer these questions: what is the role of discourse in institutional work? How language unites agency and institutions through institutional work?  How the cultural and cognitive frames of actors shape their understanding of the world and how they act as agents? How institutional work is able to change culture?

To accomplish this goal, we propose to do a literature review listing the main contributions of each perspective in accordance with the questions discussed above. The research will search for articles about institutional work in the main international journals since 2006, year that marks the seminal book chapter by Lawrence and Suddaby. As a result we believe that the paper will identify new possibilities for researches in institutional work relating with the elements discussed above. Also, we possibly will show how the two perspectives can be complementary as argument by Paul Hirsch (2008).