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Agency and Large-Scale Institutional Changes; The Study of the Creation of the Biopharmaceutical Industry in Iran

Babaei، Ali | 2023

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  1. Type of Document: Ph.D. Dissertation
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 56114 (44)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Management and Economics
  6. Advisor(s): Mashayekhi, Ali Naghi; Miremadi, Iman; Maleki, Ali
  7. Abstract:
  8. Neither state planning nor economic liberalization has been the answer for developing countries to escape from the middle-income trap, mainly due to presence of institutional voids and due to the governance of hindering institutions. Therefore, we need another explanation for how of the development, which must include how institutions change and how new institutions and new institutional fields emerge. Developing countries are full of institutional voids and the governance of hindering institutions. Therefore, the process of economic development in these countries, is beyond the power of market and state, and needs agency. Responding to the recent call by the literature for doing more research on collaborative forms of agency between heterogeneous actors during large-scale institutional changes, we will study the case of the emergence of the biopharmaceutical field in Iran. We will conduct an in-depth qualitative case study, using grounded theory approach. We will show that the emergence of the field has been the result of endeavors of a small group of agents from the government sector, research sector, firm sector, and physician sector, through the microstructure of the small group within an interactional space. Our findings will highlight the importance of an experimentalist approach to policymaking and particularly the crucial role of strategic collaboration between the government managers and the pioneer entrepreneurs - and also other key actors in other sectors - in a productive sphere – i.e., Moreover, the literature on industry development has mostly emphasised the importance of strategic embeddedness of state and firms in a co-learning process. However, the literature is deficient in the following two aspects. First, the literature has not clearly identified the boundary around agents who are effective change agents in both the state and private sectors, whereas in this study, based on the creation of a high-tech industry in a developing country, the researchers reconceptualised industry development agents by zooming in on a smaller number of key agents, institutional entrepreneurs, instead of considering the state and private sector as a vague whole. Second, the extant literature, which emphasises mostly formal relationship mechanisms, is almost silent on how change agents interlink and share essential tacit knowledge between themselves. In this study, however, the researchers analysed structures and mechanisms that enable essential tacit knowledge, or institutional knowledge, to be transferred and shared among institutional entrepreneurs in both the state and private sectors. Therefore, the researchers tried to contribute theoretically to the extant literature on industry development by applying insights from institutional entrepreneurship and knowledge management literature. This study’s second expected contribution is that it identifies a mechanism, inter-institutional circulation, as being most effective in institutional knowledge transfer between institutional entrepreneurs in both the state and private sectors. This institutional knowledge is acquired through real-life experiences of institutional entrepreneurs in diverse institutional spheres (university, private, and government sectors) and friendly relationships between them
  9. Keywords:
  10. Developing Countries ; Qualitative Research ; Biopharma ; Large-Scale Institutional Changes ; Small Group ; Collaborative Agency ; Institutional Entrepreneurship ; Leadership-as-Practice

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