Institutional Entrepreneurs and the Bricolage of Intellectual Property Discourses

Commercial software firms are increasingly becoming involved with open source communities. In this research-in-progress paper I briefly analysed a single firm case that demonstrates how an institutional entrepreneur mixes in an innovative way different discourses in an attempt to legitimise a new mode for developing software applying both open and closed source codes. The institutional entrepreneur does this by creating new distinctions in his daily software developing work. I am not arguing that the institutional entrepreneur is creating these new distinctions in an instrumental rational process, but that the distinctions emerge in sensemaking processes along his ‘doing’ something in the firm.