The Management Department
Department
Seminar Series
Charlene Zietsma
Pennsylvania
State University
Tuesday, June 25th 2019 - Room PA115 at 10:00 am
Theme: “The Microfoundations of Belief and Behavior Change: A Field Experiment on the Efficacy of Frame Bridging and Frame Shifting Strategies for Stimulating Innovative Entrepreneurship”
Abstract: Although institutions gain their
strength through broad-based social agreement, institutional change begins at
the individual level, with a shift in individual beliefs or judgments of what
is appropriate, acceptable, and legitimate. Prior work suggests that this shift
occurs as the mental models, or frames, that individuals use to make decisions
change. Frames may be changed either through frame bridging, involving
constructing connections between new ideas and analogous or familiar frames, or
through frame shifting, involving cutting off an association to a past frame in
order to switch to a new one. To understand the relative efficacy of these two
framing strategies in changing perceptions and behavior, we tested them in a
field experiment conducted in rural Sri Lanka, using entrepreneurship training
programs which attempted to reframe entrepreneurship as innovation rather than
replication of time-tested models. Our findings contribute to an understanding
of the link between the microfoundations perspective on institutional
change and the framing literature by identifying factors for predicting how and
when a given framing strategy will resonate with its intended audience and lead
to belief and behavior change, and to the entrepreneurship literature by
shedding light on how individuals are most effectively motivated to identify
and act on innovative opportunities.
