The road towards autonomous driving – A differentiated view of institutional agency in path transformation

The purpose of the article is to contribute to conceptual and empirical understandings of institutional agency in path transformation. Previous studies of links between institutional change and industrial transformation have focused mainly on the institutionalization of new practices and influence of territorially defined institutional preconditions, leaving a need to disentangle different types of institutional agency and the rationales behind actors’ activities. The author elaborates on different dimensions of the institutional environment in which path transformation occurs and proposes a new analytical framework for investigating the role of institutional agency in path development. The framework identifies different types of institutional agency, respectively targeting the ‘legitimation’, ‘anchoring’ and ‘enabling’ of new paths. It is applied to a case study of the automotive industry in the NUTS2 region West Sweden, based on the development of self-driving cars. The analysis reveals that actors utilized the relationship between existing institutions when formulating strategies, rather than primarily targeting institutional change. The author concludes that actors deploy a combination of different types of institutional agency that exhibit varying spatial patterns, and discusses the implications for how the relationship between the past, present and future is understood in path development research.