Institutional entrepreneurship and permaculture: a practice theory perspective

Permaculture is a growing but little researched phenomenon emphasising care for the environment, equity, fair treatment of people and working with — and not against — nature. It thus represents a potential alternative to business as usual, capa-ble of addressing fundamental challenges posed by human-made climate change. The paper examines a previously ignored site of entrepreneurship by taking a practice perspective, exploring connections between the practice and growth of permaculture and institutional entrepreneurship. It assesses practice-related and institutional factors affecting the start-up and operation of permaculture enterprises in the United Kingdom. The study maps and surveys UK Permaculture Association members who have started up their own business and reports on qualitative data from personal interviews with twenty of them. Data analysis employs NVivo software and involves thematic analysis pertaining to the practice, institutional biographies and institutional portfolios of permaculture entrepreneurs. The findings show the importance of permaculture activists' institutional biographies and institutional portfolios to the start-up and operation of permaculture enterprises and for shaping permaculture-related practice. The contribution of the paper lies in how it balances attention to individual agency with subfield-specific, organisational field and macrosocial factors in understanding ‘ beyond profit ’ entrepreneurship.


| INTRODUCTION
There is growing concern regarding the contribution of sustainable entrepreneurship to 'emancipatory' societal change and the remediation of grand challenges such as climate change, ageing and social and economic inequality. At the start of the 2010s, Shepherd and Patzelt (2011: 137) defined sustainable entrepreneurship as the 'preservation of nature, life support, and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for gain, where gain is broadly construed to include economic and non-economic gains to individuals, the economy, and society'. This implies moving beyond a narrow focus on individual entrepreneurs and firms, to address questions of the practice and institutionalisation of 'beyond profit' enterprises (Shepherd, 2015). The paper aims to do so by addressing the following research question: What factors foster the institutionalisation of practices relevant to the growth of permaculture-inspired entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom? Answering this question does require attention to biography-the events and circumstances that predispose individual actors to certain ways of seeing the world and how it should be. However, the answers also turn on analysis of permaculture as a subfield that transcends the duality between agency and structure. In doing this, the paper should understand better the emergence of the shared practice of permaculture, the individual actions in which 'sustainable entrepreneurs' take and the struggle between the permaculture niche and mainstream approaches in the field of agriculture/food production and supply.
The paper builds on recent contributions that direct attention to the potential of institutional approaches to generate insight into entrepreneurship in which the achievement or resolution of societal goals and problems come to the fore (Dacin, Dacin, & Tracey, 2011).
Such approaches, which include institutional entrepreneurship, may help to transcend the preoccupation with the lone, heroic, successful entrepreneur, for which the dominant entrepreneurship discourse has been criticised. Further, practice-theoretic and institutional approaches may enrich understanding of entrepreneurship as they help to identify the motives of and institutional pressures on prosocial entrepreneurs (Dacin et al., 2011), the collective or systemic nature of their practice (Phillips, Lee, Ghobadian, O'Regan, & James, 2015) and 'hidden' entrepreneurs (hip). They may also help to tease out the interaction of formal and informal institutions and their impact on sustainable entrepreneurship, as Stephan, Uhlaner, and Stride (2015) have tried to do with their work on institutional configurations. Some critical issues for understanding sustainable entrepreneurship require further scrutiny, for example, in relation to nascent fields in which economic gains have a low priority for entrepreneurs, whose motivation might be fundamentally counter cultural. In such cases, what may be in question is the relationship between practising sustainability and institutional entrepreneurship in its deepest sense-connected with the structures and agency of those who 'work with nature' and attempt to turn societal and economic conventions upside down, while receiving only just enough money to live on. Academically, this calls for exploration of the nature of 'practice' in 'fields' informed by foundational contributions from sociology on practice theory (e.g., Bourdieu, 1986;Schatzki, 1997) and by organisational studies of the emergence, structure and dynamics of institutionalised 'organisational fields' (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991;Scott, 1995). It may be that radical entrepreneurship brings into question relations and processes bridging individuals, groups and social movements, and even the very meaning(s) of entrepreneurship itself, transcending sustainable entrepreneurship as it has been conceptualised in the literature to date (see Esteves, Genus, Henfrey, Penha-Lopes, & East, 2020, this issue).
The paper investigates the connections, strategies, skills, knowledge and resources permaculture entrepreneurs need to setting up and developing their businesses. The investigation concerns the institutional portfolio, that is, the types of capital (human, social, cultural, economic) that individual entrepreneurs are able to deploy to challenge prevailing institutions, connected for example with food production and supply (c.f., Viale & Suddaby, 2009). The study also invokes the notion of institutional biographies-the 'events, relationships and circumstances' that shape an individual's 'access to and influence on institutions' (c.f., Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2011: 55). The approach treats permaculture entrepreneurs as both the products of prevailing institutions (connected with the work and values of permaculture and others) and the (re)producers of the values that structure the practice of permaculture. Yet the background experiences and skills of permaculturalists may be manifold, as may their interpretations of what they do in the name of 'permaculture' and 'permaculture entrepreneurship'. This may give rise to an organisational subfield characterised by multiple institutional logics and forms, a subject that has received far less attention than institutional field-level heterogeneity (Battilana & Lee, 2014). The paper considers the implications thereof for the institutionalisation of permaculture and permaculture-inspired sustainable entrepreneurship, in relation to emerging theoretical insights.
The paper explores the role of elements of the practice of permaculture, that is, design principles, ecological insights, activities and ethics in the institutionalisation of permaculture-inspired entrepreneurship. Such practice may be found on understandings of business development and definitions of success, and perceptions of enterprise within the permaculture movement. By attending to such phenomena, the paper contributes to the development and bridging of entrepreneurship practice theory, institutional entrepreneurship and sustainable entrepreneurship. The paper argues for a transformation of the boundaries of entrepreneurship research and a concerted effort for it to reflect the diversity of-and challenges confronting-entrepreneurship practice (Welter, Baker, Audretsch, & Gartner, 2016), for example, by bringing proenvironmental and 'prosocial' organisations into focus, while appreciating the implications thereof for building new institutions.
The paper is organised as follows. The next section reviews literature connecting institutional entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship as practice. The third section outlines the research methods employed for data collection and analysis. The fourth section presents findings, focusing on the results of a mapping exercise, an exploratory survey of permaculture entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom and data taken from interviews with a sample of these entrepreneurs. The penultimate section discusses the findings in relation to extant knowledge bearing on the study, and the final section provides a brief conclusion summing up the work of the paper and its contributions to knowledge.

| LITERATURE REVIEW
The research project reported in the paper is informed by and seeks to contribute to literature on the topics of institutional entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship as practice, as these have borne on the start-up and development of 'deep green' small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs). There is a substantial amount of work relating to sustainable entrepreneurship (Allen & Malin, 2008;Crals & Vereek, 2005;Hockert & Wuestenhagen, 2010;Kirkwood & Walton, 2010;Schaltegger & Wagner, 2011;Shepherd & Patzelt, 2011) and increasing attention to entrepreneurship as practice. There has been much debate in the research about trade-offs, which may be made among competing sustainability and economic goals of entrepreneurs (Battilana & Lee, 2014;McMullen & Warnick, 2016). However, there is less work bridging sustainable entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship and practice that could offer a different view of such 'hybridity'.
Searching for studies that have sought to transcend thematic boundaries, it is apparent that work is being conducted on a wide range of related foci. Contributions are concerned typically with social enterprise and entrepreneurship, as distinct from ecological sustainable entrepreneurship. There is a subset of research for which the focus of inquiry is indigenous entrepreneurship (Maritz & Foley, 2018;Mika, Fahey, & Bensemann, 2009); another cluster is concerned with women entrepreneurs and gender in entrepreneurship (Akinbami, Olawoye, Adesina, & Nelson, 2019;Micelotta, Washington, & Docekalova, 2018;Qiu, 2018), and a third subset is concerned with social movements and systems or industry change (Carberry, Bharati, Levy, & Chaudhury, 2019;Reinecke, Manning, & von Hagen, 2012). In addition to these, there are individual contributions on diverse topics such as immigrants' entrepreneurship (Yeasmin & Koivurova, 2019), technology entrepreneurship (Hall, Matos, & Bachor, 2019) and policy entrepreneurship undertaken in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (Mintrom & Thomas, 2018). The following paragraphs review the contributions that are of closer relevance to the paper.
Some of these contributions are rooted in institutional entrepreneurship, especially the actions of entrepreneurs. For example, Brodnik and Brown (2018) examine the agency of institutional entrepreneurs, whose actions enabled change in dominant industry practices connected with the urban water management, employing a case study approach. Wakkee, van der Sijde, Vaupell, and Ghuman (2019) consider the institutional entrepreneurship of universities that enable sustainable entrepreneurship by helping to reduce the liabilities of smallness for new firms. Weisenfeld and Hauerwaas' (2018) focus is on the role of action and practice 'worksets' in changing institutional logic to enhance urban sustainable development. Their study involves the identification of local adopters of the novel logic that might diffuse the new worksets (in institutional language, these adopters are 'carriers' of the emerging institutional logic).
Coming from a primary concern for sustainable entrepreneurship, there are several relevant contributions, which again foreground the agency of entrepreneurs. Gasbarro, Rizzi, and Frey (2018) investigate how sustainable entrepreneurs negotiate institutional pillars in conservative contexts to build legitimacy for their activities as they effect institutional change in extant fields. Pacheco, Dean, and Payne (2010) examine the actions that entrepreneurs take to escape what they call the 'green prison'. They are concerned with the agency of entrepreneurs who create institutional structures favourable to the exploitation of opportunities for sustainable development. Arguably, both of these contributions neglect the mix of factors that shape, limit or enable agency, for example, personal background, association with a social movement and the institutional work that sustainable entrepreneurs undertake. Taking into account such factors might produce insight into sustainable entrepreneurship more as shared values and everyday practice than the pursuit of competitive advantage (or evasion of competitive disadvantage). Spence, Gherib, and Biwole (2011) explicitly try to 'integrate' institutional and entrepreneurship theory to highlight possible meanings and practices of sustainable entrepreneurship. However, what is being integrated in the latter does not flow from an explicit engagement with the (then embryonic) literature on sustainable entrepreneurship and relevant practices.

| Analytic framework
The analytic framework employed in the study is given in Figure 1 It is not necessary to oppose microsocial and macrosocial accounts.
Rather, a practice perspective of entrepreneurship may bring relational networks to the fore, unconstrained by observer-imposed 'levels' of analysis. The approach transcends methodological individualism and undue reliance on the characteristics of individual entrepreneurs. The concern is to advance knowledge of the implication of shared practice with how people in a subfield of practice challenge mainstream institutions through entrepreneurship (Steyaert, 2007) and the construction of collective support (Johannisson, 2011). De Clercq and Voronov (2009) argue that newcomers may gain legitimacy as entrepreneurs within a field by rule following, rule breaking or creation of new rules. However, it may be that newcomers in certain emerging subfields are more concerned with demonstrating and challenging what they see as the illegitimacy of practice in prevalent organisational fields and in society at large. Going beyond entrepreneurship as process, 'entrepreneuring' (Johannisson, 2011) or creative entrepreneurial action (Watson, 2013) may be framed as power as practice, drawing attention explicitly to what or how such entrepreneurs 'do, think and feel' (Goss, Jones, Betta, & Latham, 2011: 212;Keating, Geiger, McLoughlin, & Cunningham, 2014) and even whether they see themselves as entrepreneurs.
Considering how entrepreneurs work within yet seek to transcend structural constraints, researchers have pointed up the institutional work that agents do and the elements of their institutional portfolio and biography that allow them to do it. For example, although Scott (2008) identified the institutional pillars which structure, or stabilise, social phenomena in organisational 'fields', others, such as Viale (Viale, 2008;c.f., Bourdieu, 1986), emphasise different kinds of capital inherent in agents' institutional portfolio which enable them to challenge existing institutional rules. Even as human agents are subject to these rules and to some extent conditioned by them, they are not 'imprisoned' by them. Their access to and mobilisation of capitals may allow agents some, though not unconstrained, latitude.

| METHODOLOGY
The paper draws on Schatzki's (1997) critique of Bourdieu's work, regarding the ontological priority of practice over actions. 'An action belongs to a given practice' (e.g., farming), when that action expresses understandings, observes rules and/or expresses an 'acceptable order of life condition' that organise the practice in question (Schatzki, 1997: 304). Social phenomena such as institutions are to be 'understood via the structures of and relations among practices' (Schatzki, 1997: 284). Practice approaches account for the development of practices of a field or within a subdomain of that field or take it as a site for examining the 'nature or transformation of their subject matter' (Schatzki, 2001: 11).
The paper is informed by social theory and organisation theory.
Drawing on social theory (c.f., Bourdieu, 1986Bourdieu, , 1996Schatzki, 1997Schatzki, , 2001, the study focuses on relationships among the larger social fields of economic and political domination, specialised fields of agriculture, education and gardening and the subfield of permaculture. From the perspective of organisation (qua institutional) theory, the paper is concerned with heterogeneity and change in 'organisational' fields. An organisational 'field' has been understood as the community of organisations with which a focal organisation 'frequently and fatefully' interacts (Scott, 1995;c.f., DiMaggio & Powell, 1991) based on a shared institutional logic. Recognition of the prevalence of multiple institutional logics has led to increasing attention to subfields, in which members do not conform with-or actively challenge-rules and practices in the organisational field and possibly in wider societal fields (Oliver, 1991). What one might look for is evidence of symbolic and material 'immunity' (LePoutre & Valente, 2012) from conformity with the 'mainstream' and issue-based relations among subfield members (Hoffmann, 1999). Fundamentally, one investigates how the foregoing is implicated with the organisation of the practice (e.g., of permaculture) and the specific actions undertaken or proscribed by subfield members (Schatzki, 1997;c.f., Bourdieu, 1996).

| Selection of empirical setting
The focus on permaculture is selected for its potential to generate an insightful account of the interrelation of a subfield of practice (of permaculture), the microsocial practices of adherents of permaculture and the institutionalisation of permaculture-inspired enterprise.
Here, permaculture constitutes a subfield of the field of sustainable entrepreneurship. Ferguson and Lovell (2014) identified four distinct (though interconnected) uses of the term 'permaculture': as a world view, as a social movement, as a design system and as a practice framework. If Ferguson and Lovell's (2014) analysis is correct, one would expect to find clear evidence of permaculture philosophy motivating entrepreneurs and influencing practice and clear evidence of their engagement with permaculture as a social movement.
Pertinent issues concern the following: (a) the identification of opportunities and constraints, successes and failures associated with

| Data collection
In the first phase of data collection, based on data from the Permacul- personal information (e.g., name, age and gender of respondent); educational and professional qualifications, including specific permaculture-related training; recent employment and sources of income, which might be additional to their permaculture enterprise; data on the nature of permaculture businesses of the respondents (name, longevity, location sector and type of activity); size of business (number of employees, turnover); involvement of women and people of colour as owners or employees of the business; source(s) of funding for the business; motivation for starting up the business and future aspirations (growth, internationalisation). Descriptive statistical analysis of the survey data was facilitated by Excel.
The third phase of data collection included 20 taped-recorded personal interviews averaging 1 h in duration with a nonrandom selection of the survey respondents chosen to represent different types of permaculture businesses and activities and for their potential capacity to shed light on the issues of concern to the study. See Table 1

| Characteristics of permaculture enterprises in the United Kingdom
The geographical spread of the permaculture enterprises in the United Kingdom is a mix of rural and urban locations, but rural locations are overrepresented compared with the overall UK population spread. In  This tendency was reflected in advice to those who are planning to start a permaculture business-for example, the importance of finding 'the right niche', making 'a natural succession' (i.e., making a transition gradually), business knowledge and skills such as marketing skills and knowledge of the tax system, getting some experience before setting up a business, finding a successful business model This is also exemplified not only by the interviewee whose parents were active in the Soil Association but also by the cases in which parents allotted part of the garden at home to the child to grow things. In some cases, the family were keen amateur gardeners and to join in was 'just the norm'. In others, interviewees referred to living near a farm or having childhood friends who liked to grow fruit and vegetables and sell them. In some cases, interviewees went from their previous occupation to volunteering or political activity (e.g., with the Green Party, which led to them 'paying more attention to environmental issues').

| Institutional portfolios
In relation to institutional portfolios, the interview material attests to the range of capitals required to both set up and run a permaculture enterprise. In terms of economic capital, there is a view that permaculture entrepreneurs 'don't need [external] money' due to their 'self-reliance' (IU). Typically, however, some entrepreneurs enjoy what one interviewee referred to as the 'funding cushion' of property ownership, whereas others benefited from donations of land and/or cash. A number of entrepreneurs had other paid work, had access to family savings or had partners with jobs, which subsidised their enterprises. Some interviewees pointed to the low costs of their start up, such as the professional IT consultant whose business only needed a couple of computers and an IT assistant who could be paid out of the income earned from well-paid IT contracts, and also those involved in teaching who mainly taught at venues, which already had the required equipment.
Those who did seek external funding obtained it from a variety of sources, such as community funding and crowdsourcing, the UK Lottery, government or local authority regional development or enterprise grants, charities and bank loans. Some interviewees mentioned receiving benefits from the state, such as working tax credit and unemployment benefit. In a couple of cases, funding from the European Union was mentioned, for example, a 3-year Children in Permaculture project funded through the ERASMUS initiative. The PA itself was a source of funding.
Another informant talked about 'doing what's needed' to be able to get £1,000 from a bank, which entailed setting up what turned out to be his current permaculture business and opening up a bank account, both of which he implied that he might not otherwise have done but for the 'carrot' of this money (EY). He also was the recipient of funding for a Local Food project, which was a partnership bid involving PA. Although the funding from this gave 2 days a week paid work for two years and so 'covered all my bills', it was seen to be a double-edged sword in that it detracted from him focusing on making his permaculture business his main source of income.  Mollison (1988;1994, with Slay) and 'Permaculture: Principles and Pathways' by David Holmgren (2011).
Also mentioned (less commonly) were business self-help books such as 'Get Clients Now'.
As one interviewee said, 'you need a really good grounding in the theory and practice [of permaculture] and… to be a good accomplished designer' (BH). A commonly referred to requirement was knowledge and skills in functional areas such as marketing and IT (e.g., in relation to website development and the use of social media, though which of these is most important varies across interviewees).
In relation to social capital, interviewees invariably remarked on the importance of social skills, communication and networking. The dominant view expressed by those interviewed for the project being to emphasise the importance of having a network of peer-to-peer support that helps the permaculture entrepreneurs interviewed and other permaculturalists with whom they engage. As one interviewee said: The permaculture community at large are our greatest asset and supporters and have been very generous in their support and belief in what we were doing, and have really wanted us to succeed and get our message out to the world. And as our network has grown, that global support has been really evident. (NI) The various permaculture courses (the permaculture design certificate, the diploma course and other training courses and workshops) appear to be sites at which interviewees build networks, which diffuse practice. They take place in a range of the UK and overseas locations though interviewees also mentioned contacts they make with overseas and non-PA collaborators, such as an olive oil grower in southern Italy and project collaborators in Sao Paolo and Hong Kong.
The process by which permaculture entrepreneurs build networks seems to rely partly on individuals 'putting their hand up… to help' by organising meetings (e.g., of permaculture teachers) or assuming roles on PA or other organisation committees.
Respondents typically work in teams with others in the permaculture movement-a common phrase used to describe collaboration therein is 'cooperation not competition' and yet, to quote one interviewee: there is no doubt that one of the biggest problems we have amongst the teaching community with permaculture is that it's competitive. (HC) Also, it can be difficult for permaculture entrepreneurs to find information or sources of ideas relevant to permaculture, and that in trying to do so, 'it can be a bit hit and miss meeting with individuals' (QD). Yet another perspective fuses symbolic capital with social capital. Thus, for example, one participant in the project referred to the benefit of being a qualified ecologist in terms of it allowing them to be taken seriously by others in the community, which lends some insight into the process through which legitimacy for permaculture entrepreneurship is acquired.

| CONCLUSION
The study sought to answer the following research question:  (Berger & Luckmann, 1967), studying their institutional biographies shows they have been exposed to counter-cultural thinking, which pervades the actions they later take. Family and personal networks shape and allow the sharing of relevant values and practices.
To start up, a permaculture enterprise is one aspect of the practice of a worldview of permaculture. This fundamentally challenges the conventional view of sustainable entrepreneurship as a process through which entrepreneurs (hip) address social and environmental objectives.
In terms of institutional portfolios (Viale, 2008;Viale & Suddaby, 2009), the study shows that permaculture entrepreneurs tend to have access to economic capital, either from personal savings or family sources. Cultural capital is gained through reading key texts, and taking courses in permaculture-such study is be undertaken by activists who are already well qualified in terms of formal educational attainments. In relation to social capital, permaculture is a community that affords many opportunities for networking that facilitates the sharing of ideas and practices among members. The PA is a key agent in promoting permaculture enterprise and transforming the lives of those who commit to permaculture and starting up permaculture enterprises. Fundamentally, the capitals, aspirations and understanding developed over the course of entrepreneurs' lives are integral to the structure of practice in the subfield of permaculture. The practice facilitates the identification of actions that are legitimate for permaculture entrepreneurs to take (i.e., as distinct from the mainstream) in going about 'doing' permaculture. However, this does not happen deterministically or universally; there remains scope for improvisation and local interpretation; so permaculture is reproduced unevenly in practice, and there is heterogeneity within a subfield that is generally quite 'tight'.
There are several possible avenues for future research. First, data collection here was limited to one country (United Kingdom), whereas greater and more robust insights might be derived from a larger, comparative study on practice, entrepreneurship in the international permaculture movement. Second, a future study could include larger, quite profitable firms, which are active within the permaculture movement but did not feature in the project. This