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Postcard No. 3 from San Jose, California 193

the actors in such projects as having a relatively clear idea of changes they
want to create, but this may not always be true. Some innovation-
supporting institutions seem to emerge because someone improvises one big
innovation, and then others try to learn from the process, generating a rou-
tine (Wood, Hatten, & Williamson, 2004). Whether new institutions are
improvised or deliberately chosen, however, DiMaggio argues that goal-
oriented struggles create them.
In these political efforts, innovation supporters have to develop a strong
coalition for change. Some organized groups always have interest in main-
taining institutions as they are. Innovators, moreover, have to overcome
institutions’ taken-for-granted nature. The ODDsters are examples of
activists who probably did not pay enough attention to political processes.
Their reflections on what they could have done differently (should have
“sought to address higher audiences in top management in a more system-
atic manner”) hint at weak political thinking. DiMaggio’s argument
suggests that (highly successful) activists are inevitably politicians.

Social Skills for Institutional Change

Fligstein (1997) expands on DiMaggio’s model. He suggests that creating
new institutions is a matter of having the right social skills—the “ability to
motivate cooperation in other actors by providing those actors with com-
mon meanings and identities in which actions can be undertaken and justi-
fied.” Fligstein focuses on an effort that built new international institutions.
However, his analysis is equally relevant to activists in firms.
Fligstein discusses Jacques Delors, the former French finance minister
who headed the European Union’s governing body in the 1980s. Delors took
the job when the European Union was in crisis. Its dissolution was being dis-
cussed. “Eurosclerosis” was considered a profound problem, and analysts
doubted that European firms could compete with Japan and America.
Delors and allies among EU officials sought a goal that had much in com-
mon with the goals of corporate activists: to open Europe to innovation
through institutional and market reforms. Moreover, their means had direct
parallels with those of the ODDsters. Delors and his associates worked to
build what Fligstein and Mara-Drita (1996) call an “elite social
movement”—a movement of officials, businesspeople, and others interested