Seizing Opportunity in Emerging Fields: How Institutional Entrepreneurs Legitimated the Professional Form of Management Consulting

W. D. Sine and H. A. Haveman contributed equally to this work and are joint second authors. The authors thank the Organization Science anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which improved the paper. The authors also gratefully acknowledge helpful comments on previous versions from Eric Abrahamson, Tina Dacin, Raghu Garud, Shin-Kap Han, Jan Jorgensen, Tom Lawrence, Marc-David Seidel, and Pamela Tolbert, as well as from seminar participants at the Academy of Management, the European Group for Organization Studies, and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada. R. David also thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Cleghorn Faculty Scholar Award (Desautels Faculty of Management) for generous funding.