Institutional entrepreneurship has been identified as one (not exclusive) condition that can foster institutional change. Scholars have studied how external changes in the institutional environment trigger institutional entrepreneurship as well as institutional entrepreneurs’ characteristics and actions influential on the amendment of institutions. However, few empirical studies have investigated how the motivation for institutional entrepreneurship during changes in the institutional environment is formed (or, in some cases, not). By a multiple-case study approach combined with phenomenological interviews, we investigated the experiences of Swiss cantonal planners (CP) – high-level civil servants responsible for sustainable urban planning – when being exposed to the same change in the institutional environment (a new federal law in Spatial Planning) that affected the institution they were responsible for (the cantonal plan). We found out that those CPs motivated to engage in institutional entrepreneurship did so to align an imagined identity of themselves and an imagined alternative institution with their evoked core values that emerged when experiencing an institution as socially reconstructable. The resulting theoretical model sheds light on the becoming of institutional entrepreneurs and the role of imagination in this process. It contributes to organizational literature on addressing the process of how people turn into actors and the role of values in imagining alternative futures.
