Edinburgh Napier University

  I-deals (that is, personalised, non-standard employment arrangements negotiated between employees and their employers) arise at different stages of the employment lifecycle. I-deals can vary by timing, such as those created before hire (ex-ante) versus after hire (ex-post). However, scholars have not fully considered the impact of the temporal context (environmental, social, economic, individual) on I-deals or how a range of organisational actors may respond to enabling/constraining conditions when creating I-deals. Our paper focuses on the under-explored issue of I-deals’ timing by applying the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship (IE). Key IE concepts enable a more critical understanding of broader temporal context impacts and the role of various actors (I-dealers, organisational agents) in creating I-deals. Drawing on a multicase study of 3 Nigerian organisations (62 semi-structured interviews, including fieldnotes and organisation-specific documents), our data revealed that field-level conditions and actors’ social positions interact to highlight (i) several distinctive temporal contexts, (ii) with differential impacts on I-deals’ timing and subsequently (iii) organisational actors adopting a range of tactics in response to enabling/constraining conditions. Based on these findings, we offer a theoretical model that reconceptualises I-deals’ timing by specifically focusing on the invisible concept of time. Finally, we discuss our study’s implications for I-deal research and offer future research directions and recommendations for practice.