The HR consulting entrepreneur: Firm-builder, market-maker and diffuser of HR management knowledge in an emergent business system

The diffusion of human resource management practices in emergent, transition and modernizing economies is crucial for the consolidation and performance of these economies. This study is a contribution to the growing research agenda exploring this phenomenon. It argues that the creation of management consulting markets is a distinct and important, yet insufficiently studied mechanism through which human resource (HR) management practices are introduced and diffused in emergent economies.;The study makes three key contributions: First, in a departure from the standard institutional approaches to the study of management practices transfer, it uses the lenses of two entrepreneurial theories of decision-making in early markets---the effectuation and the nexus of individual-opportunities approaches---to unravel how the building of HR consulting firms sets practice theorization and diffusion processes into motion in an emergent economy (Romania). Second, the investigation is empirically anchored in extensive field work, and framed in a multicase study design format. Developing an analysis framed on ground-theory lines it reveals three distinct entrepreneurial decision-making patterns that are responsible both for the formation of causal beliefs about the role of HR practices and for the build up of new market institutions that diffuses them into the broader environment. Third, the analysis illuminates the formation of preferences for new (or previously unknown) management practices. At the same time it refines our understanding of the role of entrepreneurs in the build-up of proto-institutions that further the process of HR practices diffusion in institutional contexts (including in advanced Western economies) where they are met with stiff indifference or reluctance. As such, the insights and findings of the study become the basis of a comparative research agenda that is relevant not only for transition and emerging economies but also for Western, advanced ones.