Translating Lightning in A Bottle: Idealists, Pragmatists, and the Reorientation of Translators at the Intersection of Blockchain and Climate

The travel of ideas is a ubiquitous part of social and organizational life. People and organizations are constantly exposed to ideas and often incorporate them into their lives in some way, including adopting them to create new ventures or solutions to grand societal challenges. Grounded in the translation perspective (i.e., Scandinavian institutionalism), this dissertation explores the notion of within organization translator heterogeneity and the microfoundations of the incipient process of new venture ideation predicated on the translation of an idea to a new setting or what I call "ideational translation." To explore such underpinnings of the emergence of a new organizational entity and the travel of ideas, I draw on insights from a 24-month ethnography of life behind the creation of Blockset, one of the world's first blockchain-based carbon offset platforms. Through a detailed ethnographic account, I tell the story of the set of blockchain experts and climate experts contributing to Blockset's formative creation and explore their diverse lived experiences as translators facilitating the travel of the idea of a blockchain platform to the field of climate. Notably, in doing so, I pay attention to the tensions that ensued, how people navigated them, and to what avail. Yet, what lies at the heart of this dissertation is my finding that a key microfoundational aspect of ideational translation is within organization translator heterogeneity delineated by "translation orientations" – a term I use to capture a person's general beliefs with regards to the appropriate way to implement an idea. Overall, based on my findings, I present an orientation-based model of ideational translation that is centered around a translation orientation spectrum anchored on idealism and pragmatism – which stress translators' preferences for conforming to the norms of an idea's origin and destination, respectively – and specifies why translators embrace specific orientations, their impacts on the dynamics and outcomes of translation, and reorientation pathways that translators can follow.