Vendors as institutional actors: how external providers enable enterprise blockchain assimilation and institutionalisation

Abstract

Despite extensive experimentation, many enterprise blockchain initiatives fail to progress beyond proof of concept. While prior research has focused on adoption determinants, less is known about how blockchain becomes embedded in organisational routines and scaled across inter-organisational environments. This paper examines how external vendors contribute to and shape progression from initial exploration to routinised and institutionalised use. The study adopts an interpretive qualitative design grounded in staged technology assimilation and institutional theory. Data were collected through semi structured interviews with vendor-side professionals across infrastructure providers, consultants, application developers, legal specialists and standards actors. An abductive analysis was conducted to examine how vendor activities evolve across assimilation stages and mediate institutional pressures. Interview accounts suggest that vendors act as conditional institutional actors performing stage-contingent work. Participants described vendors as reducing cognitive uncertainty through education, constructing legitimacy and organisational alignment, simplifying technical complexity through abstraction and supporting governance through monitoring and compliance mechanisms. At later stages, vendors support coordination across organisational boundaries and contribute to ecosystem legitimacy. Participants described these activities as responses to different institutional pressures that evolve over time, helping organisations move from early experimentation towards broader enterprise integration. The study extends assimilation theory by showing, from vendor accounts, how vendors may play a sustained but varying role across assimilation patterns. It advances institutional theory by showing how institutional work is distributed and cumulative over time. It conceptualises vendors as conditional institutional actors and provides a stage-based framework to guide enterprise adoption and management.