Entrepreneurship (Sociology)

Introduction

Entrepreneurship as an engine of innovation and job creation is a mechanism for changing the distribution of wealth and well-being in society. Entrepreneurship is the process of identifying and developing economic and social opportunities through the efforts of individuals and organizations, which can result in starting and building new businesses, either as independent enterprises or within incumbent organizations. Individuals discover opportunities in markets and organizations; how these opportunities are pursued results in different forms of entrepreneurship, such as independent start-ups, licensing activity, corporate ventures and spin-offs, and nonprofits. Because entrepreneurship is inexorably linked to institutional processes and organizational forms, the discipline of sociology is central to the development of entrepreneurship research. In the early 21st century, considerable resources have been devoted to the study of entrepreneurship, and this momentum points to an increasing variety of research perspectives. The threads of coherence to this bibliographic selection stem from a Weberian view of institutions. Just as Max Weber viewed society as composed of various institutional orders and organizational forms, the field of entrepreneurship research is composed of interdisciplinary perspectives drawing from the social sciences. Although this article takes a sociological view, it also includes selected works of authors in the sister social, management, and financial sciences that borrow sociological concepts or that flesh out the relevance of the sociology of entrepreneurship. This border crossing is more prevalent with the classic scholars because they are a relatively fuzzy set. Finally, in keeping with the good scholarly practice of elucidating the roots of ideas, this bibliography strives to include the classics and the initial theoretical and empirical formulations and their key elaborations, focusing more on the mechanisms that explain entrepreneurship.

General Overviews

The field of entrepreneurship does not have its own conceptual framework that explains and predicts a set of empirical phenomena. This has led scholars to produce a variety of partial reviews and programmatic statements of issues, debates, and approaches to the study of entrepreneurship. Thornton 1999 classifies entrepreneurship research into supply- and demand-side perspectives, conceptualizing a duality of the availability of suitable individuals to fulfill entrepreneurial activity (based on factors such as psychological traits), and the structural conditions that influence the number and nature of entrepreneurial roles that need to be filled. Swedberg 2000 highlights the importance of the classics as a foundation for future research. The ten-chapter edited volume Ruef and Lounsbury 2007 focuses on a variety of phenomena-based research on the sociology of entrepreneurship. Sorenson and Stuart 2008 suggests that scholars from different disciplines should participate in research to explain phenomena-based research. Carroll and Khessina 2005 argues for an ecological approach to the study of entrepreneurship. Aldrich 2011 expands on the ecological perspective by presenting a collection of essays on the evolutionary approach to entrepreneurship.

Aldrich, Howard E. 2011. An evolutionary approach to entrepreneurship: Selected essays by Howard E. Aldrich. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar.
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These essays represent Aldrich’s contribution to the literature over the course of his career. Topics covered are an expansion of evolutionary analysis, as applied to entrepreneurship; historical comparative methods; social networks; entrepreneurial teams; the creation of new organizational populations and communities; gender and family; the implications of entrepreneurship for stratification and inequality in modern societies; and future directions for entrepreneurship research.
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Carroll, Glenn R., and Olga M. Khessina. 2005. The ecology of entrepreneurship. In Handbook of entrepreneurship research: Disciplinary perspectives. Edited by Sharon A. Alvarez, Rajshree Agarwal, and Olav Sorenson, 167–200. International Handbooks on Entrepreneurship. New York: Springer.
DOI: 10.1007/b102106Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
To make organizational ecology more accessible to entrepreneurship researchers, Carroll and Khessina suggest a conceptual framework that views “new venture success and failure as a process of the rates of event occurrence: a population founding rate (decomposed into two constituent rates) and an individual organizational mortality rate” (p. 168). They review the organizational ecology literature through the lens of their framework.
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Ruef, Martin, and Michael Lounsbury, eds. 2007. The sociology of entrepreneurship. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 25. Amsterdam, Boston, and Oxford: Elsevier JAI.
DOI: 10.1016/S0733-558X(06)25001-8Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume includes entrepreneurship research within organizational sociology. Topics include entrepreneurship entry, immigrant entrepreneurship and enclaves, academic entrepreneurship, and new organizational forms. Howard E. Aldrich offers a chapter on self-employed parents and their children; Jesper B. Sorensen, on mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of self-employment; Alejandro Portes and Steven Schafer, on revisiting the enclave hypothesis; and Jeannette A. Colyvas and Walter W. Powell, on academic entrepreneurship in the life sciences.
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Sorenson, Olav, and Toby E. Stuart. 2008. Entrepreneurship: A field of dreams? Academy of Management Annuals 2:517–543.
DOI: 10.1080/19416520802211669Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sorenson and Stuart contrast two distinct paths to the establishment of the field of entrepreneurship research: (1) an independent field with clear jurisdiction, common theoretical canon, and autonomy from related fields; and (2) a phenomena-based approach in which scholars participate with different disciplinary lenses. The authors argue for the phenomena-based approach and review discipline-based research in economic and organizational sociology relevant to entrepreneurship.
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Swedberg, Richard. 2000. Entrepreneurship: The social science view. Oxford Management Readers. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This is an anthology of classics by social science scholars, such as Joseph A. Schumpeter, Richard von Mises, Alexander Gerschenkron, Kenneth Arrow, and Mark Granovetter, combined with interstitial material to bring practical and scientific knowledge closer together.
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Thornton, Patricia H. 1999. The sociology of entrepreneurship. Annual Review of Sociology 25:19–46.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.25.1.19Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This review article focuses on the less-well-developed demand-side perspective, using the sociological perspective, with the goal of identifying areas of entrepreneurship relevant to future research. These areas include the context of organizational founding relative to the activities of markets, hierarchies, the professions, the state, and technological change. Also offers suggestions for integrating supply- and demand-side perspectives.
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Tolbert, Pamela S., Robert J. David, and Wesley D. Sine. 2011. Studying choice and change: The intersection of institutional theory and entrepreneurship research. Organization Science 22:1332–1344.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0601Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Institutional theory and entrepreneurship studies have remained relatively distinct literatures. Yet, there are a number of benefits to explicitly articulating the links. Literature is reviewed that relates how institutions affect entrepreneurial choices and how entrepreneurship is related to institutional change. The authors suggest topics for future research by integrating institutional theory and entrepreneurship studies.
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Classic Works

Several classic works serve as foundations for the metatheory and concepts of different branches of contemporary research in the sociology of entrepreneurship. Many of the classics have in common a historical evolutionary, or longitudinal, perspective that bridges economics and sociology. The concepts of ethics and values spheres (Weber 2002) and loose coupling (Meyer and Rowan 1977) underlie institutional perspectives. Ogburn 1922 connects technology and social change, with implications for institutional innovation. Schumpeter 1950 introduces the concept of creative destruction, and Schumpeter 1934 presents the concept of new combinations, both of which have remained timely to contemporary entrepreneurship research in economics and sociology. McClelland 1961 is in many respects a midcentury psychological operationalization of Weber 2002. The concept of the liability of newness (Stinchcome 1965) is central to the ecological theory of founding rates of new organizations. Saxenian 1994 foreshadows the subsequent research on networks and hierarchies as different structural contexts for innovation and entrepreneurship.

McClelland, David C. 1961. The achieving society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
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McClelland explores psychological explanations for why societies have different rates of economic development. An individual’s need for achievement (n-Ach) leads him or her to become an energetic entrepreneur who then spurs economic development. High n-Ach leads people to behave in ways that allow them to fill the entrepreneurial role successfully—for example, valuing money not for itself but as a measure of success.
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Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83:340–363.
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Meyer and Rowan theorized early on how new combinations can occur by two mechanisms: (1) the rationalization, or institutionalization, of organizational forms, and (2) the loosening, or decoupling, of parts of organizations in relation to their environments. As formal organizations are institutionalized, they consist of taken-for-granted building blocks that provide entrepreneurial opportunities for those who rearrange them with “only a little entrepreneurial energy” (p. 345).
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Ogburn, William F.. 1922. Social change with respect to culture and original nature. New York: Huebsch.
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Ogburn develops a theory of cultural lag with implications for recombination as a source of innovation. Institutions change in response to the effects of advances in technology and the sciences. Cultural lags occur because not all institutional sectors change at the same rate. The four factors that drive cultural change are inventions, accumulation, diffusion, and adjustment. The accumulation of inventions over time also results in new inventions as two or more ideas are combined.
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Saxenian, Anna L.. 1994. Regional advantage: Culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Saxenian argues that Silicon Valley surpassed Route 128 in the growth of semiconductor firms because it has horizontal, network-based systems, as distinct from the hierarchical, independent, firm-based systems of Route 128. She examines three aspects of her regional advantage proposition: (1) local institutions and culture, that is, cooperation in networks versus competition in hierarchies; (2) industrial structure, that is, network versus hierarchy; (3) corporate organization, that is, outsourcing versus vertical integration.
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Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1934. Theory of economic development: An inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and the business cycle. Translated by Redvers Opie. Harvard Economic Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Schumpeter explains discontinuous innovations as the source of economic change. Entrepreneurs swim against the tide to engage with one or more types of new combinations of existing resources and practices: (1) production of new types of goods, (2) introducing new methods of production, (3) opening new markets, (4) using new sources of raw materials, and (5) new organization of the means of production.
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Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950. Capitalism, socialism and democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper.
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In 1942 Schumpeter borrowed Marx’s term creative destruction, but uses it differently to describe the endogenous renewal process of capitalism through entrepreneurship—destroying the old and making way for the new. The concept implies punctuated equilibrium of market environments characterized by brief, dynamic periods of discontinuous changes, owing to new goods, production processes, markets, or organizations that result in bursts of new competition.
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Stinchcome, Arthur L. 1965. Social structure and organizations. In Handbook of organizations. Edited by James G. March, 142–193. Rand McNally Sociology. Chicago: Rand McNally.
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In this seminal work, Stinchcome conceptualizes the liability of newness, an age-dependence effect in which new organizations are more likely to die than old organizations because they have to create new roles and relationships and because they enjoy a lower level of legitimacy. This concept is a fundamental aspect of ecological theory and empirical research.
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Weber, Max. 2002. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and other writings. Edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. New York: Penguin.
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In 1904 Weber developed a cultural theory of individualism, which in turn gives rise to an economic system of capitalism. Weber links individuals to societal-level culture by operationalizing differences in religious values between Catholics and Protestants. Weber’s theory continues to generate vibrant debate and empirical research by scholars across the social sciences.
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Theoretical and Substantive Developments

There have been significant developments in theory and empirical research relevant to the sociology of entrepreneurship, in particular, in the areas of Entrepreneurial Opportunities; Market Categories and Identities; Hierarchies as Generators; Networks and Social Capital as Generators; the State as Generator; Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives; Cultural Entrepreneurship, Institutional Logics, and Socially Situated Cognition and Attention; and Entrepreneurship and Economic Development.

Entrepreneurial Opportunities

One of the central puzzles of the entrepreneurship literature is the question of the origin of entrepreneurial opportunities. Do entrepreneurial opportunities exist only waiting to be discovered by individuals or do individuals create them? As Busenitz, et al. 2014 notes, entrepreneurship articles are now finding their way into mainline “A” journals partly due to this question, generating different demand- and supply-side theories of entrepreneurship and vibrant debate among psychologists, sociologists, and economists. Shane 2012 and Shane and Venkataraman 2000 elaborate on the discovery perspective: for example, opportunities exist independent of entrepreneurs due to technology innovation and market disruptions. Alvarez and Barney 2013 develops the creation view that, for example, opportunities are dependent on entrepreneurial behavior, as David, et al. 2013 demonstrates through institutional entrepreneurship. In spite of the conflicting epistemological assumptions of these two views, the authors share the idea that both structure and agency are necessary for the eventual development of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Alvarez, Sharon A., and Jay B. Barney. 2013. Epistemology, opportunities, and entrepreneurship: Comments on Venkataraman, et al. (2012) and Shane (2012). Academy of Management Review 38:154–166.
DOI: 10.5465/amr.2012.0069Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article comments on the opportunity discovery versus creation debate sparked by Venkataraman, et al. (2012) and Shane 2012. The discovery perspective assumes opportunities exist independent from entrepreneurs due, for example, to technology and market disruptions. The creation perspective assumes that the existence of opportunities depends on the behavior of entrepreneurs.
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Busenitz, Lowell, Lawrene A. Plummer, Anthony C. Klotz, Ali Shahzad, and Kevin Rhoades. 2014. Entrepreneurship research (1985–2009) and the emergence of opportunities. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 38:981–1000.
DOI: 10.1111/etap.12120Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Their literature review indicates entrepreneurship articles now have a significant presence in mainline “A” journals. This signals increased legitimacy and suggests that the study of entrepreneurship is contributing to a broader research conversation in organizational studies, particularly regarding the discussion of entrepreneurial opportunities and nascent ventures.
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David, Robert J., Wesley D. Sine, and Heather A. Haveman. 2013. Seizing opportunity in emerging fields: How institutional entrepreneurs legitimated the professional form of management consulting. Organization Science 24:356–377.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0745Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
David, et al. use the early history of the management consulting field to build on existing theory about how institutional entrepreneurs legitimate new kinds of organizations in emerging fields by theorization, collective action, and affiliations with recognized authorities and elites to demonstrate the benefits of their activities for society at large. Pioneers in management consulting exploited opportunities arising from broad institutional change to discredit the status quo and legitimate their model of how to advise organizations on strategic and operational issues.
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Eckhardt, Jonathan T., and Scott A. Shane. 2013. Response to the commentaries: The individual-opportunity (IO) nexus integrates objective and subjective aspects of entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Review 38:160–163.
DOI: 10.5465/amr.2012.0192Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article further develops the ontology of opportunity debate with a review of two articles in this issue, “A Narrative Perspective on Entrepreneurial Opportunities” by R. Garud and A. P. Giuliani, and “Epistemology, Opportunities, and Entrepreneurship: Comments on Venkataraman, et al. (2012) and Shane (2012)” by S. A. Alvarez and J. B. Barney. The narrative perspective conceptualizes structure as creating a context that entrepreneurs tap into, while the creative processes of entrepreneurs serve as a subtext exogenous to entrepreneurs that are a wellspring of opportunities.
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Kacperczyk, Aleksandra J. 2013. Social influence and entrepreneurship: The effect of university peers on entrepreneurial entry. Organization Science 24:664–683.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0773Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theories of entrepreneurship have proposed that entrepreneurs are shaped by contextual influences. This article examines the social transmission of entrepreneurial behavior across university peers to show that past entrepreneurial behaviors of university peers are an important driver of individual rates of entrepreneurship. Social influence has a stronger effect on the transition to entrepreneurship when exerted by spatially proximate and same-gender university peers. These findings suggest that the effect of university peers arises as a result of social influence rather than the institutional impact of universities.
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Shane, Scott. 2012. Reflections on the 2010 AMR Decade Award: Delivering on the promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review 37:10–20.
DOI: 10.5465/amr.2011.0078Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shane and Venkataraman received the 2010 Academy of Management Review Decade Award for the impact of their 2000 article on the field of entrepreneurship. Here, Shane examines which of the arguments in Shane and Venkataraman 2000 accounted for this field impact.
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Shane, Scott, and S. Venkataraman. 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review 25:217–226.
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Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as the nexus of opportunities and individuals. Strategic management with its narrower focus on relative firm performance is not entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship does not require the existence of firms, can occur before firms are established, exists in settings in which firms may not exist, and, in considering individuals in markets and hierarchies, can take place at lower levels of analysis.
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Suddaby, Roy, Garry D. Bruton, and Steven X. Si. 2015. Entrepreneurship through a qualitative lens: Insights on the construction and/or discovery of entrepreneurial opportunity. In Special issue: Entrepreneurship through a qualitative lens. Edited by Garry D. Bruton, Roy Suddaby, and Steven X. Si. Journal of Business Venturing 30.1: 1–10.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2014.09.003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article elaborates on nine studies that comprise this special issue on entrepreneurial opportunities, boiling them down into two recurring themes that underpin a core puzzle—where entrepreneurial opportunities come from. The first theme is the unique role of imprinting, or the profound influence of social and historical context in constraining the perceptual apparatus of entrepreneurs and delimiting the range of opportunities for innovation available to them. Second is the role of reflexivity in enabling entrepreneurs to overcome imprinting constraint.
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Market Categories and Identities

The research on market categories is germane to the sociology of entrepreneurship because meaning and legitimacy are based on classification, yet entrepreneurship, by definition, often defies classification. Whereas Podolny 1993 introduces and tests a theory that markets have status orders, Zuckerman 1999 shows the consequences of status ordering for candidate audience interfaces in markets by developing and testing the author’s well-known concept of the categorical imperative. Interestingly, whereas market participants rely on categorization of producers and customers, the stereotype of entrepreneurs is that they do not accede to the categorical imperative. At the same time, we do not doubt that new roles and types emerge, albeit with difficulty. Rao, et al. 2003 shows how categories, as a basic element of cognition, are important to whether entrepreneurs are able to frame their story successfully, with narrative fidelity to external audiences. This stream of research, with its dynamic theory and methods focusing on candidate (often entrepreneur) and audience (market participants, e.g., investors, customers), holds promise for identifying the pressure points that allow entrepreneurs and investors to frame their innovations and identities by activating available and accessible codes and categories. Hsu, et al. 2011 theoretically integrates this rapidly developing literature, with implications for typecasting, legitimation, and form emergence. Internet technologies have opened up new market categories for investors, as exemplified by microfinance, crowdfunding, and peer to peer innovations discussed in Bruton, et al. 2015.

Bruton, Gary, Susanna Khaval, Donald Siegel, and Mike Wright. 2015. New financial alternatives in seeding entrepreneurship: Microfinance, crowdfunding and peer to peer innovations. In Special issue: Seeding entrepreneurship with microfinance. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 39.1: 9–26.
DOI: 10.1111/etap.12143Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Few studies have investigated the antecedents and consequences of the rapidly growing new entrepreneurial financing alternatives, such as microfinance, crowdfunding, and peer-to-peer lending. This article provides an introduction and overview of six papers in the special issue on these new financial options for entrepreneurs, and provides a framework to generate new research questions.
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Hsu, Greta, Michael T. Hannan, and László Pólos. 2011. Typecasting, legitimation, and form emergence: A formal theory. Sociological Theory 29.2: 97–123.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9558.2011.01389.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hsu and colleagues propose a theory of multiple category membership to unify typecasting and identity-based form emergence theory. Their theory considers specializing versus spanning across category boundaries. This theory has relevance to entrepreneurship because identity-based form emergence treats the evolution of categories and how the attributes of producers entering a category shape its likelihood of gaining legitimacy among the relevant audiences.
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Podolny, Joel M. 1993. A status-based model of market competition. American Journal of Sociology 98.4: 829–872.
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Podolny conceptualizes a market as a hierarchical status order and examines the impact of market status on competition. In studying investment bank syndicate announcements, he finds that high-status actors receive more rewards for providing goods of a given quality. He shows that producers develop identities to compete in market niches in which they can garner the benefits of high status.
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Rao, Hayagreeva, Philippe Monin, and Rodolphe Durand. 2003. Institutional change in toque ville: Nouvelle cuisine as an identity movement in French gastronomy. American Journal of Sociology 108.4: 795–843.
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In studying the nouvelle cuisine identity movement in French gastronomy, the authors found that a shift in institutional logics led to the creation of new categories. The theorization of the new cuisine by culinary journalists and critics, acting as institutional entrepreneurs, influenced the propensity of French chefs to “defect” from classical to nouvelle cuisine.
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Zhao, Eric, Masakazu Isihara, and Michael Lounsbury. 2013. Overcoming the illegitimacy discount: Cultural entrepreneurship in the US feature film industry. Organization Studies 34.12: 1747–1776.
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Zhao, et al. examine how organizations address the problem of the illegitimacy discount. In the feature film industry, they identify two distinct naming strategies, familiarity and reputation, that exert differential moderating effects on the impact of genre spanning on audience attention: film sequels imbued with established reputation garner higher box office revenue than those simply incorporating familiar elements of prestigious films. This study contributes to an understanding of the power of market categories by drawing attention to the underlying strategic mechanisms.
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Zuckerman, Ezra W. 1999. The categorical imperative: Securities analysts and the illegitimacy discount. American Journal of Sociology 104.5: 1398–1438.
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Zuckerman develops a theory of candidate audience interfaces in markets, explaining how social processes produce penalties for illegitimate types and role performance in a market. His theory has implications for entrepreneurs because they face a categorical imperative, given their striving to create new products and services, whereas audiences interpret them through comparison with well-institutionalized and accepted role and product performance.
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Hierarchies as Generators

Corporate hierarchies are an overlooked determinant of entrepreneurship. Kacperczyk 2012 argues that the stultifying effects of large organizations are less important than previously thought. Large corporations spin off entrepreneurs and new ventures through mechanisms such as socialization and training of entrepreneurs and through the corporation’s role as an internal capital market that generates and allocates cash to fund new venture start-ups (Gompers, et al. 2005). Park and Steensma 2012 argues there are trade-offs for the entrepreneur in choosing the route of corporate intrapreneurship. Galunic and Eisenhardt 2001 shows how the recombination of corporate charters, or divisions, creates entrepreneurship. Gompers, et al. 2005 indicates the role of hierarchies in explaining how entrepreneurs are “spawned” by large corporations.

Galunic, D. Charles, and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt. 2001. Architectural innovation and modular corporate forms. Academy of Management Journal 44.6: 1229–1249.
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Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship through recombination (see Schumpeter 1934, cited under Classic Works) has a role within the corporation, in that managers can redeploy corporate assets in entrepreneurial ways as markets change. Based on inductive study of a Fortune 100 corporation, this article details the micro-sociological patterns whereby such recombination occurs. The article argues that having more divisions is an asset, as this increases the set of recombinant opportunities.
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Garrett, Robert P., and Jeffrey G. Colvin. 2013. Internal corporate venture operations independence and performance: A knowledge-based perspective. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.
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Extant research debates whether structural autonomy from parent companies increases internal corporate ventures (ICV) performance. Garrett, et al. stress that the knowledge coded within the parent’s organizational structures about identifying and exploring opportunities is critical for ICV’s performance. Structure separation may stall the knowledge flow from the parent venture to the ICV.
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Gompers, Paul, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein. 2005. Entrepreneurial spawning: Public corporations and the genesis of new ventures, 1986 to 1999. Journal of Finance 60.2: 577–614.
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This study examines two explanations, the Fairchild and Xerox views. In the former view, individuals are socialized to entrepreneurship by working in entrepreneurial firms, alongside other, more experienced entrepreneurs, whereas in the latter, individuals become entrepreneurs because the large bureaucratic companies they work for are reluctant to fund their ideas. The most prolific entrepreneurial spawning arose from public companies that were once venture capital–backed themselves, supporting the Fairchild view.
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Kacperczyk, Aleksandra J. 2012. Opportunity structures in established firms: Entrepreneurship versus intrapreneurship in mutual funds. Administrative Science Quarterly 57.3: 484–521.
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Contrary to the prevalent view that hierarchical structures and bureaucratic procedures stifle entrepreneurship, Kacperczyk contends that large and mature organizations are important sources of venturing opportunities. Based on her longitudinal study of the US mutual fund industry, Kacperczyk shows that lower individual rates of entrepreneurship are partly a result of higher rates of intrapreneurship—employees pursuing opportunities within the boundaries of established organizations.
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Kannan-Narasimhan, Rangapriya. 2014. Organizational ingenuity in nascent innovations: Gaining resources and legitimacy through unconventional actions. Organization Studies 35.4: 483–509.
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Kannan-Narasimhan examines how innovators in nine large Silicon Valley organizations compete for scarce resources for their early stage, untested, and unproven innovations. Findings show these innovators act unconventionally, elude constraints to acquire resources, and yet gain acceptance for their innovations by employing two types of ingenuity: material ingenuity, which is creatively reimagining the use of resources; and process ingenuity, which is using creative processes to gain resources.
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Park, Haemin Dennis, and Kevin H. Steensma 2012. When does corporate venture capital add value for new ventures? Strategic Management Journal 33.1: 1–22.
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Park and Steensma highlight the trade-off faced by new ventures that consider corporate venture capital (CVC) of accessing complementary assets within hierarchies versus exploring diverse resources in the open market. Based on their data from computer, semiconductor, and wireless industries, Park and Steensma find that specialized assets and environmental uncertainties make CVC more constructive for nascent ventures.
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Sørensen, Jesper B., and Magali A. Fassiotto. 2011. Organizations as fonts of entrepreneurship. Organization Science 22.5: 1322–1331.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0622Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Entrepreneurs are spawned from established organizations, yet knowledge of how organizations shape this entrepreneurial process is limited. Sørensen and Fassiotto develop avenues for future research by developing an analytical framework based on four different metaphors for how organizations matter in the entrepreneurial process.
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Networks and Social Capital as Generators

Relational networks are an important mechanism, explaining a wide range of entrepreneurial activity. Burt 1992 argues that networks high in structural holes are more likely to benefit entrepreneurs in discovering and brokering entrepreneurial ideas and opportunities. Stuart, et al. 1999 shows that start-ups with high-status network relations are more likely to have successful outcomes. In contrast to the corporate competitive context of Burt 1992, Peng 2004 illustrates how network cohesion achieved through kinship trust and solidarity protected the property rights of rural Chinese entrepreneurs involved in developing enterprises. Obstfeld 2005 discusses the importance of using networks to unite people in order to recombine and acquire the resources to create entrepreneurial opportunities. These studies imply that entrepreneurs can be differentiated and valued on the basis of their relative position in network structure and how they use that position in network relations. This is also the case for the positioning of entrepreneurial organizations relative to a status network of funders or customers. Sorenson and Audia 2000 explores how the social structure of network relations alters neoclassical economic forces; for example, the contribution of micro-level network mechanisms to macro-level processes, such as market evolution and the persistence of industrial agglomerations. Ruef 2009 finds that most start-ups are founded by groups with homophilous network affiliation to one another.

Burt, Ronald S. 1992. Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Burt develops a theory of using social capital to increase an individual’s entrepreneurial returns. The theory relates an individual’s network structure to his or her ability to use social capital, brokering holes in the social structure to obtain information and control benefits. Individuals with deep structural holes in their networks increase their chances of successfully identifying and optimizing entrepreneurial opportunities.
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Burt, Ronald S. 2010. Neighbor networks: Competitive advantage local and personal. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Using analyst, banker, and manager cases, Burt shows that individuals who do well are connected with well-affiliated colleagues. However, when human capital characteristics are held constant, these effects disappear. While network approaches have emphasized relational structures, Burt highlights how important individual agency, human capital, and the social psychology of personal responsibility are in understanding the advantages of social capital.
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Obstfeld, David. 2005. Social networks, the Tertius Iungens orientation, and involvement in innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly 50.1: 100–130.
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Obstfeld uses the Latin term tertius iungens (“third who joins”) to refer to the strategic behaviors of individuals or groups who either connect strangers or facilitate new coordination among connected people to engage in innovation. In contrast to the structural-hole-type brokerage that involves playing people against one another, Obstfeld’s idea is one of active brokerage to unite people and recombine resources.
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Peng, Yusheng. 2004. Kinship networks and entrepreneurs in China’s transitional economy. American Journal of Sociology 109.5: 1045–1074.
DOI: 10.1086/382347Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In the context of China’s rural village industrialization, this article illustrates how social networks affect economic growth by enforcing informal institutions. Kinship solidarity and kinship trust played an important role in protecting the property rights of private entrepreneurs and reducing transaction costs during the early stages of market reform, when formal property rights laws were ineffective and market institutions underdeveloped.
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Ruef, Martin. 2009. The entrepreneurial group: Social identities, relations, and collective action. Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Based on two nationally representative random samples of nascent entrepreneurs, Ruef finds that new businesses are more often founded by entrepreneurial groups instead of individual entrepreneurs. Ruef also shows that entrepreneurial groups are created and sustained not by the principle of member diversity taught in business schools, but by homophilous affiliation based on social demographic characteristics.
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Sorenson, Olav, and Pino G. Audia. 2000. The social structure of entrepreneurial activity: Geographic concentration of footwear production in the United States, 1940–1989. American Journal of Sociology 106.2: 424–462.
DOI: 10.1086/316962Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sorenson and Audia attribute the persistence of industrial agglomerations to the network structure of entrepreneurial opportunities; specifically, network relations that provide knowledge and resources. Their analyses of long-term founding and failure rates of American footwear plants support their argument. Their findings imply that industrial agglomerations can self-sustain through certain structural configurations without necessarily being economically efficient.
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Stuart, Toby E., Ha Hoang, and Ralph C. Hybels. 1999. Interorganizational endorsements and the performance of entrepreneurial ventures. Administrative Science Quarterly 44.2: 315–349.
DOI: 10.2307/2666998Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stuart and colleagues report that biotech firms with prominent venture partners are significantly more likely to go to initial public offering (IPO) faster and earn greater valuations at IPO than those lacking such connections, demonstrating that social relations transfer status between exchange partners. They also suggest that the significance of such network relations diminishes as firms gain more experiences and accomplishments.
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Vasudeva, Gurneeta, Akbar Zaheer, and Exequiel Hernandez. 2013. The embeddedness of networks: Institutions, structural holes, and innovativeness in the fuel cell industry. Organization Science 24.3: 645–663.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0780Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Vasudeva et al., in examining fuel cell technology alliance networks in nine countries, show that national institutions affect the extent to which specific network positions, such as brokerage, influence innovation. The firm spanning structural holes obtains the greatest innovation benefits when the firm (the broker) or its alliance partners are based in highly corporatist countries, or under certain combinations of broker and partner corporatism.
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The State as Generator

The state is often characterized as a constraint on entrepreneurship, but this is an incomplete view. Campbell and Lindberg 1990 shows that the state is an actor that creates markets and entrepreneurial opportunities and that states with certain types of characteristics do so more than others. Dobbin and Dowd 1997, in a study on railroads, demonstrates the effects of different state policies on competitive forces, with consequences for the rate of new railroad foundings. This study’s results are so robust in support of how the state as actor affects market forces that they override population ecology effects. Several key works illustrate the role of the state in the transition from socialist to capitalist economies, particularly with respect to institutional path dependencies. Nee 1992 portrays cadre-entrepreneurs in the development of hybrid forms of enterprise in China, Rona-Tas 1994 depicts how former Communist cadres maintain their advantageous position in the new corporate capitalist sector, and Stark 1996 presents property transformation in post-socialist Hungary as a recombinant process of realigning resources with the dominant sources of legitimacy.

Bhaskarabhatla, Ajay, and Deepak Hegde. 2014. An organizational perspective on patenting and open innovation. Organization Science 25.6: 1744–1763.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2014.0911Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Patent law changes during the 1980s increased the value of patents and changed the strategic behavior of large corporations. Using the case of IBM, the world’s largest patentee, the authors show that pro-patent practices associated with “open innovation” may inhibit the free flow of knowledge across organizational boundaries. IBM’s increased patenting and licensing activities were due to inertia, financial pressures, and new leadership. The causes and consequences of pro-patent practices exhibited by IBM are visible in other large US corporations.
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Campbell, John L., and Leon N. Lindberg. 1990. Property rights and the organization of economic activity by the state. American Sociological Review 55.5: 634–647.
DOI: 10.2307/2095861Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Campbell and Lindberg show that the state, by manipulating and enforcing property rights, causes entrepreneurs to look for new opportunities and creates a selection process for new enterprise. The fragmentation, contradictions, and stalemates among the three branches of government—legislative, judicial, and executive—create entrepreneurial opportunities at the state and federal levels; for example, regulatory and labor-organizing differences among states.
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Dobbin, Frank, and Timothy J. Dowd. 1997. How policy shapes competition: Early railroad foundings in Massachusetts. Administrative Science Quarterly 42.3: 501–529.
DOI: 10.2307/2393736Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Dobbin and Dowd reason that if public policy creates the property rights upon which market exchange is founded, then different policy regimes should manifest differences in competitive behavior, with consequences for founding rates. The authors demonstrate that public capitalization policies raise foundings by increasing the available resources, procartel policies raise foundings by dampening competition from incumbents, and antitrust policies depress foundings by stimulating competition.
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Nee, Victor. 1992. Organizational dynamics of market transition: Hybrid forms, property rights, and mixed economy in China. Administrative Science Quarterly 37.1: 1–27.
DOI: 10.2307/2393531Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article presents an analysis of the interactions among state, corporate enterprise, and market forces in the context of the Chinese transitional economy of the 1990s. Whereas marketized firms have a transaction cost advantage over alternative government organizations, the economy is characterized by a diversity of organizational forms and plurality of property rights configurations.
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Rona-Tas, Akos. 1994. The first shall be last? Entrepreneurship and communist cadres in the transition from socialism. American Journal of Sociology 100.1: 40–69.
DOI: 10.1086/230499Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article uses the case of the transition from socialism to capitalism in Hungary to argue that such a shift increases income inequalities. The communist cadres maintained their advantages, converting their past power into economic power in the more dynamic corporate segment. Rona-Tas asserts that this general pattern occurs because human capital is important, whether under the governance system of socialism or capitalism.
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Stark, David. 1996. Recombinant property in east European capitalism. American Journal of Sociology 101.4: 993–1027.
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Writing in the late 1990s, Stark proposed that east European capitalism would develop differently from western european and east Asian variants. At the heart of the transition process would be the concept of recombinant property, in which assets are decentralized and reorganized, and the management of liabilities is centralized. Uncertainty over the transition is hedged by diversifying assets and redefining and recombining resources so that they can be justified by more than one legitimating principle.
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Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives

Ecological theory is a well-developed theoretical and methodological perspective in organizational sociology and includes density-dependence and legitimation theory, which predicts that organizational founding will exhibit a U-shaped relationship with organizational density in a population of organizations. A population is a risk set of organizations bound by a common environment, such as a market or an industry, in which organizations compete for the same resources—for example, funding, skilled labor, technological knowledge, product markets, and land. Ecologists identify factors affecting the founding and failure of organizations within a population. An accumulation of rigorous research reveals that the growth of an organizational population follows a general pattern resulting from founding and disbanding rates, as influenced by two fundamental processes, legitimation and competition. Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1993 advocate the use of the ecological perspective for expanding and improving the rigor of entrepreneurship research. The theory of resource partitioning presented in Carroll 1985 points to a window of opportunity for the founding of start-ups, which economic theory cannot predict. Moreover, the ecological perspective, with its life-cycle focus, has potential to predict best opportunities for selection and timing of entrepreneurial investments. Baron and Hannan 2002 applies the ecological approach to human resource management by showing that the initial imprinting of management models by founders in Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups has a long-term effect on organizational performance. Haveman, et al. 2012 presents an evolutionary model of entrepreneurship linking individual actors to the social structures they need to acquire resources to launch new ventures.

Aldrich, H., and Gabriele Wiedenmayer. 1993. From traits to rates: An ecological perspective on organizational foundings. In Advances in entrepreneurship, firm emergence, and growth. Vol. 1. Edited by Jerome Katz and Robert Brockhaus, 145–195. Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence, and Growth. Greenwich, CT: JAI.
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Entrepreneurship studies have focused on founder traits and case studies of the founding process. Aldrich and Wiedenmayer advocate expanding and adding rigor to entrepreneurship analysis by adopting an ecological perspective that focuses on founding and disbanding rates at the population level of analysis. Changes in organizational populations reflect four generic processes: variation, selection, retention and diffusion, and competitive struggle.
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Baron, James N., and Michael T. Hannan. 2002. Organizational blueprints for success in high-tech start-ups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. California Management Review 44.3: 8–36.
DOI: 10.2307/41166130Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Baron and Hannan ask whether imprinting has a long-term effect on start-up performance. They develop six ideal types of founder’s employment blueprints: commitment, star, nontype, bureaucratic, engineering, and autocratic. The authors’ main finding is that organization building and high-commitment employment blueprint, even in the fast-paced “built to flip” culture of Silicon Valley, had the lowest likelihood of organizational failure.
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Carroll, Glenn R. 1985. Concentration and specialization: Dynamics of niche width in populations of organizations. American Journal of Sociology 90.6: 1262–1283.
DOI: 10.1086/228210Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Contrary to the economic theory that market concentration creates entry barriers for start-ups, Carroll develops and tests a theory of resource partitioning that predicts that with increases in market concentration, the founding of specialist organizations will increase. Large firms create niche spaces that allow start-up firms to enter markets, affording an entrepreneurial entry opportunity.
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Haveman, Heather, Jacob Habinek, and Leo A. Goodman. 2012. How entrepreneurship evolves: The founding of new magazines in America, 1741–1860. Administrative Science Quarterly 57.4: 585–624.
DOI: 10.1177/0001839212467168Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Entrepreneurship and industry evolution theories suggest two opposing hypotheses: as an industry evolves, starting a new venture becomes more difficult for all but industry insiders and the socially prominent because of competition from large incumbents, or it becomes easier for all people because the increased legitimacy of the industry over time simplifies the entrepreneurial task. Haveman, et al. show that it depends on the historical context. Magazine publishing was originally restricted to industry insiders, professionals, and the well educated, but later founders came from outside publishing and were middling in stature. The gains by entrepreneurs from the social periphery were mostly doctors and clergy without college degrees in small urban areas; in the industry centers, insiders were the predominant founders.
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Perkmann, Markus, and André Spicer. 2014. How emerging organizations take form: The role of imprinting and values in organizational bricolage. Organization Science 25.6: 1785–1806.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2014.0916Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Extant research has emphasized imprinting as a primary mechanism shaping newly founded organizations. Using a grounded theory study of Indymedia London, a grassroots media collective, Perkmann and Spicer point to the additional role of organizational values. Emerging organizations augment their imprinted forms by using ancillary forms aligned with their organizational values and reinforce their core features by differentiating themselves from antagonistic forms that conflict with their values.
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Cultural Entrepreneurship, Institutional Logics, and Socially Situated Cognition and Attention

Individuals and organizations use culture, in a variety of forms, as an entrepreneurial tool for innovation, including the garnering of resources. Lounsbury and Glynn 2001 hypothesizes that entrepreneurs who tell stories with narrative fidelity to institutional logics enable the acquisition of resources. Martens, et al. 2007 quantitatively demonstrates the relationship between effective storytelling and the acquisition of resources. Research on institutional and cultural entrepreneurship requires cross-level theorizing—that is, predicting how the elements of culture exist, sui generis, at the collective level, yet also manifest at the cognitive level. Cornelissen and Clarke 2010 suggests how to bridge two different interpretations—the cognitive strand, which focuses on conscious mental models, and the institutional strand, which emphasizes habitual enactment of social norms. Research is developing on how elements of culture exist at the cognitive level, yet have autonomy from individuals and organizations, such that these elements are subject to manipulation. Thornton, et al. 2012 shows how the institutional logics perspective can be used for such cross-level research. Thornton 2004 discusses how attention shifts with changes in institutional logics and how entrepreneurs can use institutional logics like a tool kit; Thornton, et al. 2012 outlines how entrepreneurs manipulate cultural institutions to discover entrepreneurial opportunities and to evangelize others to buy into developing these opportunities. Almandoz 2012 shows how institutional logics expressed through dispositional differences between entrepreneurs have an effect on founding rates of new ventures—actors can enact logics based on their prior experience and socialization. Kannan-Narasimhan 2014 (cited under Hierarchies as Generators) illustrates how innovators focus on managing legitimacy and using managerial attention as a lever.

Almandoz, Juan. 2012. Arriving at the starting line: The impact of community and financial logics on new banking ventures. Academy of Management Journal 55.6: 1381–1406.
DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0361Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using a mix of interview and archival data on bank founding teams, this article links institutional logics, founder backgrounds, and entrepreneurial success. Founding teams with prior experience in a community institutional logic are more committed and more capable of attracting local support, resulting in greater founding rates for their enterprises. By contrast, prior experience in a financial institutional logic is more likely to lead to team dissolution. High embeddedness in both logics simultaneously has a positive effect on the likelihood of establishment in stable economic periods, but a negative effect in turbulent periods.
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Cornelissen, Joep P., and Jean S. Clarke. 2010. Imagining and rationalizing opportunities: Inductive reasoning and the creation and justification of new ventures. Academy of Management Review 35.4: 539–557.
DOI: 10.5465/AMR.2010.53502700Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cornelissen and Clarke argue that entrepreneurs engage in inductive analogical and metaphorical reasoning to justify new ventures, which allows them to surpass their past experiences and adapt to feedback of key stakeholders. The authors also admit that entrepreneurs will rely less on inductive reasoning and more on calculated reasoning as they accumulate direct experiences and build track records.
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Garud, Raghu, Henri A. Schildt, and Theresa K. Lant. 2014. Entrepreneurial storytelling, future expectations, and the paradox of legitimacy. Organization Science 25.5: 1479–1492.
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2014.0915Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Research shows entrepreneurs use storytelling as a means to establish venture legitimacy and gain stakeholder support. Garud, et al. argue that when entrepreneurs employ projective stories, they paradoxically set expectations that may create future disappointments. This is because of the inherent uncertainties that projective stories mask: ventures will likely deviate from their early projections, thereby disappointing stakeholders and resulting in a loss of legitimacy. The constraints and possibilities of maintaining and regaining legitimacy through revised storytelling are examined.
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Jaskiewicz, Peter, Katharina Heinrichs, Sabine B. Rau, and Trish Reay. 2015. To be or not to be: How family firms manage family and commercial logics in succession. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.
DOI: 10.1111/etap.12146Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Family firms use different approaches to manage the process of succession. Based on an analysis of 21 case studies of German family firms, Jaskiewicz, et al. develop four different ways of managing potentially conflicting family and commercial institutional logics associated with four different succession processes.
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Lounsbury, Michael, and Mary Ann Glynn. 2001. Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources. In Special issue: Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship strategies for wealth creation. Edited by Michael A. Hitt, R. Duane Ireland, S. Michael Camp, and Donald L. Sexton. Strategic Management Journal 22.6–7: 545–564.
DOI: 10.1002/smj.188Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lounsbury and Glynn further define cultural entrepreneurship by using anecdotes to illustrate how entrepreneurs leverage culture by telling stories to identify and legitimate their new ventures and enable acquisition of resources and creation of wealth. Effective stories must have narrative fidelity with membership in industry categories and align with cultural understandings through norms and beliefs.
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Martens, Martin L., Jennifer E. Jennings, and P. Devereaux Jennings. 2007. Do the stories they tell get them the money they need? The role of entrepreneurial narratives in resource acquisition. Academy of Management Journal 50.5: 1107–1132.
DOI: 10.5465/AMJ.2007.27169488Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In the first systematic large-sample test, Martens and colleagues show that effectively constructed stories do help entrepreneurs acquire the money they need to facilitate external resource acquisition. The study employed qualitative analyses of the entire population of IPO prospectuses in the semiconductor, biotechnology, and Internet content provider industries from 1996 to 2000.
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Thornton, Patricia H. 2004. Markets from culture: Institutional logics and organizational decisions in higher education publishing. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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This book develops a theoretical formulation for the institutional logics perspective and, in particular, the concept of the inter-institutional system. Empirical studies test the theory that with a shift in institutional logics, the focus of attention shifted from market categories revolving around acquisition of books to market categories revolving around acquisition of companies. Individuals and organizations can manipulate logics like a tool kit to reframe the meaning of a phenomenon, and hence use alternative justifications for their behavior to their advantage.
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Thornton, Patricia H., William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury. 2012. The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure and process. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601936.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Chapter 5 develops a theory of cultural entrepreneurship based on switching referent categories. Entrepreneurs discover innovations and evangelize support for them through vertical specialization within institutional orders and horizontal generalization spanning institutional orders, which enables blending and segregating of logics. The availability and accessibility of institutional logics are further contingent on structural overlap and event sequencing of macro-events.
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Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

Entrepreneurship is thought to be an essential driver of economic development and social prosperity. Yet, rates of entrepreneurship vary significantly across countries with distinct cultural and institutional contexts. Building on Robert Merton’s classic concept of anomie, Cullen, et al. 2014 argues that opportunity entrepreneurship is a deviant response to anomic shifts in cultural values and institutional orders. Saulet 2013 poses the interesting puzzle of why high rates of entrepreneurship are not always associated with high rates of growth and development. These works point out that the origin and impact of entrepreneurship depends on national contexts. Entrepreneurship activities are also carried out across national borders. Kiss, et al. 2012 provides a comprehensive review of international entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Liu, et al. 2010 specifically focuses on how returnee entrepreneurs and foreign direct investment (FDI) spur local innovations. More substantively, Bruton, et al. 2013 and Webb, et al. 2013 address how entrepreneurship might solve poverty problems and prosper in the informal economy.

Bruton, Garry D., David J. Ketchen Jr., and R. Duane Ireland. 2013. Entrepreneurship as a solution to poverty. In Special issue: Desperate poverty. Edited by Garry D. Bruton. Journal of Business Venturing 28.6: 683–689.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.05.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the introductory article to the special issue on how entrepreneurship can help to solve poverty by helping individuals create their own businesses to ensure a more lasting solution to their poverty. First, extant knowledge on entrepreneurship and poverty is examined in light of where future research on this important topic should move. Second, the five articles selected from 71 submissions that make up this special issue are introduced.
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Cullen, John B., Jean L. Johnson, and Praveen K. Parboteeah. 2014. National rates of opportunity entrepreneurship activity: Insights from institutional anomie theory. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 38.4: 775–806.
DOI: 10.1111/etap.12018Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Opportunity entrepreneurship is theorized as a creatively deviant response to anomic conditions in societies (i.e., when social institutions block traditional means of achievement). Findings indicate that institutional contexts mitigate or enhance the effects of cultural drivers of opportunity entrepreneurship and differences in national rates of entrepreneurship.
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Kiss, Andreea N., Wade M. Danis, and S. Tamer Cavusgil. 2012. International entrepreneurship research in emerging economies: A critical review and research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing 27.2: 266–290.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2011.09.004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article reviews international entrepreneurship research in emerging economies. It discusses the importance, timeliness, and relevance in consideration of the growing influence of emerging markets in the global economy. While this research is methodologically and topically diverse, and rapidly growing, it has a limited presence in premier journals, and it is fragmented and highly skewed in its geographic coverage. The goal of this inventory is to evaluate this literature to increase its quality, coherence, scope, and impact with consequences for new research questions.
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Liu, Xiaohui, Jiangyong Lu, Igor Filatotchev, Trevor Buck, and Mike Wright. 2010. Returnee entrepreneurs, knowledge spillovers and innovation in high-tech firms in emerging economies. Journal of International Business Studies 41.7: 1183–1197.
DOI: 10.1057/jibs.2009.50Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using panel data, this paper investigates the impact of returnee entrepreneurs, foreign direct investment (FDI) intensity, and interfirm employee mobility on innovation in Chinese high-tech firms. Returnee entrepreneurs positively affect innovation, FDI intensity has a negative impact on local innovation, and multinational employee mobility affects international technology spillovers and internal research and development (R&D) efforts that determine innovation performance.
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Saulet, Frederic. 2013. Local and systemic entrepreneurship: Solving the puzzle of entrepreneurship and economic development. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 37.2: 387–402.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6520.2011.00469.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
While economists agree that entrepreneurship has a positive effect on growth in developed countries, one can observe productive entrepreneurship in developing countries but little corresponding development. The authors use social cooperation and network theories to explain why entrepreneurship has a limited impact on growth in developing countries.
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Webb, Justin W., Garry D. Bruton, Laszlo Tihanyi, and R. Duane Ireland. 2013. Research on entrepreneurship in the informal economy: Framing a research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing 28.5: 598–614.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2012.05.003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The authors use institutional, sociological motivation-related, and resource allocation theories to develop a framework to review research on incentives, constraints, motivations, strategies, and abilities of entrepreneurs to operate and grow ventures in the informal economy. This review develops foundations for future entrepreneurship research.