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This study aims to broaden the understanding of activist public relations in developing contexts. The power of formal laws and policies in developing contexts diminishes by traditional norms and authorities, and therefore, a great deal of activist public relations efforts is devoted to controlling destructive norms and informal authorities. Activist public relations literature often assumes powerful formal institutions that are capable to control behaviors. The authors challenge this assumption by exploring activist public relations against gender-based violence (GV) in Bangladesh.

This study took an interpretative and social constructionist approach to examine public relations practices of two GV activist organizations in Bangladesh. The data were collected through observation, interviews and document analysis of four campaigns. The data were coded in NVivo.

The data show that the activist organizations used public relations campaigns for informal institutional work. The campaigns included educating various publics and storytelling to build supporting identities, norms and networks to address GV in Bangladesh.

The study has been limited to advocacy campaign of the non-governmental organizations.

The knowledge from this study can be applied to the social development sectors where public relations is used to activate activism. In addition, the public relations practitioners and scholars can find how activists public relations is emerging in developing context.

The findings suggest that activist public relations in developing contexts carry out institutional work and create informal institutions to compensate for the formal institutional voids. In addition, this paper highlights the role of public relations in institutional work, to create and maintain contributory institutions or disrupt disturbing institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore peace protest as a form of institutional work aimed at supporting one institution and disrupting another.

The authors utilized walking ethnography (28 miles in 18 h while conducting 25 walking interviews) and digital media analysis (news reports, social media and electronic communication).

Walking participants engaged in multiple types of institutional work aimed at maintaining the Good Friday Agreement and disrupting partisan violence. The institutional work left no lasting impact on either institution.

The paper conceptualizes two competing institutions and situates the dual institutional work of Lyra's Walk in the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland. The study contributes to understanding formality and multiplicity in institutional work research.

This paper aims to review the history of black and minority ethnic housing associations in England since the arrival of Commonwealth migrants.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lawrence and Buchanan (2017), the authors examine the interplay of institutional control, agency and resistance, in a highly racialized context.

The authors identify five phases in the development of grassroots organizers into housing associations, describing the different types of “institutional work” involved in challenging racialized institutions and establishing new institutions. The exercise of episodic power to achieve institutional agency created resistance from powerful actors seeking to maintain systemic power. The growing movement for black and minority ethnic housing fought to establish organizational legitimacy. Achieving this not only enabled them to serve and represent their communities but also entailed compromising more radical political agendas.

Racialized aspects are largely lacking from institutional theory, as are the actions of racialized individuals and organizations. In looking at a highly racialized context, the authors hope to contribute to understanding the institutional work done by such groups and the challenges they face as their efforts develop and become legitimated.

The purpose of this paper is to address the question how multinational corporations (MNCs) can respond to different domains of formal voids associated with informal institutions in emergent markets.

The author advances the institution-based view of international business strategy by developing a framework and six propositions. The theoretical distinction of informal institutions as an additional aspect when disrupting formal institutional voids are instrumental in developing a refined understanding of how MNCs can respond to institutional voids.

By emphasizing the notion of informal institutions that are associated with formal institutional voids, the author moves away from a unidimensional toward a multidimensional view of substituting formal voids. The presented response variety includes a variety of substitutes.

Further research can apply qualitative research to further examine where, when and why social innovations can be used efficiently to address institutional weaknesses or absences. The author suggests further research opportunities in the implication section.

Constituting substitutive formal institutions with complementary informal institutions can help strategic managers navigate business activities in emerging markets. Institutional weaknesses can be used as opportunities to create legitimacy and serve social needs. To help facilitate such impacts public policies need to be developed accordingly.

The paper provides a new and critical perspective on how MNCs can use institutional voids as opportunities. The author’s key contribution is to highlight specific substitutive actions from MNCs to institutional voids when different cultural-cognitive and normative circumstances apply in emerging markets.

In this chapter, the authors adopt a macrofoundations perspective to explore punishment within institutional theory. Institutional theorists have long focused on a single type of punishment – retribution – including the use of sanctions, fines, and incarceration to maintain conformity. The authors expand the types of punishment that work to uphold institutions, organized by visible and hidden, and formal and informal characteristics. The four types of punishment include (1) punishment-as-retribution; (2) punishment-as-charivari; (3) punishment-as-rehabilitation; and (4) punishment-as-vigilantism. The authors develop important connections between punishment-as-charivari, which relies on shaming efforts, and burgeoning interest in organizational stigma and social evaluations. The authors also point to informal types of punishment, including punishment-as-vigilantism, to expand the variety of actors that punish wrongdoing, including actors without the legal authority to do so. Finally, the authors detail a number of questions for each type of punishment as a means to generate a future research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how institutional mechanisms operate within both formal and informal channels of cross-border remittance.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted with Myanmar migrants mostly working in Thailand. Thematic coding was used to analyze field notes and identify themes in channel member perceptions and institutional environmental process.

Informal money transfer channels have achieved higher levels of legitimacy when compared to formal channels. Channel legitimacy is a more important attribute than efficiency. Lack of financial infrastructure, such as bank branches and ATM machines particularly in rural or outlying areas of Myanmar, the requirements for formal documentation and language and communication are the major institutional constraints that encourage the development and use of multiple channels in Myanmar. Formal money transfer channels develop with stronger regulative institutional processes, whereas informal money transfer channels develop with stronger cultural-cognitive and normative institutional processes.

Using convenience sample of remitters mainly from one area of Thailand and other channel members from Yangon, the financial capital of Myanmar, may limit the applicability of the findings, which calls for future research.

Banks and money transfer offices need to improve legitimacy perception within migrant communities by building stronger networks with local banks and international banks. They could provide Myanmar speaking front-line service personnel and include brochures in the Myanmar language to improve the communication process. The findings and recommendations from this study are also applicable to informal channels and formal financial institutions in other ASEAN countries that are preparing to make investments in Myanmar. Moreover, Myanmar banks should also consider opening branches to cater for Myanmar workers in ASEAN, especially in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.

This paper applies institutional theory within channels, investigates the context of a financial channel rather than a product channel, addresses the importance of institutional environmental mechanisms and constraints in influencing channel behavior and is embedded in the situational context of Myanmar, a newly opened South-East Asian economy where little prior research has been conducted.

This article explores the use of informal socio-cultural practices to mitigate formal institutional voids in a qualitative study of informal self-employment in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Informal socio-cultural values and practices such as ubuntu and indaba were observed to be making meaningful contribution to business and lives. Development of formal institutions as a consequence was not observed though. The article proposes that economic development efforts might best serve communities in sub-Saharan Africa by facilitating institutional development that converges with local socio-culturally informed practices rather than focus on attempts to absorb informal work into a homogenously understood formal institutional system.

Informal entrepreneurship is seen as a direct outcome of either the failure of formal institutions or the asymmetry between formal and informal institutions. These two viewpoints are so far debated as alternative theoretical explanations for the prevalence of informal entrepreneurship. In this paper, the authors offer a theoretically integrative approach to further advance the institutional perspective of informal entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Using face-to-face surveys of 322 street entrepreneurs from Lahore, Pakistan, the authors deploy the hitherto unused partial least square approach (PLS) to structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze data within the field of informal entrepreneurship.

The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical propositions of the new institutional perspective that the authors present in their paper. The authors find no direct impact of factors like procedural justice, redistributive justice and public sector corruption (i.e. formal institutional failings) on the formalization intentions of street entrepreneurs. Their findings demonstrate that the relationship between formal institutional failings and formalization intentions can only be explained through the mediating role of institutional asymmetry (i.e. tax morality).

From a policy perspective, the authors find that if they can encourage street entrepreneurs to obtain a local-level registration as the first step toward formalization, it will significantly increase their chances to opt for higher national-level registrations.

This paper presents a unique attempt to further understand the context of street entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of the institutional theory. In doing so, it synthesizes the arguments of existing institutional perspectives and further develops the institutional theory of informal entrepreneurship. Moreover, the paper develops the concept of “formalization intentions”.

Working conditions on many digital work platforms often contribute to the grand challenge of establishing decent work. While research has examined the public regulation of platform work and worker resistance, little is known about private regulatory models. In this paper, we document the development of the “Crowdwork Agreement” forged between platforms and a trade union in the relatively young German crowdworking field. We find that existing templates played an important role in the process of negotiating this new institutional infrastructure, despite the radically new work context. While the platforms drew on the corporate social responsibility template of voluntary self-regulation via a code of conduct focusing on procedural aspects of decent platform work (i.e., improving work conditions and processes), the union contributed a traditional social partnership template emphasizing accountability, parity and distributive matters. The trade union’s approach prevailed in terms of accountability and parity mechanisms, while the platforms were able to uphold the mostly procedural character of their template. This compromise is reflected in many formal and informal interactions, themselves characteristic of a social partnership approach. Our study contributes to research on institutional infrastructures in emerging fields and their role in addressing grand challenges.