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This study examines the interconnected effects of formal, informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers on firm performance. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region has implemented various reforms and policy initiatives to support small businesses yet are unsuccessful as formal institutional framework and governance remains a challenge.

The authors employ a sample of 3,515 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the ECOWAS and a two-stage instrumental variable approach to control for endogeneity. Additionally, the authors check for robustness using various measures of firm performance such as profitability, productivity and export intensity.

The authors confirm that formal institutions are insignificant for firm profitability and productivity, whilst reducing informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers are associated with firm performance. However, when barriers to informal, environmental and skill-based institutions are at the lowest, formal institutions are associated with firm performance.

The major limitation lies in the policy implications. Informal institutions come into play when formal institutions are weak. However, informal practices must be addressed in the form of formal enforcement. This leads to a conundrum.

Policymakers should continue to market-supporting institutions and a conducive business environment to complement the formal institutional framework.

This study provides new empirical evidence on how institutional quality affects firm performance by examining whether other institutional factors, such as the informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers, can moderate this effect.

Virtual and augmented reality solutions in medicine are generally applied in communication, training, simulation and therapy. However, like most new digital developments, these technologies face a large number of institutional barriers that are inherent to the medical sector.

Following Richard Scott's view on institutions and organizations, a multiple case study is used to analyze regulatory, normative and cultural-cognitive institutional pillars in the medical industry.

The results of the study demonstrate that (1) the regulatory pillar inhibits the advancement of new technologies in the approach to treatment, regulation of patient data, educational processes for medical staff, and information and financial flows; (2) the number of barriers increases based on the solution's level of disruption and the number of variable conventional procedures; (3) trust between participants in the medical industry plays an important role in introducing new technologies; (4) new participants need to address certain pillars depending on the area of application.

The authors discuss top-down and bottom-up approaches for overcoming institutional barriers when implementing augmented and virtual reality solutions for companies focusing on the medical market.

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between institutional influence and performance, mediated through transformational leadership (TL) and moderated by barriers, situational factors, communication and implementation.

Using a structured survey instrument, data were collected from 370 faculty members from 31 higher educational institutions in southern India. After checking the psychometric properties of the instrument, the authors used Hayes’s PROCESS to test the direct hypotheses and three-way interactions.

The results revealed that TL mediated the relationship between institutional influence and performance. Further, the findings supported the three-way interactions between (1) institutional influence, barriers and communication positively affecting TL; and (2) TL, situational factors and implementation affecting the performance of faculty members.

This study underscores the importance of TL for the smooth functioning of higher educational institutions and achieving superior performance, especially in the new normal context after the global pandemic.

This study makes several significant recommendations to administrators in higher educational institutions, in addition to contributing to the vast literature on TL. The study suggests that administrators must invest resources in developing TL skills so that employees reach their fullest potential and contribute to achieving organizational goals. In addition, leaders in organizations need to exercise a transformational style to combat the new normal post-pandemic academic environment.

This study provides new insights into the importance of TL style and institutional influence to enhance performance. To the best of our knowledge, the conceptual model developed and tested the first of its kind in India, significantly contributing to theory and practice.

This paper focuses on social innovation dynamics in extreme contexts where institutional volatility is deeply rooted and enduring. In other words, the authors focus their discussion on the challenges that social innovators are facing in their endeavor of solving wicked social problems within an extreme institutional environment. This research is guided by the following question: How does an extreme institutional environment influence social innovation processes?

This qualitative research builds on the unique case of the Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) sector, a rarely studied context in organizational studies. The authors combine archival sources with 24 semi-structured interviews with Palestinian NGOs.

The authors theorize three barriers that hinder social innovation in such contexts: institutional trap, effectiveness trap and sustainability trap. The authors also theorize five mechanisms through which these barriers influence each other dynamically: mingling, surviving, undermining, binding and reinforcing. Taken together, these barriers and mechanisms shed light on social innovation processes taking place within extreme institutional environments.

The main limitation of this study is the methodological design, based on an extreme single case-study which, on a bunch of features, is quite unique in the world. The authors argue that the results are all the same transferable to other relatively similar contexts.

By theorizing the institutional barriers to social innovation in an extreme institutional context, the research thus sheds light on how social innovation could be sustained and stimulated in Palestine and other contexts that face similar institutional challenges.

From an engaged scholarship perspective, studying Palestine cannot be more relevant than today considering the turmoil in which Palestinians are. The research thus provides a deeper understanding of organizational and institutional dynamics with crucial social repercussions.

The social innovation literature has overemphasized success stories to the detriment of the struggles that hinder social innovations in extreme institutional environments. By focusing on the barriers that social innovators experience in these contexts, the authors provide novel empirical insight. Furthermore, this study enriches the understanding of the institutional dynamics of social innovations by proposing a process model that elucidates how an extreme institutional context can influence social innovations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why multi-tier apparel suppliers integrate social sustainability practices into their supply chains and what barriers these suppliers encounter while embedding social sustainability practices.

This study employs a qualitative research design, drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 46 owners and managers from 33 multi-tier apparel suppliers in Bangladesh, an important outsourcing hub for the global apparel industry. To corroborate research findings, the views of owners and managers were triangulated by further interviewing 11 key representatives of institutional actors such as third-party auditors, a donor agency, industry associations, regulatory agencies and a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

The authors' findings suggest a range of divergent institutional drivers and barriers – coercive, mimetic and normative – that determine the implementation of multi-tier suppliers' social sustainability practices. The key reported drivers were buyers' requirements, external stakeholders' expectations, top management commitment and competition. Conversely, cost and resource concerns and gaps in the regulatory framework were identified as key social sustainability implementation barriers. In particular, owners and managers of second-tier and third-tier supplier firms experienced more internal barriers such as cost and resource concerns than external barriers such as gaps in values, learning and commitment (i.e. compromise for mutual benefit and non-disclosure of non-compliance) that impeded effective social sustainability implementation.

Social sustainability in supply chain management has received significant attention from academics, business practitioners, governments, NGOs and supranational organisations. However, limited attention has been paid to investigating the drivers and barriers for social sustainability implementation from a developing country's multi-tier supplier perspective. The authors' research has addressed this knowledge gap.

The evidence from the authors' study provides robust support for key assumptions of institutional theory and has useful implications for both managers and policy-makers.

The authors' study contributes to the embryonic research stream of socially sustainable multi-tier supply chain management by connecting it to the application of institutional theory in a challenging institutional context.

This paper aims to explore the barriers that constrain the venture capital (VC) financing in Iran based on the institutional theory.

To answer the question, “How institutional barriers constrain the VC financing in Iran?”, 31 detailed interviews were conducted, and the interviewed data were analysed by using the grounded theory method.

There exist several institutional barriers (formal and informal) in different stages of the VC investment process in Iran. Major formal institutional deficiencies include lack of appropriate financial regulations, inefficacy in tax, labour, property rights, financial disclosure, bankruptcy, investor’s protection laws and regulations, lack of credit rating/scoring system, inefficacy in small and medium-sized enterprise-supporting policies and capital market underdevelopment. Moreover, there exist some informal institutional barriers such as culture of capitalism disapproval, culture of secrecy, individualistic customs and weakness of managerial skills that constrain VC activities in Iran.

The research findings imply that the government’s role should change from “establishment of government-sponsored VC funds” to “enforcement of institutional reforms that lead to an appropriate framework for VC investment”.

This paper has made three key contributions. First, it has provided comprehensive insights into how institutional barriers constrain the VC investment in a developing country. Second, a new stage-wise model is proposed for analysing the VC investment process. Third, existing knowledge about the role of both formal and informal institutions in the VC investment is extended.

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the barriers associated with the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in agricultural supply chains.

The study initially identified thirteen barriers by conducting a literature review and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. Subsequently, these barriers were validated and modeled using an integrated Fuzzy Delphi-ISM approach. Finally, MICMAC analysis was employed to categorize the barriers into distinct clusters.

The results provide considerable insights into the hierarchical structure and complex interrelationships between the barriers as well the driving and dependence power of barriers. Lack of information about technologies and lack of compatibility with traditional methods emerged as the two main barriers which directly and indirectly influence the other ones.

The robust hybrid Fuzzy Delphi and ISM techniques used in this study can serve as a useful model and benchmark for similar studies probing the barriers to Industry 4.0 adoption. From a theoretical standpoint, this study expands the scope of institutional theory in explaining Industry 4.0 adoption barriers.

The study is timely for the post-COVID-19 recovery and growth of the agricultural sector. The findings are helpful for policymakers and agriculture supply chain stakeholders in devising new strategies and policy interventions to prioritize and address Industry 4.0 adoption barriers.

It is the first comprehensive, multi-country and multi-method empirical study to comprehensively identify and model barriers to Industry 4.0 adoption in agricultural supply chains in emerging economies.

The digital direct-to-consumer (D2C) approach has seen widespread adoption across many industries, but its application to regional food products has been slower. This study aims to identify and rank the most significant challenges to the widespread use of digital D2C for regional food products.

A multi-criteria decision-making method called a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) was used to determine the order in which these obstacles were evaluated. Thirty-five barriers were identified and categorized into six categories named technological, operational, sociocultural, financial, market and institutional and regulatory barriers.

Market barriers ranked as the top barrier, and the technological barrier ranked the least significant amongst the main barrier categories for the adoption of digital D2C model for the regional food products. Lack of consumer awareness ranked number one globally, and lack of government subsidies ranked the least amongst the thirty-five identified barriers. Operational barriers came out to be second most significant barrier followed by institutional and regulatory barrier, sociocultural barrier, financial barrier and technological barrier.

The findings of this research were derived through a numerical examination of data gathered from the Indian setting. It follows that the technological, sociocultural, financial, market, operational and institutional constraints, among others, outlined here are all unique to India. Because of the unique nature of the Indian setting, the results of this study can only be used there and not elsewhere. It is possible that future research will broaden the aims of this one and refine its methodology. Digital D2C adoption for regional food products may be prioritized and ranked using quantitative and qualitative data sources like ANP and TOPSIS. It is possible that similar studies may be conducted in nations which have a different set of operational, technological, sociocultural market and financial and regulatory barriers. Conceptual framework can be formed by integrating TAM and TPB to understand the buying behavior of regional food products via digital D2C.

This research is the first to identify challenges to the widespread use of the digital D2C model for regional food products. Policymakers and other interested parties can use this information to better understand the difficulties of expanding the distribution of regional food products beyond their immediate regions.

This study aims to explore the barriers and motivations to integrating environmental performance into balanced scorecards (BSCs).

This research adopted a qualitative case study approach with semi-structured interviews within an Australian public health service organisation. Secondary document analysis was performed using annual reports, strategic plans and website data.

The internal barriers creating resistance to incorporating environmental performance dimensions into the BSC include the existing role of environmental disclosure, insufficient sustainability BSC knowledge, lack of BSC champion support, organisational culture and limited environmental commitment practices. Solutions revealed to support decisions to integrate environmental performance in the BSC include recruiting sustainability expertise, articulating financial motivations and recognising external pressures.

The findings provide suggested actions for other organisations facing similar challenges regarding integrating environmental performance into a BSC.

In the current business environment, organisations face growing pressure to consider environmental performance in their BSCs. This study provides insights into the potential problems that prevent or delay the integration of environmental issues into BSCs.

This study provides evidence on how institutional and external factors influence barriers and motivations to embed environmental performance measures into a BSC. This study demonstrates how health-care organisations can effectively overcome barriers by modifying specific institutional artefacts. This is an important contribution to the body of knowledge because there is limited empirical research regarding integrating environmental issues into a public sector BSC that projects key organisational commitment indicators.

This study, a systematic review, focuses on the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) originating in developing countries. It critically analyses, evaluates and synthesises studies featuring formal and informal institutions, embedded in social and business networks, as a marketing solution for institutional voids. The review shows that current international marketing studies downplay the role of informal institutions in the internationalisation of SMEs. Thus, the authors set a new research agenda for advancing the institutional theory to account for the impact of informal institutions and networks on firm internationalisation.

This review followed five structured stages, including framing the research questions, identifying relevant studies, assessing their quality, summarising the evidence and interpreting the findings. Based on the systematic approach, 434 papers (374 from Web of Science, 60 from Scopus) were generated. Following that, the authors applied the qualitative inclusion/exclusion criteria, which yielded 63 papers. Their analysis involved three authors, with the fourth author focusing on ensuring quality in the analysis.

The study findings invite a different line of theorising market structures and processes focusing on the role of networks as an alternative to formal institutional systems. The outcome of our review suggests that there is scope for developing the institutional theory that account for the role of informal institutions and networks.

Based on the analysis, we call for new theorisation, in the international marketing literature, which accounts for informal networking amongst internationalising SMEs in the light of institutional voids. Thus, the authors promote novel participatory, bottom to top understanding of relationship between institutions and enterprises.