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The purpose of this paper is to examine the gender differences in entrepreneurship driven by configurations of institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition, and provide theoretical guidance and practical reference for promoting female and male entrepreneurship.

Based on a configuration perspective, six antecedents of institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition are integrated to explore multiple concurrent factors and causally complex relationships affecting female and male entrepreneurship.

This study indicates that the configurations of institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition can achieve high female and male entrepreneurship. There are similarities and differences between female and male entrepreneurship from a configuration perspective. Perceived opportunity plays an important role in entrepreneurship for both women and men, and the absence of fear of failure is also important for male entrepreneurship. There is a complementary effect among entrepreneurial cognitions in the absence of institutional environment. In the configurations of institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition, female entrepreneurship benefits more from informal institutions, whereas regulative and cognitive institutions play a greater role in male entrepreneurship.

Policymakers and individuals should take a holistic and complex view of the impact of institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition, and differentiated measures should be taken for female and male entrepreneurship.

This research responds to the call for multilevel transnational entrepreneurship research, enriches research on institutional environment and entrepreneurial cognition, deepens the application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to the field of entrepreneurship and strengthens the understanding of the similarities, differences and complexities of female and male entrepreneurship.

Critiques of international business (IB) have long pointed to the weaknesses in the understanding of context. This has ignited debate on the understanding of institutions and how they “matter” for IB. Yet how institutions matter ultimately depends on how IB applies institutional theory. It is argued that institutional-based research is dominated by a narrow set of approaches, largely overlooking institutional perspectives that account for institutional diversity. This paper aims to forward the argument that IB research should lend greater attention to comparing the topography of institutional configurations by bringing political economy “back in” to the IB domain.

Using principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, the authors provide IB with a taxonomy of capitalist institutional diversity which defines the landscape of political economies.

The authors show institutional diversity is characterised by a range of capitalist clusters and configuration arrangements, identifying four clusters with distinct modes of capitalism as well as specifying intra-cluster differences to propose nine varieties of capitalism. This paper allows IB scholars to lend closer attention to the institutional context within which firms operate. If the configurations of institutions “matter” for IB scholarship, then clearly, a quantitative blueprint to assess institutional diversity remains central to the momentum of such “institutional turn.”

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of institutional theory, serving as a valuable resource for the application of context within international business. Further, our taxonomy allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the diverse institutional context within which firms operate, whilst extending to support the analysis of broader socioeconomic outcomes. This taxonomy therefore allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the institutional context within which firms operate.

South Korea has shown ultra-low fertility since the 2000s despite a massive expansion of pro-natal policies. The purpose of this research is to analyse institutional and socio-cultural configurations surrounding Korea's pro-natal policy and provide implications as to why the comprehensive packages have not produced intended outcomes.

This study assumes institutional complementarities, suggesting that the effectiveness of policy depends on various support factors. Drawing out insights from the framework of de-familisation, the authors construct a gender and family framework to analyse the pro-natal policy configurations in Korea.

Labour market policies in Korea have explicitly aimed to support dual-earner couples and protect women's employment status after childbirth. However, the dualistic labour market and remaining female-caregiver norms lead to the polarisation of couples into dual earners and male breadwinners. In family policy, the government has rapidly increased affordable childcare services, but widespread distrust in private services and generous birth-related cash benefits formulate a tension between de-familisation and continued familisation. Other welfare programmes that attach welfare rights to marital status also prolong female-caregiver norms in institutional arrangements. The findings suggest that the ambivalence between recent policy developments and the existing arrangements can limit the effectiveness of the policy packages.

The framework based on institutional complementarities addresses the limitations of previous studies concentrating on the statistical testing of individual policy effects. A similar approach can be applied to other countries showing major policy efforts but producing unsatisfactory outcomes.

The study examines how the interactions among three prominent institutional logics—state, market and religion—fundamentally shape the patterns of individuals’ engagement in social entrepreneurship (SE).

The study develops a configurational theoretical framework and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to test the hypotheses by gathering data on social ventures from 35 countries from the World Values Survey and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

The results show that the prevalence of social entrepreneurial ventures is enabled by different combinations of logics of action, governance mechanisms, strength of religious beliefs and religious pluralism.

This research reveals that the relationship between institutional logic profiles and SE is contingent on the coherence between different institutional logics.

This study aims to contrast the disparities in optimal competitiveness configurations across international economies. Additionally, we analyse the competitive efficiency across firms of different performance endowments to identify distinctions and determine whether standardised or customised competitiveness configurations are optimal.

This study uses a multilevel regression model to confirm country-specific effects followed by a non-parametric “Benefit-of-the-Doubt” (BoD) method to conduct an international comparison of the competitive efficiency of top- and poor-performing firms across eight European and Latin American economies.

Not only are national ecosystems significant differentiators of competitive efficiency, but contras firm-level characteristics also explain these differences. It is found that more recent start-ups tend to experience significantly greater competitive efficiency. However, by separating the top-performing firms from the poor performers in each economy, it is found that the configurational outputs that potentially contribute most to competitive efficiency are not necessarily the same; while “technology” is a key factor for driving the competitive efficiency of top-performing firms, “market” drivers are most essential for improving the competitive potential of poor performers.

The configurational outputs that potentially contribute most to competitive efficiency are not necessarily universal.

This paper aims to assess the comparative position of the national innovation system of Chinese state entrepreneurship versus liberal market entrepreneurship. Based on the comparative institutional framework, it asks whether Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage because of its incoherent institutions in liberal or coordinated economies. Hence, does the Chinese institutional system of innovation lag behind that of US or liberal countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies in the transformation of national science into economic products measured as high-technology exports?

This study uses panel data analysis based on 29 OECD economies and the Chinese economy over 23 years. Regarding national science productivity (explorative capabilities), it includes published and patented science streams; regarding technological transformation (exploitative capabilities), it measures the percentage of high-technology exports in gross domestic product (GDP). The interactions between the types of entrepreneurship and national science institutions serve as predictors in the design.

The results show that Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative advantage over liberal economies in published science. However, Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage compared to liberal entrepreneurship in patent science. Regarding the dyadic level of comparability between the national economies, there are mixed results in the transformation of national science.

This study supports the three following theoretical points: national institutions differ regardless of the pressure of convergence through globalization; national science contingencies influence different paths of the transformation of national science to technology; and mixed economies, such as state entrepreneurship, can achieve high performance without fully conforming to liberal markets.

This study emphasizes institutional mechanisms for future research to support the innovation of incoherent institutions and suggests the benefit of cross-pollination of senior managers between state and private organizations for a defined duration.

Theoretically, this research combines an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional level of analysis, and in so doing, it deals with the transformation of national science in scientific publications and patents in the vertical value chain. Empirically, this study links the national published and patented science with the national economic artifacts in high-technology sectors. This novel approach to assess the national and discipline-level interaction sets a context for the future research in other settings. It also informs policy decisions regarding the growth of science, innovation and development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of proto-institutions that are new institutional subsystems that subsequently affect the current institutional arrangements in the evolution of service ecosystems.

To shed light on the mode of action of proto-institutions, the authors investigate the changes of three service ecosystems in Italy: the health care ecosystem, the food-supply ecosystem and the urban mobility ecosystem.

First, the paper elucidates how changes of service ecosystems are triggered by megatrends that are external to specific service ecosystems. Second, the study empirically shows how service ecosystems and their institutional settings change through the establishment of proto-institutions.

Responding to recent calls to investigate in more detail how actors challenge dominant social patterns and to conduct research to better understand how changes at the level of individual actors may lead to shifts within overall service ecosystems, this paper is one of the first to empirically study the relationships between phenomena that are external to service ecosystems, the emergence of proto-institutions and the resulting changes of institutional arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues and situations affecting the entrepreneurial university via frame analysis to determine how institutional members frame the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an entrepreneurial university and provide key insights on how it has been manifested in reality.

Interviews of 18 institutional members from the NUS will be the focus of this paper. Categories of frames were adopted from environmental conflict research. Official documents were also analysed to support the frames found in this study.

Based on the NUS case, the entrepreneurial university was perceived in an apparently ambiguous setup. Interviewees’ framing features the reality affecting the entrepreneurial university in relation to disciplinary identities, institutional configuration, power of important actors and risk perceptions attached to entrepreneurial activities. Issues presented by the case are considered intractable because institutional members have interpretative differences in motivations and interests in pursuing entrepreneurial activities.

Future research can draw upon the factors that contribute to the institutionalisation of the entrepreneurial university model.

The results may assist universities in refining certain approaches in carrying out entrepreneurial activities. Using methods such as frame analysis can enable identification of problems and ways to resolve the issues concerning reforms or policy frameworks introduced to universities.

At the time of this writing, analysing the entrepreneurial university model through the application of frame analysis is novel and yet to be explored in the field of higher education.

The purpose of this study is to provide a nuanced explanation of the linkage between entrepreneurial motivations, job attractiveness and growth of family-owned small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) using expectancy and institutional theories.

The data was collected from small family business owners and job seekers in the same companies during interview time using a simple random technique.

The study found that three EMs among small business owners play a pivotal role in family SME business growth in underdeveloped trade regions like China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. These firms are interested in investing in seaport-related commerce, restaurants or hotels and real estate business.

The government, small family business owners, universities and regional youth can use this applied research for their benefits alike.

The study contributes in multiple ways. First, the authors brought a unique context in the emerging economies context of an informal economy like Pakistan. Second, the authors have uniquely tested the moderating role of job attractiveness in the least developed regions. Finally, the authors have integrated family SMEs’ expectancy theory and institutional perspective.

This research paper attempts to address the strategic challenges of developing knowledge‐based innovation (KBI) in China through the analysis of the triple helix (TH) innovation networks between university, government and industry in China. In so doing, the TH model is adopted as an analytical framework to investigate the format and operations of knowledge networks within university, government and industry during the economic transitions in China.

The paper incorporates field observation, interviews with senior government officials, desk research on various government policy document as well as critical review of the existing literature related to KBI and the TH model in order to build up the strategic overview of the current state of KBI in China.

Based on the critical literature review and interviews, it is identified that the formation and operation of knowledge production system in China on the one hand reflects the three dimensions within TH model: normative control (government), wealth generation (industry) and novelty production (university and public research institutions), on the other hand highlights dynamic institutional interactions and transformational processes in creating the knowledge economy. The key factors that have an effect on the inter‐institutional relations and evolutions of different knowledge functions within the TH innovation networks, have also been identified and manifested in the proposed theoretical framework of the knowledge production system in China.

The originality of the paper rests in addressing the strategic implications of TH innovation model for developing KBI in China, and highlighting the challenges facing both policy makers and innovation managers in terms of managing the organizational and institutional changes during the process of knowledge creation.