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Entrepreneurial process strongly relies on context. The previous entrepreneurship research in developed countries over-emphasizes on its economic impact, but ignores its social impact, which leads to the slow development of entrepreneurship theories. Transitioning China provides entrepreneurs with a typical environment where opportunities and constraints coexist, which is a new research area in the field of entrepreneurship study.

Based on the grounded theory approach, this paper generalizes a local entrepreneurial process model from a multiple case study.

The paper states that the interaction among entrepreneurs, opportunities and institutional context is the core of the process. To be specific, entrepreneurial process includes an inner and an outer mechanism. The inner mechanism is based on the relations among institutional constraints, entrepreneurs and opportunities: nascent entrepreneurs, forced by institutional constraints to start a business, undergo a psychological process with entrepreneurial angst, reflective learning and effectuation and finally create business opportunities. The outer mechanism is grounded in the relations among new ventures, institutional evolution and opportunity development: new ventures facilitate institutional evolution through institutional entrepreneurship strategies, which in turn supports the ventures in the sustainable development of opportunities.

This study illuminates the social and institutional impact of entrepreneurial behavior, which is gradually fading and forgotten in modern society. The findings of the study enrich the research on entrepreneurial process, entrepreneurial cognition and institutional entrepreneurship and also provide implications for entrepreneurs.

The authors explore how home and host market institutions impact emerging market (EM) international entrepreneurship (IE) into developed markets.

Based on four case studies of Nigerian entrepreneurs expanding into the USA, this qualitative research adopts an institutional perspective to the study of EM IE.

The findings show home and host formal and informal institutions simultaneously enable and constrain the IE process. Weak home institutions shape the international opportunity recognition decision but seriously impede international opportunity development and exploitation activities in the developed market. EM entrepreneurs benefit from highly functioning regulation in the developed market whilst also experiencing discriminatory treatment from institutions. The findings of the study further show the positive and constraining effects of host institutions throughout the process.

Based on the findings, the paper details future research ideas, managerial implications and recommendation for policymakers.

The underlying assumptions of Baumol’s theory of entrepreneurial allocation limits its potential to answer some key questions related to the entrepreneurship allocation. Hence, this paper aims to highlight the inherent limits of Baumol’s theory and suggest a new approach for understanding the entrepreneur-institution relationship and their functions.

This is a conceptual paper with a narrow focus on the literature.

The paper argues that Baumol’s adherence to neoclassic economics assumptions about entrepreneur and institution, such as entrepreneurs as rational choice taker with predetermined goals or institutions as exogenous, limits the potential of his theoretical framework to explain productive entrepreneurship in weak institutional settings. As such, underlying on Austrian economics assumptions about entrepreneur and his/her agency, this paper proposes a reconceptualization of productive entrepreneurship as an outcome of the interaction between entrepreneur and context.

Going beyond Baumol’s main proposition of one-sided influence of institutions on entrepreneurship allocation, this research highlights the influence of individual factors and entrepreneurial action on choosing entrepreneurial paths by entrepreneurs. So, future policies to stimulate productive entrepreneurship should consider these factors and go beyond Baumol’s mere focus on institutional improvement.

Going beyond one-sided influence of institutions on entrepreneurship allocation, this paper suggests an interaction centric approach which considers the role of actors and institutions as the co-creator of each other in the social process and argues that any effort for explaining the entrepreneurship should consider the co-creative nature of the actors and institutions as well as the endogenous nature of institutions. The proposed approach will help expanding entrepreneurship literature through finding answers to some key under-examined questions in the promising research stream of entrepreneurship allocation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of institutional entrepreneurship in opportunity formation and opportunity exploitation in developing emerging strategic new industries.

The paper reviews the focal literature focussing on institutional entrepreneurs’ role in opportunity formation with special attention to opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs in emerging economy. A multi-method approach consisting of historical case studies and event sequencing is applied to track the historical development of the solar energy industry in two case contexts and to investigate the role of institutional entrepreneurs in this process.

Investigation of two cases illustrates that different types of institutional entrepreneur, as represented by individual entrepreneurs and local government, in the context of massive institutional change – such as the Grand Western Development Program and the Thousand Talents Program in China – have varied effects on triggering and inducing institutional change and innovation to explore and exploit opportunities in emerging new industries.

The significance of local context for the nature and scope of institutional entrepreneurship in emerging economy is worthy of further research. The top-down process of institutional innovation dominated by local government might cause myopic outcome and distortion of market opportunities. Indigenous individual entrepreneurs with well-accumulated political capital and strong perceived responsibility could be the main actors to introduce incremental institutional change by combining bottom-up and top-down processes and promoting sustained new industry development through creating and seizing institutional opportunities and market opportunities.

This paper illustrates the close relationship between institutional environment and opportunity formation in emerging economies, contributes to the understanding of contextualizing institutional entrepreneurs in different regional contexts and discloses the problems involved in local government acting as an institutional entrepreneur.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the role of institutional entrepreneurs who use accounting technology to accomplish change within a privatised telecommunications company.

The case study method is adopted. The authors draw on recent extension to institutional theory that gives greater emphasis to agency including concepts such as embeddedness, institutional entrepreneurs and institutional contradiction.

As part of the consequences of new public management reforms, we illustrate how institutional entrepreneurs de-established an older state-run bureaucratic and engineering-based routine and replaced it with a business- and accounting-based routine. Eventually, new accounting routines were reproduced and taken for granted by telecommunications management and employees.

As this study is limited to a single case study, no generalisation except to theory can be made. There are implications for privatisation of state sector organisations both locally and internationally.

The paper makes a contribution to elaborating the role of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change towards privatisation and how accounting was used as a technology of change.

How do institutions affect entrepreneurship? Conversely, how do entrepreneurs impact institutions? Institutional theory has long struggled to explain the action and agency inherent in entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1988; Barley & Tolbert, 1997). Contemporary institutionalist research in organization studies began with the question of how the institutional environment shapes the structures and behaviors of existing organizations. This research largely focused on how normative, regulative, and cognitive dimensions of the environment (Scott, 2008) constrain large, mature organizations and the circumstances that increase the adoption of new structures by such organizations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983). A subsequent wave of research in the institutional tradition focused on institutional change within mature organizational fields (see Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002). Some recent research has studied the actors – “institutional entrepreneurs” – that create new or transform existing institutions (e.g., Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004). Much less attention, however, has been paid within the institutional-theory literature to entrepreneurship: the processes of founding and managing new organizations.

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”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of transnational entrepreneurs in growing born global firms, with a focus on the growth process facilitated by collaborative entry mode.

The author chose the solar photovoltaic industry as the empirical setting. This industry is a particularly good context for the study because many firms in this industry sell knowledge-intensive products internationally from their inception. The primary data consist of 32 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, industry association representatives, research institute scholars, and professional service firms.

The study highlights the importance of transnational entrepreneurs who develop born global firms to maturity by using their technological knowledge, international connections, and bicultural advantages to navigate and leverage institutional complexity. Collaborative entry mode with distributors enables born global firms’ high growth rapidly, whereas transnational entrepreneurs play a central role in building and expanding international network. Initial public offering in overseas stock exchange accelerates the high growth trajectory of born global firm by signalling its maturity.

The author took a process perspective by examining the growth and maturity of born global firms by collaborative partnership; the author’s focus on the role of transnational entrepreneurs highlighted entrepreneurs’ sensitivity to institutional complexity along the growth trajectory.

The author recommends both incumbent and entrepreneurial firms in developed economies collaborate with transnational entrepreneurs in various business areas. Industry firms may be able to cooperate on product and marketing development, and professional service firms can offer services to expand born global firms further, because transnational entrepreneurs follow the global “rules of the game”.

The author shed important light on the role of transnational entrepreneurs throughout the growth of born global firms via collaborative entry mode. Furthermore, the author develops a multilevel framework for analysing the combined influence of transnational entrepreneur and institutional complexity on the growth of born global firm.

The success of a young entrepreneur depends on how institutional support can facilitate venture performance. Drawing on the institutional theory, this study posited the role of self-efficacy in supporting the effect of institutional support. Self-efficacy is a driving factor for entrepreneurs in managing and implementing business action confidently and successfully. With macro- and micro-oriented research, this study aims to examine how the micro-level factor that is self-efficacy could mediate the influence of macro-level factors (i.e. institutional governance, cultural and social norms and cognitive structure) toward iGen's new venture performance.

A total of 462 respondents representing the population of Malaysian iGen entrepreneurs participated in this study. The samples were selected using a multistage sampling technique (i.e. probability cluster sampling technique and non-probability purposive sampling). Survey items were adapted from the previous studies. Structural equation modelling was used, and the first stage involved testing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the measurement items' unidimensionality, validity and reliability. The second stage of analysis is to test the mediation model.

The mediation analysis results confirm that the relationship between institutional governance, cultural and social norms, cognitive structure and new venture performance is mediated by self-efficacy. The results confirm that the relationship between institutional governance and cultural and social norms toward new venture performance is fully mediated by self-efficacy. On the other hand, the relationship between cognitive structure and new venture performance is partially mediated by self-efficacy.

For future research, it is necessary to consider a wide-ranging sample size in improving research generalisation. Moreover, the cross-sectional study only observes the phenomenon at a certain point and cannot explain the process in the correlational relationship. Future researchers are encouraged to adopt a longitudinal study, which allows the researchers to study a sample throughout a period to draw firm conclusions. Survey data also raise the concern of common method variance (CMV), and future studies may use different data types to solve the problem. In addition, future studies are encouraged to examine other factors that could influence new venture performance.

This study extends the current literature on public policy and entrepreneurship. It comprehensively explains the relationship between institutional governance, cultural and social norms, cognitive structure and self-efficacy toward new venture performance. This study was also conducted in a developing country and iGen context, which can offer new insights into the current literature. Many empirical studies have applied institutional theory in examining entrepreneurship action and behaviour, yet the scholarly consecration on micro-level factors is limited. With macro- and micro-oriented research, this study has examined the influence of self-efficacy as a potential mediating variable.

This chapter explores how classic and institutional entrepreneurs in the sharing economy (SE) frame and make sense of the emergent, plural, and contested SE concept. The authors address this question through an investigation of an attempt to institutionalize the SE as a separate field in France, through data collected among SE entrepreneurs gravitating around OuiShare, a leading institutional entrepreneur for the SE. To analyze the plurality of discursive framings within the SE field, we explored how classic entrepreneurs affiliated with the SE and institutional entrepreneurs made sense of the concept and its related practices by referring to different theories and narratives. The results reveal that classic entrepreneurs used and combined four distinct theoretical currents (access economy, commons, gift, and libertarianism) to frame their projects. This framing diversity was further reinforced at the meso level by specific forms of institutional entrepreneurship which reflected and actively built on such framing diversity. However, over time, such heterogeneity negatively affects the internal coherence of the field. Based on these results, the authors discuss the impact of enduring framing diversity on the SE organizational field emergence and development.