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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of religious entrepreneurs on bank loans and further examine the moderating effect of entrepreneurial gender.

In 2010, the Chinese national survey reported the different religious beliefs of private entrepreneurs. Using this set of survey data, the authors obtain a sample of 4,330 Chinese family firms and employ the Tobit regression approach to examine the relationship between the amount of bank loans and the religious background of entrepreneurs. In addition, the authors use the propensity score matching approach to address the endogeneity issue.

Based on the data from the 2010 national survey, the authors document that the amount of bank loans is significantly higher for Chinese family firms with religious entrepreneurs than for their counterparts. This finding suggests that religious individuals are inclined to be more ethical and honest and Chinese family firms with religious entrepreneurs transfer soft information to banks, and eventually lenders favor religious entrepreneurs with more bank loans. Moreover, the authors reveal that the amount of bank loans is significantly larger for firms with female entrepreneurs than for those without female entrepreneurs. In addition, entrepreneurial gender attenuates the positive relationship between religious entrepreneurs and bank loans.

This study is one of few studies to examine the influence of an entrepreneur’s religious belief on bank credit decisions and adds to previous studies about religious influence on corporate behavior by revealing a positive association between religious entrepreneurs and bank loans. Moreover, this study validates that female entrepreneurs exert positive effects on the amount of bank loans and attenuate the positive influence of religious entrepreneurs on bank loans.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that socio‐religious context plays in the decision of whether to become and entrepreneur, and what type of new business venture to create.

Interpretivist development from qualitative data obtained by interviews of entrepreneurs in Nepal and Canada.

Conceptions of Right Livelihood play an important role in the evaluation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities and in the day‐to‐day operations of the resultant new businesses.

Links the literatures of social economics and entrepreneurship to explore how entrepreneurs must balance economic, social, and religious objectives when launching and operating new businesses.

This study aims to understand how religion impacts the everyday activities of Muslim entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

This qualitative research is grounded on in-depth interviews with 50 entrepreneurs presently living and working in the UAE. When selecting the interviewees, the authors used purposeful sampling to ensure a diverse sample of interviewees with respect to nationality, age, gender and the nature of their business.

It was found that religion for these Muslim entrepreneurs is highly individualized, leading to our initial impressions that work and religion have no relationship. Nevertheless, following deeper investigation, it was found that religion does shape the everyday entrepreneurial activities of these entrepreneurs. More precisely, the entrepreneurial activities of these Muslim entrepreneurs are impacted by a desire to re-explain their work in religious terms, leading to conflicts between work and religion.

In todays’ competitive environment in the UAE, the workplace is increasingly consuming a considerable amount of individuals’ time, becoming more fundamental to their identity, and incorporating more life factors. However, the aspects impacting work have not been extensively researched, particularly the impact of religion on entrepreneurial endeavors, which represents a different type of work. The current study endeavors to fill this crucial research gap, and by doing so, we bring empirical attention to the relationship proposed yet largely ignored in prior studies.

This study aims to provide a theoretical account of the nexus of religion and entrepreneurship in hospitality and tourism (H&T) by considering the influences of religion on entrepreneurial motivation, acquisition of resources for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour.

The authors synthesise research and theory on religion and entrepreneurship and apply it within H&T, taking into account the specificities of the industry. Specifically, they pooled together relevant theory and empirical research findings which they summarised to identify points of convergence and divergence, before refining the data to allow for further theoretical insights to be gained.

The authors suggest that religion may positively or negatively influence entrepreneurship; in particular, they identify various modes of religion influences, which offer insights into how religion may encourage, sustain and amplify entrepreneurship or alternatively inhibit entrepreneurship.

Religion offers an important yet underused lens for understanding the activities and mechanisms influencing entrepreneurship in the rapidly evolving H&T industry. This study identifies different aspects of the two multidimensional and interdisciplinary concepts of religion and entrepreneurship and offers new insights into the relationship between the two within the context of H&T.

The utilization of social networks is known to have an impact on micro-enterprise success. This study aims to examine the contribution of social networks in acquiring resources and their role in the enterprise’s success.

A business’s success is influenced by its network structure and the network’s resources. The authors examine whether unique religious-cultural characteristics affect the social networks contribution to a business’s success. This model examines the network utilization of women entrepreneurs who own micro-enterprises in ultra-religious groups. The sample consists of 123 surveys completed by Jewish ultra-Orthodox women entrepreneurs in Israel. Data collection was conducted between February and June 2013. The authors used a snowball sampling approach where interviewees were asked to refer us to other entrepreneurs. In the hour-long interview, a questionnaire was used with open and closed questions.

Findings indicate that strong personal ties provide a micro-enterprise with social legitimacy, emotional support and assistance in the management and operation of daily activities. However, contrary to the existing literature, network utilization did not contribute to enterprise success. That is, in religious communities in particular, social networks enable the existence of businesses, but do not contribute to their success.

The practical implications of this paper are the mapping of the social network resources used by the business owner, such as financial consultations or professional assistance, as well as distinguishing between strong and weak ties, which reflect the intensity of the contact for better use of the social network by the entrepreneurs.

This study examined social networks’ contribution to the acquisition of resources, as well as the part they play in the success of ultra-orthodox women micro-entrepreneurs and perhaps other religious and minorities groups.

The relationship between ethnicity, religion and entrepreneurship is an emerging field, and an extremely important topic, considering the influence of these drivers on people’s lives and on entrepreneurs’ performance, in particular. This study aims to explore and contribute to a more robust understanding of this relationship.

The main trends were disclosed using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis and VOSviewer. The set of articles cover the annual period from 1973 to 2022. The coupling analysis founded links to produce a framework outlining an integrative state of the art intersecting ethnicity and religion and entrepreneurship spectrum study.

The analysis identified integrative relationships between the concepts of ethnicity, religion and entrepreneurship, which describe the direction of literature, resulting in five main categories.

This study offers a novel framework and in-depth understanding to delve into this interrelationship research agenda. Guided by the gaps in the literature, a set of outstanding avenues for future research are proposed.

Recent scholarship in neo-evolutionary sociology has rejected stage-models in favor of multilinear theories that shift the study of sociocultural change away from teleological arguments toward those that emphasize selection pressures and macrodynamics. The paper below adopts a neo-evolutionary frame to revisit one of the most epochal moments in human sociocultural evolution, the urban revolution (about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and perhaps the Indus Valley) and the rise of the first political units. Shifting the analysis from conventional perspectives, this paper asks the question why the polity was the first autonomous institution besides kinship and what consequences did this have on the trajectory of the human societies, and more generally, human sociocultural evolution. By doing so, a slightly different historiography is presented in which institutional autonomy corresponds not with stages, but rather an historical “phasing” that emphasizes the role that institutional entrepreneurs have played in driving institutional evolution via structural opportunities and historical contingencies.

This study aims to address decision-making processes of Christian entrepreneurs living and working in rural areas. The authors draw on the institutional logics perspective and stewardship perspective to demonstrate how religion influences rationality and entrepreneurial decision-making processes in a rural context.

This study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach supported by ethnographic fieldwork. Qualitative and interpretative analyses are used to access deeper insights into the decision-making processes of Christian entrepreneurs in a rural environment. Data include short-term immersive events, observations and interviews as COVID-19 pandemic restrictions lifted in the region.

This study reveals that normative (religious) commitments – a sense of moral duty and action influenced by religion – and a high-religiosity context – where religion permeates diverse aspects of life – lead to behaviors that are perceived as rational and normative. In this context, the normative relationship between a market and a community logic, alongside a logic of religion, are all linked through a stewardship perspective. A broad focus on the development of community and place also safeguards business and community interests.

Since the findings are based on one rural area and one religion, future studies should address a broader range of geographical areas and religions. In this study, uncertainty arising from COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and the resumption of business exchanges also influence the decision-making processes of the entrepreneurial participants. While the findings reflect the normative dispositions and the decision-making processes that are inherent in this context, an even broader examination of rural entrepreneurship will benefit our understanding of entrepreneurial decisions in terms of rationality and place.

The findings reveal that entrepreneurs who relocate to a rural, high-religiosity context should first assess how the community affiliated through a set of beliefs – expects actors to behave. Additionally, applicability to other religions requires further consideration.

This study answers the call to examine entrepreneurship and the underpinnings of rationality that challenge mainstream debates on entrepreneurial decision-making and religion. The findings answer this call by advancing the knowledge of the decision-making process of religious entrepreneurs. In this respect, the findings present a context where rational business behaviors, influenced by a market logic, are transformed through exchanges with a community informed by a logic of religion. A conceptual model illustrates the nature of this context and associated processes.

Embeddedness has gained prominence in entrepreneurship studies. However, the notion that the embeddedness metaphor relates to “market” structures prevails in studies in the area. Entrepreneurship scholars still know little about whether entrepreneurs are eventually embedded in other structures whose relationships go beyond the restricted dimension of the interested actor’s assumption. This study aims to propose investigating the social structures in which a specific type of entrepreneurship, the religious one, is embedded.

The research was qualitative, using interviews as an evidence collection instrument. A total of 17 entrepreneur-pastors responsible for business churches in Brazil and eight parishioners took part in the study.

Religious entrepreneurs are embedded in market structures, corroborating a perspective that associates embeddedness with the utilitarian notion. At the same time, entrepreneurs are embedded in two other social structures: reciprocity and redistribution.

This article emphasizes the relevance of going beyond the predominant perspective associated with the utilitarian and rationalized understanding of embeddedness in relationship networks.

This study makes essential contributions. Initially, it attests to the utilitarian perspective of Granovetter’s embeddedness while suggesting incorporating two other dimensions into the metaphor. By highlighting this, this article stresses the need to reinterpret the metaphor of embeddedness and how entrepreneurship scholars use it. Further, by emphasizing the need to consider embeddedness in networks beyond its still utilitarian perspective, this paper highlights unexplored opportunities for entrepreneurship scholars.

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.