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This paper examines how cultural holes that exist at the intersection of institutional fields influence the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Through an exploration of physician-founded ambulatory surgery centers in the United States, we examine how the presence of cultural holes presented doctors with alternative beliefs, values, and practices to overcome the cultural constraints around entrepreneurship within the medical profession. In doing so, this study extends cultural entrepreneurship research by bringing cultural holes to the forefront, empirically showing how they facilitate entrepreneurial action and proposing other contexts where cultural holes may affect entrepreneurial actions and outcomes.

Although economic and entrepreneurship scholars have argued that high income inequality has a positive impact on entrepreneurship by increasing the incentives for high quality human capital to take entrepreneurial risk and by enabling talented entrepreneurs to accumulate and reinvest capital into new businesses, we suggest that the relationship between economic inequality and entrepreneurship may be more complex than initially indicated in light of recent research on the topic of social trust and entrepreneurship. We propose that income inequality is likely to have a curvilinear effect on entrepreneurial activity. Although moderate levels of inequality can increase entrepreneurial activity, very high levels of inequality will begin to reduce rates of entrepreneurship due to diminished generalized social trust in the community. Lower generalized social trust decreases the sharing of information and resources leading to fewer entrepreneurial opportunities, and as a result, lower levels of entrepreneurship.

Foundational work on institutional theory as a framework for studying organizations underscored its relevance to analyses of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship research has often ignored the insights provided by this theoretic approach. In this chapter, we illustrate the utility of institutional theory as a central framework for explaining entrepreneurial phenomena by discussing three primary questions for entrepreneurship researchers: Under what conditions are individuals likely to found new organizations? What are key influences on the kinds of organizations they found? And what factors determine the likelihood of the survival of new organizations? We describe the kinds of answers that an institutional perspective provides to these questions, illustrate some of our arguments by drawing on a recent field of entrepreneurial endeavor, hedge funds, and discuss the implications of our analysis for further work by entrepreneurship researchers.

Social movements can disrupt existing industries and inspire the emergence of new markets by drawing attention to problems with the status quo and promoting alternatives. We examine how the influence of social movements on entrepreneurial activity evolves as the markets they foster mature. Theoretically, we argue that the success of social movements in furthering market expansion leads to three related outcomes. First, the movement-encouraged development of market infrastructure reduces the need for continued social movement support. Second, social movements’ efforts on behalf of new markets increase the importance of resource availability for market entry. Third, market growth motivates countermovement that reduce the beneficial impact of initiator movements on entrepreneurial activity. We test these arguments by analyzing evolving social movement dynamics and entrepreneurial activity in the US wind power industry from 1992 to 2007. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of social movements, stakeholder management, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

A large and growing literature examines the explicit social responsibility practices of companies. Yet corporations’ greatest consequences for social welfare arguably occur through indirect processes that shape the social fabric that sustains generosity and mutual support within communities. Based on this logic, we theorize and test a model that suggests two pathways by which large corporations affect community philanthropy: (1) through direct engagement in community philanthropy and (2) by indirectly influencing the efficacy of community social capital, defined as the relationships among community members that facilitate social support and maintenance of social welfare. Our analysis of United Way contributions in 136 US cities over the 46 years from 1952 to 1997 supports our model. We find that the presence of corporations weakens the contributions of both elite and working-class social capital on community philanthropy. Our findings thus contribute to a novel view of corporate social responsibility based on how corporations influence the social capital of the communities in which they are embedded.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate microlending outcomes among Latin American non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), specifically microfinance institutions (MFIs). While there is a growing movement of non‐profit ventures channeling small loans to the poor worldwide, assessments of their impacts are lacking. Thus, field interviews with clients who had various degrees of involvement in the process of receiving microloans from MFIs were conducted over a summer in Guatemala.

Using a dataset of 393 clients from Guatemalan MFIs, microfinance impacts from two dimensions are examined and impacts measured along financial and social dimensions by surveying new clients, current clients, and graduated clients of five MFIs in Guatemala.

Applying univariate and multivariate analyses shows that for Guatemala, MFIs do produce a measure of improvement in the lives of microfinance clients. This improvement is concentrated along the social dimensions of housing, health, and client empowerment.

A limitation of this paper is that it focuses on only five of several dozen MFIs in Guatemala. What is needed is further use of the survey instruments to carry out subsequent studies throughout more of Latin America, and beyond.

This research suggests that microfinance demonstrates promising results associated with social benefits to various client populations. As such, it holds a variety of implications for government and other policymakers as they consider innovative ways to reduce poverty and human suffering around the globe.

It is anticipated that this field study will contribute to the furtherance of literature on the effects of lending among the poor.