Entrepreneurship Through a Unified Sociological Neoinstitutional Lens

Abstract

The institutional context, which includes the normative, regulative, and cognitive dimensions of social life within the various constitutive spheres of society, has a strong influence on entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. Institutions shape who becomes an entrepreneur, opportunity creation, identification, and evaluation, as well as how entrepreneurs attempt to start new firms. We introduce a novel framework that unifies the two dominant perspectives in sociological neoinstitutionalism, the institutional logics and the institutional pillars typologies, and apply this unified framework to examine the existing research at the nexus of entrepreneurship and institutional theory while outlining a set of entrepreneurial phenomena to which the framework can be applied. We analyzed the citation pattern of all 77 articles published since 1999 in top management journals (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal) that used institutional theory to examine entrepreneurial phenomena, and we demonstrate how the unified framework effectively organizes past research while also pointing to new and important areas for development.