Institutions, entrepreneurs, and communities: A special issue on entrepreneurship

This Special Issue's aim is to demonstrate that drawing on sociological research can further enrich entrepreneurship studies of institutions, entrepreneurs, and communities. We develop an organizing framework for our ten Special Issue papers that categorizes the pieces by community level and type, observed changes, form of entrepreneurial actor, institutional and entrepreneurial concepts and processes, and integrative methodologies. This set of categorizations helps us to identify components that scholars can use to build more mid-range theory around our special issue topics. The framework also helps us to isolate limitations in the Special Issue papers, thereby providing avenues for future research.

► Bridging from entrepreneurship to other disciplines can help enrich entrepreneurship studies of critical topics, such as institutions, entrepreneurs and communities. ► Entrepreneurship research on this particular set of topics has been deemed to suffer from five problems. ► These problems include competing conceptualizations of institutions as formal vs. informal arrangements, conflating culture with country, using single country studies, relying on overly agentic theory, and not developing multi-level frameworks. ► To help resolve these issues, we offer a framework with multiple dimensions that assesses our Special Issue papers.