Institutions and Entrepreneurship

In this volume, we examine how the institutional environment affects entrepreneurial organizations, and how entrepreneurs create and manipulate their institutional environment. This includes not only how the institutional environment constrains both founding processes and the type of organizations founded, but also how institutional dynamics construct new entrepreneurial opportunities, empower and facilitate action, and how entrepreneurs manipulate the institutional environment to serve their own ends. This institutional approach to entrepreneurship shifts attention away from the personal traits and backgrounds of individual entrepreneurs, and toward how institutions shape entrepreneurial opportunities and actions; how entrepreneurs navigate their cognitive, normative, and regulatory environments; and how actors modify and build institutions to support new types of organizations.

This volume represents the cutting edge of research on the institutional approach to entrepreneurship. It features articles from leading organizational sociologists. A variety of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches are used, and empirical contexts range from satellite radio to film to nuclear power.