This study investigates the complex relationships between high-performance work systems, entrepreneurial orientation, and firm performance under varying levels of environmental hostility. Using empirical data from a representative sample of 263 US firms, the paper explores these dynamics through the lens of the resource-based view and configurational theory. The study is the first one to analyze how high-performance work systems and environmental hostility interact to influence the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance. The findings challenge the traditional notion of high-performance work systems as universally beneficial, revealing their potential to constrain firm performance, possibly due to structural rigidity inherent in centralized systems and standardization procedures and the contextual misalignment between human resource practices and employee work and business environments. While high-performance work systems seem to stifle the display of entrepreneurial behaviors, environmental hostility enhances firm performance by activating entrepreneurial orientation in hostile conditions. In benign environments, entrepreneurial orientation’s impact on performance is less pronounced. The study also uncovers the complex dynamics of the three-way interaction, showing that in highly hostile environments, entrepreneurial orientation can thrive even without well-developed high-performance work systems, making the case for flexibility and adaptability for activating entrepreneurial behavior in firms. These insights contribute to a nuanced theoretical understanding of how internal and external factors interact to influence firm performance. We provide actionable insights for managers on how to strategize about high-performance work systems to support entrepreneurial orientation effectively, especially in challenging and hostile environments, and offer specific guidance on the optimum configurations of high-performance work systems and entrepreneurial orientation for firm performance in benign and hostile environments. Finally, we present the study’s limitations and outline the future research agenda for scholars, calling on them to incorporate longitudinal and configurational approaches to understand the complex relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance.

Purpose - This study aims to synthesize and conceptualize the highly fragmented yet important literature on racial discrimination in entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach - A bibliometric analysis and literature review were performed that involved 523 articles containing 26,926 references. Findings - The bibliometric analysis identified three dominant research themes that comprehensively illustrate the state of research in this domain: strategic, sociocultural and individual-level perspectives. The synthesis of extant literature helped in formulating a holistic conceptual model that portrays the genuineness of racial discrimination in entrepreneurship. The sources, factors and impact of racial discrimination faced by entrepreneurs were identified. Based on the review and analysis of keywords, certain fruitful future research directions were formulated that will take the field forward. Originality/value - This work is the first attempt to review the literature that narrows down the focus to racial discrimination in entrepreneurship (from other discriminations such as gender, cultural and religious discrimination) as one form of discrimination due to its unique origins and consequences.

In this paper, we examine community collectives – place-based, community-led initiatives for sustainable livelihood, as an alternative to the top-down, efficiency-driven economic model. Drawing on the theoretical framework of prefigurative organizing, we examined the strategies employed by community members in confronting entrenched inequalities and overcoming marginalization as they envision and engage in inclusive futures. We conducted a comparative case study of two exemplary community collectives in India that exhibited differences in the degrees of internal and external marginalization. We identified two key cross-cutting themes of prefigurative organizing: projective cultural adjustment – whether a community leverages their traditional culture or breaks away from it, and tempered autonomy – negotiating autonomy without overtly challenging dominant groups, and exercising self-imposed restraints to make independent decisions. We show how these two themes manifested across three key processes of prefigurative organizing: prefiguring self-governance; commoning; and cultivating discursive spaces. These findings help us theorize that in communities where the degree of internal marginalization is high due to persisting social hierarchies, breaking away from past discriminatory practices, incorporating suspension of consent in the decision-making process, and introducing multiple constructive works are essential components of prefigurative organizing. In communities where the degree of external marginalization is high, building on the past, incorporating refusal in decision-making, and introducing unified constructive work are important components of prefigurative organizing. We suggest that prefigurative organizing against the dominant power structure, whether within community social hierarchies or external exploitative political-economic structures, is based on selective and strategic engagement without seeking an exit, as exit might not be an option for place-based communities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research for alternative organizing and grand challenges.

This paper focuses on building a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the state of social entrepreneurship (SE) research by using an integrated bibliometric and unsupervised machine learning approach. Bibliometric analysis, along with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling enables us to identify key trends and themes in the SE domain. This approach is superior to tools and methods used in the past, which primarily employed systematic literature reviews and bibliometric analysis. While systematic manual literature reviews become impractical as the literature grows, bibliometric analysis focuses on the most cited articles, ignoring recent influential work, suffering from citation biases, and giving more weight to impact over thematic discovery. The methodology used by us overcomes these issues by first extracting large amounts of information through advanced computational methods and then using unsupervised machine learning to discover the latent themes and topics in this large collection of publications. This research uses the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases to extract corpora of 3844 texts (titles, abstracts, and keywords) from published research on SE. We decipher the key trends in the literature and segregate them into three broad categories – individual attributes and motivation, organizational actions, and institutional conditions and development, with 21 sub-topics to enhance the understanding of this field of inquiry. This study is the first in the entrepreneurship domain to use this integrated approach to review the literature, and the findings lay the groundwork for future research.

Social enterprises (SEs) primarily aim to create social value i.e. generate benefits or reduce costs for society, while maintaining financial sustainability. Extant research shows that SEs need the same set of resources as required by their commercial counterparts. However, owing to their unique operating condition and organizational characteristics, SEs face severe resource challenges. These resource challenges are further exacerbated for SEs operating in emerging economy. Overcoming these resource constraints is vital for SEs in order to address their mission. In this paper, we show that SEs facing resource constraint environment adopts bricolage process to mobilize required resources. Through inductive multiple case study approach we identified eight different sub-processes of bricolage, which were further aggregated in to three bricolage process namely- Accessing, Organizing, Enacting. In doing so, we contribute to the social entrepreneurship literature as well as entrepreneurial bricolage literature. Our study has important implications for future research and practice.

Social entrepreneurs encounter ethical dilemmas while addressing their social and commercial missions. The literature has implicitly acknowledged the ethical dilemmas social entrepreneurs face; however, the nature and implications of these ethical dilemmas and how social entrepreneurs navigate them are underexplored and undertheorized. We address this by conducting a 36month field study of a social enterprise operating in a rural resource-constrained environment in India and dealing with a stigmatized product. We found four categories of ethical dilemmas faced by social entrepreneurs: challenges in engaging the community (equality vs. efficiency and fairness vs. care), challenges related to spillover effects (right vs. responsibilities), challenges in balancing diverse stakeholders (emotionally detached vs. emotionally engaged), and challenges related to cross-subsidization efforts (utilitarianism vs. fairness). Further, we identified three types of institutional work social entrepreneurs engage in to address ethical dilemmas: recognition work, responsibilization work, and reflective judgment work. We label these three institutional works as inclusion work - purposive actions of an entity to address ethical dilemmas by implementing its program in a way that supports the most marginalized. Our study makes an important contribution to the literature on ethics in the context of social entrepreneurship by identifying specific ethical dilemmas social entrepreneurs face in managing hybridity (balancing social-commercial objectives) and enhancing social impact (managing social-social objectives). Moreover, through the concept of inclusion work, our research not only integrates insights from ethics and institutional theories but also responds to the recent call to address grand societal challenges through institutional work.

In this study, we employed a combination of bibliometric analysis and a structured review approach to examine the social entrepreneurship (SE) research. Our bibliometric analysis involved 2517 articles containing 155,846 references and we analyzed the data in three time periods: 1990–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2020 to detect longitudinal trends. This analysis helped us to identify the intellectual foundation of each period and the evolution of the intellectual structure of SE research. We specifically identified 13, 9, and 11 clusters that constituted the philosophical foundations of SE research for the periods 1990–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2020 respectively. A longitudinal comparison of three periods helped us to trace the evolution of the intellectual structure of SE research. Further, the structured review, involving 106 recent influential articles, enabled us to identify 10 recent dominant themes of SE research. Building on our bibliometric and structured review approach, we developed an organizing framework for guiding future SE research across six dimensions: ethics, individual, community, collaborative, organizational, and contextual.

This study examines how scholarly research on immigrant entrepreneurship has evolved in the past by conducting a bibliometric citation meta-analysis. We analyze 1,207 papers containing 49,016 cited references and unveil the intellectual structure of research on immigrant entrepreneurship. We show the impact of key articles, authors, journals, and institutions and outline possible future research avenues. The study explores six sub-research streams and outlines how studies on immigrant entrepreneurship build on each other using a co-citation mapping technique. Based on the results of our analysis, we discuss opportunities for future research to advance the immigrant entrepreneurship literature.

Extant approaches to information provisioning to farmers to improve agricultural productivity, and thereby alleviate poverty have relied on top-down external expert-driven knowledge. Such external knowledge involves decontextualised content and the use of technical language, and is resource-intensive. An alternative view emphasises the need to explore indigenous knowledge exists in rural communities, which, in contrast, requires the use of local resources, is easily understandable, and has greater potential for adoption. This paper explores how information and communication technologies, specifically videos, can be leveraged to curate such indigenous knowledge and convert it to knowledge commons. Adopting a case study approach that involved multiple sources of data collection over a nine-year period, we unearthed a dynamic process model that we labelled as knowledge commoning. It is a process through which latent-action-oriented knowledge from high-yield farmers embedded within its social context is made available as commons. The creation of knowledge commons is an iterative process between knowledge curation and knowledge dissemination, and is guided by the demand and uptake potential within local farming communities. Further, we describe how socio-cultural barriers in knowledge commoning can be overcome through scaffolding, involving the concealment of social transformation objectives within another goal desired by the community. Technological challenges can be overcome through the process of technoficing, which encompasses pursuing social objectives using technology that is appropriate for the purpose. Building on our process model, we offer contributions to theory, practice, and policy.

Research on organisational ambidexterity (OA); the simultaneous pursuit of explorative and exploitative innovation, has been reviewed in the past. Yet, we lack knowledge of the changes in OA research over time, which could help us understand how today’s OA research has been shaped and can be taken further. Accordingly, this study employs a bibliometric analysis to evaluate the evolution of the OA research field across four eras from 1996-2009, 2010-2013, 2014-17, and 2018-2021. We identify the key clusters of OA research in each era, point to key theoretical and methodological influences associated with each cluster, and describe how they have changed and influenced OA evolution. We observe how a distinct resource-based view (RBV) influence in OA has led to the relocation of agency from firms to individuals, and we generate insights that challenge previous observations that cross-sectional designs are to be blamed for the dilution of the ambidexterity hypothesis.

Grand Challenges are some of the most pressing issues of our times. There is an urgent need to understand ways in which they can be successfully and sustainably addressed to actively build a better, more equitable world. In this study, we explored the current grand challenges research to better understand the evolution of the field and scope for future research. We conducted a multi-period bibliometric analysis and a systematic literature review of the grand challenges research to chart the intellectual evolution of the field. Our bibliometric analysis comprised of 815 articles containing 48,501 cited references across three periods: 1993-2012, 2013-2016, and 2017-2020. Our systematic literature review was based on 37 recent (2017-2020) influential articles. Based on our results, we propose an integrated framework to help guide future research across six dimensions: organizational, policy, community, ethics, impact and collaborative.

Research on hybrid organization (HO) has grown rapidly over recent decades, yet the conceptualization and research structure remain fragmented. In this paper, we employ a combination of bibliometric analysis and a structured review of recent influential articles to evaluate the domain of HO. As part of the bibliometric analysis, we analysed 676 documents containing 51,014 references by applying citation, co-citation, and social network analysis (SNA) techniques. Based on our analysis, we identified the 108 most influential works shaping the domain and explored the linkages between them to uncover the intellectual structure of the domain. Specifically, we observed five different clusters that depicted the intellectual structure of the HO domain. Our result further clarified the overall centrality features of the HO research network. Further, the structured review resulted in the identification of six different themes: impact of organizational actors on HO, impact of the external environment on HO, hybridization process and organizational response, organizational structure and governance, organizational strategy, and organizational performance. Building on our results, we propose a framework and explicate the gaps for future HO research.

The current research explores the contingencies behind the acceptance or rejection of digitized business model innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). Building on the existing literature on business model innovation and using the lens of stakeholder theory, we explore the contingencies that decide the success or failure of digitized business models at the BoP. We conducted an inductive case study of eKutir, an Indian social enterprise that uses a digital platform to deliver value for farmers in Orissa. Our analysis reveals that stakeholder's stability and stakeholder's incentives are the critical contingencies deciding the conditional acceptance of the digitized business model innovation. Our results also confirm that accessibility, availability, affordability, awareness and acceptability are the most important factors contributing to the stakeholder's adoption of digitized business model innovation. Further, we infer that age, respect, power and authority are key differentiating factors contributing to stakeholder's stability which can significantly influence the acceptance of digitized business model innovation. We conclude with a framework that can guide the successful implementation of digitized business model innovation at the BoP.

Growth models such as Gibrat’s law and Jovanovic’s theory that examine the relationship between the firms’ growth, age and size have either been tested on data from developed economies or from the manufacturing sectors in developing economies. This study checks the suitability of these models in service sectors in developing economies as service sectors have distinct characteristics and developing economies such as India are heavily dependent on this sector. The current study considers three major service sectors contributing to India’s economy vis-à-vis financial services, information technology and real estate for the period 2002–2005. We observed that during 2002–2005, India’s economy was stable without wide fluctuations in economic performance, such as gross domestic product, unemployment or inflation. These sectors not only had a significant impact on economic growth but also had comprehensive microeconomic data. Our results negate both Gibrat’s law and Jovanovic’s theory. We argue that service sectors which are knowledge-intensive will experience different growth patterns compared to manufacturing sectors. We find a definite and significant relationship between firms’ growth and their size and age. Also, we find concluding evidence that younger firms up to 10 years of age struggle a lot more than older firms in the Indian service sector. JEL: D20, D21, D22, D02