An Institutional Nexus Perspective of Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

In this paper, we contribute to the nascent field of transnational social entrepreneurship by developing an institutional nexus perspective to predict how the different migration directions and human capital endowments of transnational entrepreneurs may facilitate or constrain their social entrepreneurship activities in different institutional contexts. The institutional nexus perspective links the previously developed institutional void and institutional support perspectives of social entrepreneurship by introducing transnational social entrepreneurs as bridging agents between different institutional environments. Since existing research on transnational and migrant entrepreneurship has neglected a number of important migration directions, theoretical development remains considerably limited, necessitating a better understanding of the role of context-spanning migration at the intersection of transnational and social entrepreneurship. In this paper, we address these shortcomings and provide a contextualized framework of transnational social entrepreneurship from the institutional nexus perspective. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of our work and provides suggestions for future research to test and advance the theory.