Entrepreneurial Workaround Practices in Severe Institutional Voids: Evidence From Kenya
研究了肯尼亚47位商业创业者在正式制度缺失且非正式制度也不可靠的情况下，如何通过变通实践实现企业创建与增长，发现严重制度空白促使目标混合化、关系战略化并主动加固制度基础设施。
Entrepreneurs in developing economies try to cope with weak or absent formal institutions—often referred to as “institutional voids”—by relying extensively on intermediary organizations such as business incubators and development organizations or informal institutions such as political, kinship, or family relationships. However, in many African countries, intermediary support is limited and informal institutions are also unreliable, adding risks and costs to doing business and increasing the severity of institutional voids in the surrounding ecosystem. We investigate the practices followed by 47 commercial entrepreneurs in Kenya to “work around” these severe institutional voids to achieve their goals of business creation and growth. We find that severe institutional voids stimulate the hybridization of goals to include social value creation, create a need for a more strategic orchestration of business relationships, and motivate entrepreneurs to proactively cross-brace the institutional infrastructure around them. We contribute by unveiling the important role of entrepreneurs as microinstitutional agents in developing economies and by detailing how commercial and social goals become intertwined in the context of African entrepreneurship.