The leading international business journal has asked the authors to reflect on how their research has shaped thinking on social entrepreneurship.
Researchers from King's Business School and partner institutions have published a major reflective article in the prestigious Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), one of the world's leading business and management journals .
The authors are Professor Ute Stephan (King's Business School), Professor Lorraine M. Uhlaner (Prague University of Economics and Business) and Dr Christopher Stride (University of Sheffield).
The original 2015 article received the 2025 JIBS Decade Award, recognising the most influential paper published in the journal over the previous ten years.
As part of this recognition, the journal invited the authors to reflect on how their work has shaped research in the field and how understanding of institutions has evolved over the past decade.
The retrospective is published alongside an Editor-in-Chief's commentary and reflections from two senior international scholars, underlining the paper's significance for international business and entrepreneurship research.
In the new article, the authors develop a revised 'hierarchy of institutions' that brings together insights from economics, sociology, political science and cultural theory. The framework shows how different layers of formal and informal institutions, such as laws, public policies, cultural norms and values, interact to shape who is able to participate in entrepreneurship and markets, and under what conditions.
Rather than treating institutions as simply absent or supportive, the research distinguishes between different types of institutional gaps ('voids') and supports. It shows how institutions influence outcomes not only through economic incentives, but also through psychological mechanisms such as agency, motivation and perceptions of legitimacy.
The authors also trace how institutions shape social entrepreneurship across its full lifecycle, from entry and organisation to scaling, exit and failure. In doing so, it offers a more balanced assessment of social entrepreneurship's potential, highlighting how institutional contexts can enable positive social impact but may also reinforce exclusion or marginalisation.
The authors argue that these insights are essential for research and policy debates that seek to understand inclusion, social impact, and institutional change in different national contexts. Reviewing the literature, they find that a similar institutional infrastructure supports different types of value-adding entrepreneurship such social and commercial entrepreneurship focused on opportunities.
Being asked by the Journal of International Business Studies to reflect on our Decade Award-winning work was an opportunity to take stock of how research on institutions has developed over time. Our aim with this article was to provide a clearer framework for understanding how different institutional layers, both formal and informal, shape entrepreneurship, inclusion and social impact across countries.
Professor Ute Stephan, King's Business School
Our aim was to bring greater precision to debates about institutions, showing how they influence entrepreneurship not just economically, but also through motivation, agency and inclusion.
Professor Lorraine M. Uhlaner, Prague University of Economics and Business
This retrospective allowed us to step back and clarify how different layers of institutions work together to shape entrepreneurial outcomes, something that is often treated too narrowly in research.
Dr Christopher Stride, University of Sheffield
The article, Institutions and social entrepreneurship: a hierarchy of institutions to revisit institutional voids, support, and configurations, is published in the January 2025 edition of the Journal of International Business Studies.
