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In an era marked by critical societal and environmental challenges, impact entrepreneurship holds the potential to unite related, yet largely fragmented perspectives that focus on improving the world through new venture creation and growth. An impact entrepreneurship perspective offers an opportunity to move beyond fragmentation toward cohesion around the tripod of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns in entrepreneurship, often addressed in separate literature streams. Drawing on entrepreneurship and management literatures at the intersection of impact and entrepreneurship, the symposium aims to delve into this dynamic domain, bringing together leading authors and voices from the frontlines of environmental, social, and responsible entrepreneurship. The primary goal of this symposium is to foster a critical dialogue among leading scholars in the field. We aim to delve into how impact entrepreneurship serves as a catalyst for change, integrating market and societal logics to address pressing global challenges. This dialogue will not only provide a holistic view of current academic discourse but also identify gaps and propose future research priorities. The format is designed to stimulate thought-provoking conversations among panelists and with the audience, facilitating a critical exploration of emergent themes and directions in impact entrepreneurship. This symposium represents a unique opportunity to merge diverse perspectives spanning environmental, social, and responsible entrepreneurship, paving the way for more inclusive impact entrepreneurship scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragile states are generally associated with the concept of institutional voids. Yet, in this study, we move beyond state fragility to explore how distinct local contexts within a fragile state are shaped by multiple institutional logics. Through an explorative multiple case study design, we shed light on two constellation types – relation-centered and market-centered constellations – that constitute the local contexts, with which entrepreneurs interact, within a fragile state. Depending on their entrepreneurial (mis)alignment, we find that the entrepreneurs agentically engage and interact with their local contexts, hereby – consolidating relational centricity, molding relational centricity, reinforcing market centricity, and navigating market centricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the transition toward increasingly formalized, market-driven, capitalistic economies, recent management and international business literatures have witnessed great theoretical advances relating the role of formal institutions shaping various forms of new ventures. New institutional frameworks account for a multiplicity of formal institutions, such as the role of governance quality, state fragility, intellectual property rights, and premarket reforms. Nevertheless, formal institutions do not act alone, and their interaction with informal institutions becomes critical to understand how informal new ventures emerge, especially in fragile countries. Through the analysis of 40 countries across 12 years, we build a new theoretical framework to explain how distinct institutional interactions between formal and informal institutions lead to informal entrepreneurship across countries. Based on these findings, we point to more culturally aware theory and policy approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the promise entrepreneurship holds to foster sustainable development, surprisingly little is known about the actual outcomes and impacts of sustainable ventures. Through an explorative case study design conducted in Germany, we shed light on how different impact measurement (hereafter: IM) activities are characterized, and what kind of outcomes they have on organizational and societal levels. From our inductive coding a novel typology of IM activities emerged based on their level of agency and formaliy, including IM as fragmented frame, IM as aggregation and IM as bridge. Drawing on this typology, we propose a new theoretical framework of IM as agentic activity toward sustainable development. This framework highlights how distinct IM activities lead to different consequences in terms of legitimacy, impact monetization and exploitation of sustainability potential. Taking these outcomes together, we characterize three distinct sustainable venture types based on the role impact plays in their context and business model as the result of the different IM activities: impact as bonus, impact as added value, impact as a service. Our findings entail important theoretical contributions at the juncture of IM, sustainable entrepreneurship, and agency, as well as guidelines for practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal entrepreneurship (IE) refers to the global portion of entrepreneurial activities, which are not registered with the government and yet operate within socially accepted values and practices. IE has attracted increasing attention from scholars and policy makers over the years because it produces negative externalities. To tackle IE effectively, it is important to understand its origins, which are rooted into collectivistic cultural practices. Drawing on new institutional economics, we hypothesize that in-group and institutional collectivism present curvilinear relationships with the prevalence of IE across countries, and that gender equality influences these relationships. We ran GEE panel regressions employing a dataset including 35 countries over 12 years (2006-2017). Our results support our hypotheses substantially and entail theoretical implications at the intersection of informal entrepreneurship, culture and gender equality, as well as relevant practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal entrepreneurship (IE) represents the process of opportunity recognition and exploitation in the informal economy, i.e. outside of formal institutional boundaries (laws, regulations), yet within informal institutional boundaries (norms, beliefs). This includes entrepreneurial activities that, while not complying with formal laws and regulations, remain legitimate for many entrepreneur's stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, and employees. In this paper we review the stream of literature on IE, drawing on the multilevel causal mechanism framework. We employ a systematic and integrative literature review to synthesize the existing literature, identifying situational, action-formation, and transformational causal mechanism on three different levels (micro, meso, macro) for the puzzling phenomenon of IE. The multilevel mechanism framework generates new perspectives on IE. To advance theory in this field further, we propose some directions for future research on IE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]