From faith to fortune? Religious entrepreneurs’ responses to institutional voids

Abstract

While religion is important to billions of people worldwide, research at its intersection with entrepreneurship is in its infancy. We add to this nascent stream through an abductive, qualitative study exploring how religious entrepreneurs address institutional voids to produce positive and/or negative outcomes through their ventures. Merging insights from structuration theory and religious agency from the literature on the sociology of religion, we explain how entrepreneurs with high levels of individual religiosity transfer such religiosity in more visible or less visible ways to their ventures. We further explain how, as their ventures face challenges stemming from institutional voids, they manifest their religious agency in different ways: entrepreneurs with more visible manifestations use mechanisms like confrontation, purposeful evasion, or remorseful acceptance; those with less visible manifestations use mechanisms such as rational evasion and pragmatic acceptance, eschewing confrontation altogether. This study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship and religion by 1) integrating structuration theory and religious agency into entrepreneurship; 2) contextualizing theory at the intersection of religion, entrepreneurship, and institutional voids; and 3) inducing a grounded conceptual model that identifies distinct mechanisms and their implications at the organizational, community, and societal levels.