The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University are pleased to announce its upcoming Institutions & Entrepreneurship Conference, to be held June 8-10, 2023, in Montreal, Quebec.

The conference will bring together scholars who take an institutional approach to the study of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial processes, broadly defined.

Institutions – the regulative, normative, and cognitive pillars of society – serve as both constraints and enablers of entrepreneurial action. Institutions are tied to time and place, and while relatively stable are subject to change, sometimes gradually and sometimes more abruptly. Entrepreneurship, or the construction of new organizations, organizational forms, and markets both affects and is affected by institutions. We are interested in papers that speak to this relationship: How do institutions affect entrepreneurship, and how does entrepreneurship affect institutions? Our preference is for empirical papers.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• How do changes in regulatory, normative, or cognitive institutions create opportunities for entrepreneurship?
• In what ways can social movements be generative of entrepreneurship? Do social movement actors engage in entrepreneurship to further their cause?
• How do entrepreneurs build institutional structures, such as regulatory and quasi-regulatory regimes, that promote new organizations and markets?
• How do entrepreneurs draw on institutional logics to legitimate novel organizational forms? What entrepreneurial opportunities exist in spheres characterized by conflicting logics?
• How do entrepreneurs deploy cultural elements in their activities? Can symbolic and ceremonial action further their interests?

We are open to both qualitative and quantitative research designs and to a wide variety of contexts, including:

• Institutions and entrepreneurship in emerging markets.
• Institutions and entrepreneurship in the informal economy.
• Entrepreneurship amongst social groups that are institutionally marginalized.
• Institutions and entrepreneurship in times of economic and social disruption (political or economic crises, mass immigration, war, famine, natural disasters, etc.).