Research

Entrepreneurship is inherently uncertain, especially in the context of international business, where entrepreneurs operate in institutional environments that differ sharply from the West, expand into foreign markets, or build international partnerships. I examine how social capital serves as a strategy for entrepreneurs to navigate the challenges arising from complex institutional environments in international business. While some relational strategies can be highly effective, their value varies across contexts and may even become harmful under certain conditions. To explore these dynamics, I draw on insights from social network theory and institutional theory to study settings such as venture capital, family businesses, village economies, and necessity-based entrepreneurship.

Working Papers

Huang, R. Don’t Take My (Your) Path: Social Capital, Institutional Development, and Intergenerational Entrepreneurship.

Job market paper

Why do some children follow their parents into entrepreneurship while others do not? I argue that intergenerational entrepreneurship depends on both the transferability of parental resources and the institutional environments that determine their value. Distinguishing growth entrepreneurship from necessity entrepreneurship, I propose that operational capabilities acquired through observation and hands-on family-business experience are readily transmitted, whereas the specialized capabilities required for growth entrepreneurship are more difficult to inherit. I further argue that market development weakens the value of inherited opportunity-generating social capital by providing formal alternatives for information, financing, and strategic partnerships, while leaving coping-oriented social capital comparatively unaffected. I test these arguments using the China Family Panel Studies, linking parental occupations and childhood province conditions to children’s first entrepreneurial entry from 2014 to 2022. Discrete-time hazard models show no average intergenerational transmission of growth entrepreneurship, but an 85% higher hazard of necessity entry among children of necessity entrepreneurs. However, parental growth entrepreneurship predicts children’s growth entry when childhood market institutions are weak. Guanxi beliefs provide supporting mechanism evidence. These findings show how historical institutions revalue inherited family resources and shape the persistence of entrepreneurial advantage across generations.

Foley, A., & Huang, R. Balancing the Ties that Intertwine: Balancing Multiplex Market Exchanges in Village Economies.

Exchange relations tend toward balance: actors seek to repay the kindness of others and avoid prolonged indebtedness. Prior research, however, has largely examined balance in uniplex relations - those structured around a single type of exchange – leaving unclear whether and how balance is achieved in multiplex relations, where transactions span multiple, normatively distinct exchanges. We examine this question in the context of village economies, where households operate simultaneously as economic and social actors. Using data on 5,343 exchange dyads among 690 household organizations across 16 village economies in Thailand, we analyze how actors balance obligations across four types of exchange: goods, hired labor, gifts, and assistance in the form of free labor. The analysis shows that households routinely settle economic debts with personal obligations and resolve personal obligations through economic generosity. More fundamentally, our results are consistent with a two-stage model of exchange in multiplex markets: when two transactions within a multiplex market relation are governed by the same norms of exchange (economic or social), those norms determine whether excess giving in one exchange is used to offset deficits in another. By contrast, when exchanges span domains (e.g. one economic, one social), the attributes of the resource being traded govern balancing behavior: imbalances tend to propagate across exchange domains when both involve particularistic resources but tend to offset each other when the resources involved are universalistic. Implications for exchange theory in the context of multiplex markets more broadly are discussed.

Manuscript in preparation for submission

Hiatt, S., Huang, R., Sine, W. D. Black September: Stigma, Social Control, and New Venture Performance in Jordan.

Manuscript in preparation for submission

This study addresses the oversight in stigma research regarding the government social control challenges encountered by stigmatized ethnic communities venturing into entrepreneurship, and the potential strategies these groups can employ to alleviate the adverse impacts. Focusing on stigmatized Palestinian immigrants in Jordan, we highlight informal government social control as a mechanism that detrimentally affects stigmatized entrepreneurs via biased policy implementation. We further theorize that stigmatized entrepreneurs can partially counteract these challenges by turning to the informal economy and operating in their ethnic enclaves. In these ethnic ghettos, entrepreneurs, operating in the informal economy can commerce with others in their stigmatized community. Our empirical analysis draws from data on the performance of 8756 new ventures in Jordan spanning from 2003 to 2021, complemented by insights from 60 qualitative interviews.

Huang, R. Navigating Institutional Boundaries: Positioning, Heterogeneity, and the Effectiveness of Limited Partners as Intermediaries for Cross-Country Co-Investment.

Boundaries between organizations arise from differences in identity, operations, survival, and performance, complicating cross-boundary collaboration. While previous research suggests that intermediaries can facilitate cross-boundary collaboration, there is limited understanding of how the relative positions of intermediaries to the mediated parties and their own heterogeneity influence their effectiveness. In this paper, I study one form of cross-boundary collaboration: cross-country co-investment by venture capital firms (VCs), focusing on the role of shared limited partners (LPs) in helping VCs navigate institutional boundaries. The results show that overall, VCs from countries with similar institutional distances to their shared LPs’ countries are more likely to coinvest than those with different institutional distances to their shared LPs. However, when institutional distance between VCs increases and/or there is greater opportunity for VCs to interact with their shared LPs, VCs whose shared LPs are institutionally closer to one of them are more likely to coinvest. Further, institutional diversity among shared LPs moderates the relationship between LPs’ institutional distance to VCs and their effectiveness as intermediaries. This research underscores the importance of intermediary positioning and heterogeneity in determining their effectiveness in enabling cross-boundary collaboration.

Sine, W. D., Huang, R., Cordero, A. Stigma as a source of Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Its Implications.

Entrepreneurship research has traditionally portrayed stigma primarily as a barrier that constrains entrepreneurs’ access to, material, symbolic and social resources. In this chapter, we advance a complementary perspective by arguing that stigma can also serve as a source of entrepreneurial opportunity. We develop a two-dimensional framework that conceptualizes stigma-originated opportunities along the stigma status of the origin of product categories and organizational fields, and the stigma status of the target market. We argue that stigma creates entrepreneurial opportunities when these two dimensions do not align: when products and services of stigmatized origin, which may not be available to mainstream customers,. enter mainstream markets, and when mainstream entrepreneurs enter underserved stigmatized markets. We further examine which entrepreneurs are best positioned to exploit such opportunities, emphasizing the role of boundary-spanning actors who can balance legitimacy and authenticity across stigmatized and mainstream audiences. In addition, we develop a framework explaining how the commercialization of products and services that originate from a stigmatized group may subsequently affect the stigma status of the stigmatized collectivity itself. Finally, we discuss strategic approaches entrepreneurs may adopt to exploit stigma-originated opportunities and outline promising directions for future research on the relationship between stigma and entrepreneurship.

Review in progress

Research in Progress

Obstfeld, D., Foley, A., Huang, R., Tasselli, S. Interdisciplinary Review of Tertius Iungens Brokerage (targeting Academy of Management Annals).

Review in progress