Socio-cultural factors and entrepreneurial activity : an overview created by Patricia H. Thornton, Domingo Ribeiro-Soriano and David Urbano

Scholars who study entrepreneurship have lent great value by exploring the factors that explain how entrepreneurs create new businesses and thus, how societies and economies grow and prosper. Although there has considerable research based on psychological and economic approaches to entrepreneurship, the influence of socio-cultural factors on enterprise development remains under studied. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to integrate, from a theoretical perspective, the socio-cultural factors and entrepreneurial activity. In this sense, the article points out that the institutional approach could be an apt framework to develop future research analyzing the socio-cultural factors that influence the decisions to create new businesses. Also, a brief overview of the content of each of the papers included in this special issue is presented.