The Institutional Logic of the Family in a Small-Town Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

This paper argues that family and tradition influence how entrepreneurs in small towns practice business. To do this, the paper repurposes interview data from a larger project about the link between small-town values and economic development. Specifically, the author coded interviews from 17 city leaders in a small town in central Texas using Thornton and Ocasio’s “Institutional Logics” framework. In doing so, the paper finds that entrepreneurial activity is entangled with three different institutional logics (family, community, market) and two different hybrids (family-market and family-market-community). The paper uses this finding both to qualify the claim that small-town entrepreneurial ecosystems only consist of community and market hybrids and to validate the argument that entrepreneurship is an everyday activity of balancing identity and infrastructure.